Epilogue: Revolutionary Times in Contemporary History

As we sat down to write this Handbook’s introduction in the spring of 2019, Sudanese and Algerian protestors had launched a new wave of Arab uprisings. Then the Iraqis and Lebanese rose up in unprecedented fashion in October. We realized that we needed to compose an epilogue to capture these monumental events. It has been exhilarating to start this project in the wake of one wave of uprisings and to close it with another. We took a final look at this epilogue as the Covid-19 pandemic broke out and all but suspended anti-regime mobilizations in MENA. But there is every reason to conclude that the uprisings will continue. Too determined are the demonstrators to complete the struggle that began in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria in 2011 and to bring about “the fall of the regime” in their countries; too dependent are the politician–business class and the military industrial complex on the corruption they have sown and on the geopolitical protection they reap from abroad. The aspirations of the first set of Arab uprisings, expressed in the ubiquitous slogan “freedom, bread, and dignity” have been renewed by the Lebanese chant “Kullun ya‘ni kullun” (“all of them means all of them”); the Iraqi slogan “Nurid watan” (“we want a homeland”); and the Algerian mantra “Yetnahaw Ga3” (“they should all go”).

It has been said that the “Arab Spring” turned into an “Arab Winter.” While a cycle of counter-revolutions did seem to have crushed the 2011 uprisings, we have avoided seasonal metaphors to explain the dynamics of popular upheavals, revolutionary processes, and political stakes at work in contemporary MENA. If anything, the Arab uprisings constitute a chain of events that defy the contemporary litany of political oppression and economic crises.¹ It now appears certain that people will not settle until significant institutional changes are brought out that improve economic and political conditions. It is unclear what forms the ongoing revolutions will take. But we contend that the validity of our Handbook’s arguments does not depend on future outcomes. Should the current revolutions suffer the same tragic fate as the ones in 2011, it would invalidate neither our point that the political economy of the region—if not the world—needs to be rethought from the bottom up, nor the fact that the people in the region and elsewhere suffer enormously from neoliberal authoritarianism and will continue to demand better at ever-greater risks to their lives.

Our Handbook has challenged existing narratives that expect defeat, foreclose alternative futures, or are deaf to popular demands. It is time to consider remodeling our analytical toolkits in light of contemporary human practices, collective experiences, and social movements. A serious engagement with contemporary events in MENA exposes the deep gulf between academic research agendas and disciplinary debates on the one hand, and the aspirations of the people trying to disrupt and change the ordinary flow of history.² In the course of revolutionary times, cultural and geopolitical epistemicians struggle to square the unruly events unfolding before their eyes with the analytical categories in their heads. There appears to be a reluctance to accept those emergent phenomena that fail to conform to established disciplinary forms of knowledge, whether political science or religious studies, international law or social anthropology.

We have written this epilogue in an attempt to account for key developments that occurred after our contributors wrote their chapters. We first provide a brief survey of the causes and triggers of the current revolutionary cycle in its international socioeconomic context. We conclude by way of offering some preliminary reflections on the dynamics of the 2019 protest movements themselves.

In the immediate aftermath of the first set of uprisings in 2011, many skeptics commented that they might turn out to be temporary outbursts of popular discontent unable to generate long-term transformations. This is certainly a short-sighted analysis and echoes the counterrevolutionary measures adopted by some MENA regimes. For example, Muhammad bin Salman, the new crown prince of Saudi Arabia and Muhammad bin Zayid, the crown prince of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates (the UAE), have speculated on Egypt and Bahrain as success stories in counterrevolution, when they tried to force similar outcomes in Libya and Yemen, two countries that were key sites of uprisings but are now zones of proxy war and civil strife. The war in Yemen was “Muhammad bin Salman’s war” as Saudi journalists, including the late Jamal Khashuqji (Kashoggi), boasted at the beginning of the campaign in 2015. The UAE has recently cut its losses by pulling troops out of the war which has cost over 100,000 lives, manufactured a severe famine, and repartitioned the country. The Saudis have taken over the port of Aden and oil-producing regions in southern Yemen and are trying to solidify their role in Yemen through the Riyadh Agreement signed on November 5, 2019. If implemented, “it will mean that Saudi Arabia will assume ultimate responsibility for southern Yemen politically, militarily and in terms of security,” according to a Yemeni political analyst.³

