In 2011, large protests erupted across various regions in the Arab world. The protesters demanded an end to ‘corrupt’ dictatorships, the introduction of ‘true democracy’, freedom of speech and the protection of human rights. The protests were soon dubbed the ‘Arab Spring’. Yet, by 2013, most commentators and journalists who had enthusiastically covered the events of the Arab Spring were already penning its obituary.

The protests were successful in ousting some dictators. But this was often followed by the ‘old state structure’ regrouping and reasserting its writ and hold on power. In Egypt, for example, when a dictator fell, an election saw the right-wing Muslim Brotherhood win and form a government. The same happened in Tunisia. However, both the governments soon ran into trouble with large but fragmented segments of ‘moderates’ and ‘progressives’ who poured out for another round of protests.

In Egypt, the inexperienced Muslim Brotherhood government was accused of attempting to form yet another one-party state. The commotion resulted in a military coup. But in Tunisia, competing groups managed to come to an understanding. A constitution was drawn up and agreed upon by the major stakeholders, thus saving the hard-won democracy that the Tunisians had established after the fall of a dictator. 

For the Western media, the Arab Spring was a popular story to cover. It was described as yet another set of events trumpeting the ‘triumph of democracy.’ One must add, though, that through the 1980s, the same Western media had exhibited similar excitement during the civil war in Afghanistan between jihadists and Soviet troops. The anti-communist jihadists were bankrolled by the US and Saudi Arabia through an Islamist military regime in Pakistan. In the Western media, the jihadists were often referred to as ‘freedom fighters’. The rest, as they say, is history, but one pregnant with some glaring ironies. 

There was no Arab Spring in Palestine because Palestinians have always been more concerned with Israel than with the actions of their own ruling groups. Is this likely to change in the wake of recent events?

Nevertheless, as Tunisia somewhat managed to retain the gains made by the Arab Spring, the monarchies in Morocco, Jordan and Oman succeeded in mitigating the impact of the protests by providing some social and political freedoms. The state structure in these countries remained intact. The Bahraini state/monarchy, however, used brutal tactics to suppress the protests. It accused Iran of instigating unrest in Bahrain. Using this as a justification, it crushed the protests. 

In Libya, where the Arab Spring succeeded in overthrowing (and then killing) a dictator, the country soon spiralled into a vicious civil war. In Syria, when the protests failed to oust a dictator, the protesters picked up arms. The arms were provided to different groups by different countries, mainly the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey and Iran. The result was a savage civil war. A similar tragedy unfolded in Yemen as well. 

So why did the Arab Spring fail? And why wasn’t there an Arab Spring in Palestine, the most troubled region in the Middle East?

In the 1950s, secular Arab nationalists who were at the forefront of anti-colonial movements, rose to power. They formulated Arab nationalist ideologies that treaded a path between Marxism and capitalism. According to author and former correspondent of The Wall Street Journal Anand Gopal, a social contract was drawn up between the nationalist regimes and the citizens, in which the interests of the citizens were made dependent on the nationalist state.

The state sought to provide economic security and opportunities through public spending. In exchange, the citizens were to support a one-party system. The Arab monarchies that managed to survive in the post-colonial era too followed a similar path. Here the one-party was the monarch. 

However, from the late 1970s onward, when global economics began to rapidly mutate, many Arab regimes gradually started to adopt neoliberal economics, which encourages privatisation and a drastic reduction in public spending. This ruptured the social contract, thus alienating the middle and working classes in numerous Arab countries.

Neoliberalism also developed a new middle class. But by the early 2000s, both the old and new middle classes were feeling alienated, because they lacked the required ‘connections’ (with the ruling elites) to prosper. Brought up on the fluid politics of neoliberalism, the middle classes decided to protest ‘horizontally’. This means that there was no central organisation or leader of the Arab Spring. 

Gopal understands this as a flaw. The initial goal of the Arab Spring protests was to gain the attention of the Western media and powers. Therefore, protesters simply demanded democracy and human rights. There was no talk of equal distribution of wealth and resources, workers rights or anything that would interest the working classes. So these classes largely stayed away.

What’s more, within the middle classes were also factions that were close to the Islamists. The Islamists were once the mouthpieces and tools of the old land-owning and trader classes. They had opposed the nationalist regimes. 

Being navigated horizontally, the protesters failed to have a cohesive message, other than what sounded ‘nice’ to the Western media. The fragmented nature of the protesters meant they failed to gain the structural strength that was required to dislodge the state structures that they were raging against.

The fall of individual dictators was celebrated, but the state structures remained intact. Or, even when the fall of a dictator was followed by the collapse of the state structure, chaos ensued, because the protesters could not produce any convincing blueprint of a new structure nor any popular leaders. In horizontal movements, there are none. 

There was no Arab Spring in Palestine. To the Palestinians, Israel as an occupying force is the bigger enemy than the two main Palestinian ruling groups: the secular-nationalist Fatah and the Islamist Hamas.

According to the American Middle East analyst Aaron D. Miller, Fatah and Hamas use authoritarian tactics to keep the populations in their respective areas of influence in check. Fatah controls the West Bank and Hamas is in power in Gaza. Both are antagonistic towards each other, even though the Palestinians look towards both to mitigate the impact of the Israeli occupation. 

Israel’s oppressive policies in Palestine uncannily safeguard Fatah and Hamas from the wrath of the Palestinians. The late Fatah leader Yasser Arafat once told Miller that one shouldn’t wait for revolutions in Palestine because the Palestinians will always be angrier at the Israelis than at their own leaders.

Yet, the recent actions of Hamas, whose fighters ‘invaded’ Israel and drew another round of indiscriminate bombing of Gaza by Israeli forces, just might bring to the surface something that has been brewing in Gaza — resentment towards Hamas for constantly attracting violence from Israel without ever looking to be any closer to achieving liberation for the Palestinian people. A Palestinian Spring.

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 15th, 2023