The situation in Libya is no more promising since Frank Wehrey has predicted in the last chapter of our Handbook that the country “will persist in a state of truncated sovereignty, contained violence and hyper-localism.” The renegade General Khalifa Haftar and his army’s six-month-long siege of the capital Tripoli has cost the lives of over a thousand people and continues relentlessly. Weapons and mercenaries pour into the country while the victims of this “second Libyan civil war” since 2011 pour out across the Mediterranean. Like in Yemen, there is no end in sight for the human suffering. Examples like these make it easy to become cynical, expecting the dark forces to always win. But one aspect that ought to distinguish critical area studies and contemporary history approaches from those of geopolitical and security studies is the recognition that victory and defeat are hindsight categories that obfuscate social processes, human practices, experiences, and aspirations during revolutionary times.⁴

Since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the War on (Islamist) Terror has cost the US treasury $6.4 trillion dollars, killed over 800,000 people and made thirty-seven million refugees and displaced persons.⁵ At the global level the US, Canada, and the European Union compete with Russia and China to pour arms into the region, and to provide diplomatic and logistical support for the repressive policies of their regional allies. At the regional level, the Saudi, Egyptian, and Israeli governments compete with those of Iran, Syria, and Hizbollah to suppress democratic aspirations across much of the region. Everywhere authoritarian regimes have resorted to civil-war fear-mongering, and xenophobic nationalism—and mass incarceration has surged dramatically. In the course of putting this Handbook together, we have witnessed an accelerated worldwide turn to right-wing politics in the US, the UK, and Russia, as well as outright fascism in many parts of eastern and southern Europe. Like their right-wing allies in the West, centrist states such as Canada, France, and Germany have imposed parliamentary restrictions on freedom of speech and academic freedom regarding Israel’s relentless destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihood.

Iran has descended into a severe economic crisis, exacerbated by President Trump’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Deal and harsh new US sanctions. Faced with a growing public debt, this oil-rich government has rationed gas and hiked the price by between 50 percent and 200 percent in November 2019. Spontaneous, nation-wide protests were met with police brutality under cover of a five-day internet blackout. While the material conditions of ordinary Iranians have been worsening, the country has grown to become a weighty regional power. It has been the main beneficiary of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003; it has ensured the survival of the Assad regime in Syria against all odds; it has protected the unpopular government of Iraq; and provided financial and military cover for Hizbollah in Lebanon.⁶ The American assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimani on January 3^rd, 2020 has heightened international tensions while the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ “accidental” downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane a week later has further eroded the regime’s domestic stability and popular acceptance.

Saudi-Arabia’s and the UAE’s stand-off with Iran has further increased sectarianization that continues to threaten destabilization in the Gulf region and beyond, as their proxy warfare in Yemen has made clear. Saudi Arabia has recently undergone domestic change—some call it a palace coup, others a “Game of Saudi Thrones” – after King Salman made his then thirty-one-year-old son Muhammad bin Salman crown prince in June 2017. “MBS,” as he is known among his supporters, had first made a name for himself in Washington when he launched “Vision 2030”—an ambitious ten-year economic plan to wean Saudi-Arabia off its dependency on oil and foreign labor at a time when a barrel of crude was below $40 US. As crown prince, he quickly purged the council of princes who traditionally advised the Saudi king. In November 2017, he arrested dozens of Saudi billionaires and leading businessmen on charges of corruption and allegedly tried to extort billions for their release. This spectacular heist scared away international and local investors. The murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Kashoggi on October 2, 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a hit squad linked to Bin Salman, has further exposed the crown prince’s intolerance of dissent.⁷ Under mounting pressure, the friendship between the Trump family and Bin Salman has become a political lifeline for both sides.

The most glaring example of the Trump administration’s criminal incompetence is its policy on Palestine. Since December 2018, the president has broken international law a number of times, in efforts to throw a political lifeline to the corrupt Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to consign Palestinians to political and social death. First, Trump moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; in February 2019, he cut all US aid to the Palestinian Authorities; on March 15, he recognized the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights; and in June, his son-in-law Jared Kushner launched the “Peace to Prosperity” plan.⁸ Billed as “a new vision for the Palestinian people and the broader Middle East,” it is in fact no more than a scheme to incentivize Arab millionaires to benefit from the expulsion of the remaining Palestinians. The fact that as of November 18, 2019 the Trump administration no longer considers the Israeli settlements illegal provides further political cover for the accelerated Israeli settlement and annexation drive in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Today the War-on-Terror consensus has over-written the UN-mandate to uphold international law in general and the Palestinian right to exist in particular. The global right-wing consensus not only grants Israel impunity for its crimes against Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews. This authoritarian alliance also helps frame its victims as aggressors and label legitimate criticism as anti-Semitism. The Israeli government has created the Ministry of Strategic Affairs in response to the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement in 2006. The new ministry continues to function as an effective propaganda machine to “explain,” white-wash, and deflect from, Israeli atrocities.⁹ Its main mandate has been to intimidate the general public, discredit and harass pro-Palestinian activists, pervert the legal definition of anti-Semitism to include anti-Zionism, and put pressure on governments, organizations, media, and universities to criminalize criticism of Israel.

If Donald Trump calling Egyptian President Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi “my favorite dictator” in 2019 felt like another bad joke by a hapless president, his words give license to MENA heads of state to rule as pharaohs—like al-Sisi—or sultans—like President Erdoğan. Since riding to power on the back of a popular anti-Muslim Brotherhood uprising in 2013, the Egyptian president has turned the country into a security and surveillance state in which close to one hundred million inhabitants are effectively under permanent curfew. This has allowed the government to implement draconian austerity measures all the while spending Gulf loans on building a new national capital in the Egyptian desert.

President Erdoğan has been in power much longer than al-Sisi. And he is a businessman, not an army man. But the dictatorial turn in Turkey developed in parallel with Egypt’s. As Asli Ü. Bâli’s nuanced chapter demonstrates, President Erdoğan used his enormous popularity to take advantage of the Turkish constitution by switching from prime minister to president. He built a personality cult around himself between the Gezi Park protests in 2013 at which police killed twenty-two activists, and the botched army coup attempt of 2016. The subsequent crackdown cost the lives of an estimated 300 people; over 50,000 people have been arrested and 160,000 fired from their jobs. By March 2019, President Erdoğan’s popularity began to dip, judging by the republican opposition’s municipal election victories in five of the largest cities. In this context, President Trump’s decision to withdraw most US troops from Syria and from the American–Kurdish military alliance against ISIS has given President Erdoğan license to occupy northern Syria and uproot Kurdish communities on both sides of the border. The Turkish government justified the invasion with the pretext of returning refugees to Syria, all the while threatening Europe with a new stream of refugees should the EU protest the invasion. Meanwhile, this latest Turkish population engineering plan has also given imprisoned ISIS fighters a second chance to regroup at the behest of Erdoğan, even as their leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was assassinated on October 29, 2019.

The resurgence of Russian power in MENA since the 2011 uprisings has primarily occurred through the Syrian corridor. President Putin’s military and diplomatic support for the Assad family has sustained a regime responsible for the vast majority of the over half a million Syrians killed and tortured, as well as the over thirteen million refugees and internally displaced Syrians. Putin’s ruthless policy on Syria has severely challenged American hegemony in the region as a whole. Diplomatically, Russia has become the kind of broker for the Assad regime that the US has been for Israel for decades. Putin’s government has set the agenda of various peace talks since the Geneva negotiations over UNSC Resolution 2254 and a Syrian transition government broke down in 2017. At one and the same time in the fall of 2019, Israeli planes bombed the Iranian positions near Damascus; Russian and Syrian regime rockets rained down on Idlib province; and the Turkish army invaded northern Syria—each in the name of fighting terrorism.

Syria’s future cannot begin until the Assad regime is dismantled, and national sovereignty restored. The Assad family has ruled over Syria for fifty years and, as Yassin al-Haj Saleh, the prominent intellectual of the globalized Syrian condition, has argued, it still deploys the rhetoric of eternity.¹⁰ The nation-wide, ecumenical uprising in 2011 shook the Assadist personalization of the Syrian state to the core. The revolution signaled to the world, that there was another subaltern Syria beneath decades of martial law and mass incarceration. The regime could only maintain the chimera of eternity by conducting a total war on the Syrian people, killing and torturing its finest. And yet, there has been a growing global consensus left, right, and center that a military victory of Assadist rule is the lesser evil. The mass exodus of Syrians in 2015 has shaken the foundations of the Turkish state, the European Union, and the world order as a whole. It has brought out the best and the worst in people. Those who have learned from the past have opened up their homes; and those who have not have attacked refugees, closed borders, and tampered with citizenship and asylum laws. Right-wing governments, fascist parties, and liberal indifference made racism respectable again in Europe, the US, and elsewhere. It has created a political environment which permits trampling the most basic shared understandings of human rights and international law.

Tunisia stands out as a political success story despite a crippling economy. On October 13, 2019, Tunisians elected in a landslide vote the independent candidate Kais Saied, a legal scholar and political outsider promising to carry out the goals of the uprising. His victory was made possible by the support of the Tunisian youth and constituted a signal defeat of the frontrunner Nabil Karoui, a media mogul turned philanthropist who had served time for corruption during the election campaign. In this sense, popular revolutions continue in the Arab world—“al-thawra mustamirra.”¹¹

State and militia violence has destroyed Libyan, Yemeni, and Syrian societies. It has also severely damaged the social contract between citizens and the state in Bahrain and Egypt, often in the name of counterterrorism. In many cases, this has led to securitized sectarian and ethnic identities that “end up creating self-perpetuating in-out group dynamics and social realities that become difficult to roll back.”¹² This form of securitization in MENA mirrors developments that are eroding democracy in the West, a paradigm shift that Yassin al-Haj Saleh calls “genocracy”—a form of state sovereignty, tried and tested inter alia by Apartheid Israel, Assadist Syria, and most recently in Modi’s India, whose legitimacy rests on securitization of refugees and migrants in the name of antiterrorism, and whose effect is the racialization or “sectarianization” of citizenship.¹³ The heavy weight of all these global forces of oppression and exploitation make all the more remarkable the current mass protests in the four key MENA countries that had not risen up in 2011.

By 2019, economic suffering and political injustice had reached tipping point in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, and Iraq. The protests in these four countries were sparked by a combination of government breaches of constitutional rule, rampant corruption and nepotism, and austerity measures targeting the middle and lower classes to pay for the neoliberal gutting of national economies. These uprisings, like previous ones, reference one another through social media in witty slogans, songs, and signs of solidarity. They also draw tactical and emotional strength from parallel revolutionary struggles in Chile, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. They make clear that the worldwide revolutionary struggle against oppression and exploitation continues.

Since October 17, 2019, half the population of Lebanon took to the streets and squares across the country. With the universal Arabic chant “the people demand the fall of the regime,” the vernacular slogan “all of them means all of them,” and an endless repertoire of witty rhyming insults against the elites, the October Revolution celebrated the largest nation-wide demonstrations in Lebanon’s ninety-nine years of existence.¹⁴ Unlike other neoliberal Arab authoritarianisms where power emanates from a single figure at the top, the “regime” here, like in Iraq after 2003, means the class and sectarian nature of the whole system. Reinforced by the Taif Agreement of 1989, this system allowed competing political elites to advance their personal interests in the name of representing their respective communities and preventing a return to civil war. But as Bassel Salloukh pointed out, “[d]ecades of monetary policies favoring the rich triggered the kind of united uprising that identity divisions in a sectarian system are supposed to prevent.”¹⁵

The trigger that brought half the country’s population onto the streets was a tax on the popular messaging app, WhatsApp. But the economic crisis had been brewing for years, with the Lebanese government so dysfunctional and corrupt that it could not provide basic services. Its failure to reach a deal over garbage collection had led to the 2015 “You Stink” protests. Wild fires on October 15, 2019 exposed the gross incompetence and underfunding of the Lebanese civil defense. In the meantime, unemployment had reached twenty percent, with youth unemployment at over thirty percent. The public-debt burden, exacerbated by a ballooning public service amounting in 2018 to thirty-five percent of government expenditures, was “projected to increase to 155% of GDP by the end of 2019.”¹⁶ What may bring the Lebanese economy to a final state of collapse is a massive Ponzi scheme involving the political and business elite, in which the Central Bank borrowed dollars from private Lebanese banks at high interest in order to service the public debt. This has left the Central Bank owing $85 billion US dollars, twice the amount of its currency reserves, to Lebanese banks which are owned or run by parliamentarians, their families, and international partners. This in turn has led to a dollar shortage, a steep fall in the value of the Lebanese pound, a liquidity crisis, and supply bottlenecks, all of which is being felt most severely by the middle and lower classes, who have risen against their own sectarian leaders.¹⁷

Protestors are calling for a caretaker government of independent experts that would desectarianize the electoral law and party structures, prepare a new constitution, repatriate the stolen funds, and take the country to early elections. They are demanding progressive taxation that stops shielding the wealthy, ‘haircuts’ for banks and their millionaire depositors, and the prosecution of economic corruption and environmental malfeasance. Civil society groups are pushing for greater rights for women, especially for Lebanese mothers to pass on their citizenship, and for civil marriage. However, Lebanese protestors realize that they are demanding the impossible, namely that the elites abolish the system that feeds them. They also realize that this revolution is a marathon not a sprint. The sorry state of regional and global politics might yet buy them enough time to engineer the long-overdue fundamental constitutional changes as long as the imminent economic collapse can be averted.¹⁸ The role that independent professional associations have been playing in the Sudanese revolution serves the Lebanese protestors as a model of civil-society transformation and has been much discussed in the tents in downtown Beirut in November 2019.

Mass demonstrations in Sudan brought down Omar Bashir’s thirty-three-year-long rule on April 11, 2019. These demonstrations had begun four months earlier in response to a series of austerity measures launched by the government, including cuts in bread and fuel subsidies. Rallying around the figure of Kandaka—“Nubian queen”—Sudanese protesters continued to occupy public spaces across the country even after a transitional military council took over the reins of power, for fear of a repeat of the Egyptian experience. On June 3, the transitional military government committed a massacre in Khartoum which cost the lives of over a hundred people gathered in peaceful sit-ins. The opposition Forces of Freedom and Change, representing Sudanese professional associations, youth, and women’s movements, have continued to organize civil disobedience against ongoing state violence and signed a constitutional declaration in August. The resultant Sovereignty Council commits the military to return to the barracks and pave the way for free elections. While the African Union considered this council as civilian and lifted Sudan’s suspension, the military members on the council have been supported by Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia and remain reluctant to relinquish power. The army’s strongman, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, has dispatched his loyal Rapid Support Forces to rebellious Sudanese towns and villages as well as to Yemen to join Muhammad bin Salman’s war.¹⁹ The political situation in Sudan remains tense. Protesters across the country continue to challenge the military, the old ruling parties, government institutions, and corrupt companies. Sudanese feminists have been driving change since the socialist parliamentarian Fatima Ibrahim introduced equality laws in the 1950s. Their work to undo subsequent Islamist legislation has led to the revocation of a notorious public order law restricting women’s movement in public spaces on November 29, 2019.²⁰

The revolution in Sudan shares similarities with the Algerian uprising where women, too, have been at the forefront of the year-long, nation-wide protests.²¹ In Algeria the revolutionary trigger was the news that the octogenarian president Abdel Aziz Bouteflika would stand for a fifth term of office.²² Like Omar Bashir in Sudan, Bouteflika was forced to resign in April 2019, after two months of peaceful demonstrations. People are fed up with the atrophied single-party rule of the FLN and a moribund state. Both have proven incapable of tackling economic crises by any other measure than improving the national security apparatus. Algerian protests also represent a broader generational coup across MENA. The vast majority of bodies demonstrating on the streets belong to young Algerians born after the brutal war between the Algerian army and Islamist militants in the 1990s and are against both sides.²³

Today’s generation of young Algerian women and men appear immune to the war-on-terror politics of fear. They are suspicious of all established politicians, including figures from the official opposition. They have drawn lessons from 2011 and refuse to be baited into negotiations with the government. They had demanded the cancellation of the presidential election on December 12, 2019 and since then have contested the regime-friendly election result of a loyalist to ex-President Bouteflika. At this point, they will settle for nothing less than a clean break with the past—a Second Algerian Republic of sorts. Like in Lebanon, we are currently witnessing a political stalemate here, a test of which side can hold their breath longest while the economic situation deteriorates. The question is: will the unity of the revolution outlast the unity of the political elites? The protesters refuse to be co-opted and have set clear conditions before approving a transitional government, and the government is holding out for protest fatigue. But if the Sisi government successfully banked on the population eventually turning against the Egyptian revolution in 2011, this outcome is not self-evident in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, and in the fourth, most tenacious revolution: Iraq.

Since October 1, 2019, millions of Iraqis have been demonstrating across the country.²⁴ They, too, demand the overthrow of the regime. But the order they fight is of much more recent, neocolonial coinage, and the state response has been much more violent than in parallel revolutions. After 2003, the American occupation forces grafted a sectarian system onto a state purged of its bureaucratic class. Since the US government has begun to cut its losses in Iraq, Iranian forces under Qasem Soleimani have filled the country’s power structure. And the protesters have risen to reclaim their country. The revolution has spread across the country, most noticeable in Baghdad’s Sadr City and Shia centers of learning in Kerbala and Najaf, and to all classes of society, including thousands of women, high-school and university students, artists, and professional associations. The government in Baghdad has responded with live ammunition and sent army units to crush the protests all over the country. Over 400 Iraqis have been killed by security forces and snipers. Criticism of violence against protestors, especially by Iraq’s most senior and revered cleric, the Iran-born Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, finally led to the resignation of the prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, on November 30, 2019. The corrupt political system is hanging on during the Covid-19 crisis, and so are the demonstrators.

Iraq’s is a generational revolt, too. While the October revolution in Lebanon was a rebellion of the people born after 1990—“you are the civil war, we are the popular revolution”—the Iraqis who “demand a homeland” and confront government militia bullets, came of age only after the US invasion in 2003. And also like in the three other current MENA uprisings, their protests are directed at the entire political class and the sectarian system that has enabled their corruption. The new Iraqi generation opposes the Baathist old guard that sees salvation in a return to Saddam Hussein’s iron fist; it also accuses the Iranian government and Iranian-backed Iraqi politicians of exploiting and perpetuating the lawlessness, poverty, and corruption that the American occupation created in Saddam’s wake. In a notable deviation from recent Iraqi anti-establishment protests, this generation also rejects the patronage of Muqtada Sadr, the Shia cleric–politician whose popularity used to be based on his independence from Iranian backers.

In one of their revolutionary pamphlets “Tuk Tuk,” named after the three-wheeled rickshaw ambulances that have become the symbol of the lower-class origins of the uprising, “The Youth of Iraq” presented a list of ten demands to the government of Iraq, including: the instant resignation of the government; the establishment of a three-month transition government composed of independent patriotic members unaffiliated with past and future political parties or local, provincial, or national governments; the dissolution of governorate councils, replacing them with a new system approved by the people; the amendment of the electoral law and the establishment of an independent and patriotic electoral committee; enacting the existing political party law to guarantee financial transparency and disarmament of parties; new elections to be held under UN supervision; a constitutional review by parliament within three months; transparent and fair investigation of the attacks on protestors, compensation for families of those killed and injured; the Supreme Judicial Council to lead public corruption investigations of current and previous officials and returning and ensuring the return of all stolen public funds.

These demands echo those of Sudanese, Algerian, and Lebanese protesters. As ‘Azmi Bishara, a leading theoretician of the Arab uprisings, observed, we are currently witnessing an unprecedented cultural–political revolution in which protestors constitute a civil mainstream, driven by moral values, not party ideologies. They are demanding full citizenship rights and, in the case of Iraq and Lebanon, insisting on an antisectarian national unity. While political elites normally defend national unity, they are now defending a sectarian system as the best viable option.²⁵

The one MENA country that never had a chance at independence and remains under colonial rule is Palestine. As Wendy Pearlman reminds us, “if any nation in the region had a tradition of people’s power, it was the Palestinians.”²⁶ Today, this people’s power is represented by a global solidarity movement that supports the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign (BDS) modeled on the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.²⁷ Palestinian civil society organizations have appealed to people, institutions, and companies around the world to refuse to be implicated in Israel’s violations of Palestinian territory, property, and humanity. They call for a boycott of Israeli institutions until the state complies with the requisite UN resolutions by ending its occupations of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights as well as its siege of Gaza; by granting Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel full legal equality; and by respecting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to Palestine.²⁸

An international solidarity movement can fulfill neither the functions of a legitimate national government nor of a liberation organization. In the absence of either, Palestinians are reamed by the everyday violence of the Israeli siege and occupation—daily house invasions, confiscations and demolitions, curfews and checkpoints, arrests and assassinations. And despite this life and death situation, the vast majority of Palestinians protest peacefully. Since March 2018, Gazans have continued their weekly peaceful marches of return, although army snipers have shot dead as many as 350 of them as soon as they came near the Israeli enclosures.²⁹ In the West Bank, sit-ins, protest marches, and legal battles have tried to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. In East Jerusalem, Hebron, and elsewhere, Palestinians resist by remaining there, even though legal and physical harassment by the occupation authorities makes life unbearable.

Going forward, MENA scholars in North America and Europe face the ethical and academic conundrum of how to respond to the Palestinian plea for an academic boycott of Israel. Decades of research and experience in MENA countries, the best of which has been assembled in this Handbook, have confirmed the findings of colleagues who work on settler colonialism elsewhere that nominal democracies can be as violent as dictatorships. While China, Syria, and other “genocracies” are rightly sanctioned, even as the West appeases them as lesser evils, the accelerated Israeli colonization of Palestine enjoys full legal, diplomatic, and financial cover from Western governments, and lately even some Arab ones. As such it is incumbent on MENA scholars to act on their better knowledge and keep breaking the epistemic injustice that still shrouds Palestine and the region as a whole.³⁰

Jens Hanssen, Lüdinghausen, Germany

Amal Ghazal, Vancouver, Canada