“Where are the Arabs?” w/ Nihal El Aasar
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Hello and welcome to Politics Theory Other. My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Nihal El-Assa. As Israel's genocide in Gaza escalated in the autumn of last year, there was much speculation as to whether we would see mass uprisings in the Arab states of the region, and especially in Egypt, where in 2011 the US client state of Hosni Mubarak was overthrown, only to then be followed by a counter-revolution that brought Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to power, who has ruled with an iron fist since 2014.

Yet although there have been major Palestine protests in the region and other acts of solidarity, we have not seen the kinds of uprisings that many hoped for. In a recent article for Parapraxis titled Left-Wing Melancholia, the Arab Political Subject, Nihal Al-Assar takes up this question and argues that repression and the threat of violence alone cannot be the sole explanations for the relative lack of public tumult.

In our conversation we talked about the Arab Spring and the kind of political subject it brought into being, the profound effects of the counter-revolution that destroyed the hopes that so many had invested in the Arab Spring, and we also talked about how the demoralisation of the Arab publics of the region is critical to the regime of capital accumulation in the Middle East and Israel's central role in that process.

Nihal El-Assa is an Egyptian writer and researcher living in London. Nihal's work has appeared in Parapraxis, Art Review and Protean magazine amongst other venues.

So the title of your article is Left-wing Melancholia: The Arab Political Subject. And I suppose one quite obvious point that occurred to me when I was reading the article is that it was of course once completely standard and usual to speak of the Arab-Israeli conflict rather than the Israel-Palestine conflict, partly for the obvious reason that until 1978 and the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt,

The chief military adversaries of the Israelis had been, to varying degrees and at varying times, the armed forces of Syria, Iraq, Jordan and most significantly Egypt. The shift after that moment of increasingly speaking instead of the Israel-Palestine conflict has been seen as not just an indexing of the sidelining of the Arab states but is often also seen as a progressive move since it centred the Palestinians, highlighted Palestinian agency and the PLO in particular.

And it's a framing that encouraged people to see the question of Palestine as a political issue rather than merely a humanitarian problem. But it seems clear from your article that you think something very important has been lost by that shift away from the Arab-Israeli framing. Can you talk about that? Yeah, so you're exactly right. It was referred to as the Arab-Israeli conflict for a certain period before it moved to become the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And I think aside from the semantics, from what we see today clearly with how the regional dimension has been activated and what's happening in Palestine and how Israeli aggression has moved beyond the borders of Palestine and into Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and so on and so forth, it remains clear that the Arab states, whether they're U.S. comprador states or whether they're in the axis of resistance, still have a lot

at stake with the fourth existence of Israel in our region. And before I thought of writing this essay, and obviously I was grappling as an Egyptian, I was grappling with this idea of

the Arab masses, why there haven't been millions of people in the streets, as was the case in Egypt during the first intifada and during the second intifada. I read this piece by Ghassan Kanafani. It's actually in the upcoming volume of Selected Political Writings that's going to be released by Plusa Press called The Resistance and Its Challenges, and I draw a lot from that

piece in the article where Kanafani concludes that there's no non-Arab way out of the Palestinian question.

And also in Canafeni's other writings, and Canafeni, for those who may not know, was a Palestinian intellectual, political thinker, novelist, strategist, editor, and was the spokesman of the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist organization. And in his other work as well, including the famous work, The 1936-1939 Revolt in Palestine,

We see Kanafani writing in 1972 that Palestine is for the most part historically an Arab issue.

And he was kind of interested in this broader definition that seeks to think of the Palestine question and the Palestinian revolution that was happening at the time in relation to the surrounding regional dynamics of the post-Sykes-Picot Arab statehood and as embedded in the Arab world. And it wasn't only Canafani that...

thought so. The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, once said that the Zionist state in the region is a bulwark around Arab barbarism. So you're right, the confinement or the narrowing of the definition of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict lets a lot of analysis, historical and contemporary, go to waste, I think.

I suppose it's a point we'll come back to, but on that point, kind of funny makes about there being no non-Arab way out of the situation. Obviously, the fact that the United States and Israel spent so much time and effort and resources in sidelining the Arab states, that being the project that sort of culminates with the Camp David Accords in the late 1970s, perhaps reinforces that point.

So on the question of the way in which the people of the region have reacted. So you write in the article that, quote, there have been certain weighted expectations for the Arab masses to react more strongly and urgently to this genocide. Some have heeded the call, some have tried and failed. In reckoning with the responses or lack thereof of the Arab public, Palestinians and allies, friends and foes alike, have at some point over the past 10 months asked, where are the Arabs?

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world, heard on TV, in the streets and even in music. Now firstly we ought to make clear, and this is something you do make clear in the article, that there have been major demonstrations, there have been boycotts of Western products and other acts of solidarity, and all of this in the context of extreme state repression where the potential costs of political activity are very high. But when it comes to the question of why we haven't seen even more popular mobilisation,

and certainly we haven't seen the kinds of mass uprisings that Hamas called for when they launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. The most obvious answer would seem to be the internal repressiveness of the Arab states and that it's primarily the threat of violence that is the chief explanation. Can you explain why you think that although repression is clearly a key factor, it's not sufficient by itself to explain the relative quiescence we've seen?

Yeah, so I thought to think quite methodically about this question of like, where are the Arabs? In that way, I thought to define who the Arabs are. And like, obviously, the Arab masses now are in a region that has for the past 20, 30 years been rejuvenated.

riddled with a lot of conflict, civil war, invasions, a failed Arab Spring. So a lot has happened in the last 30 years. And I see anti-imperialism as my lens through which I see that. And within that, I divide the Arab states into states that are U.S. Comfortor states and states that

are kind of in the middle and then states that are states that are defined now as the axis of resistance and these states have outwardly shown material and political support for for Palestine and I read an essay in the Lebanese Al-Akhbar newspaper called The Death of the Arab Spring Subject and it really stuck with me because

It kind of talked about how October 7th cemented that the Arab political subject that started the Arab Spring or that conducted the Arab Spring or was active during the Arab Spring is not the same subject that will bring liberation for the region. And that October 7th kind of showed that.

And it prompted me to think about the aftermath of the Arab Spring, especially in Egypt, the country that I'm most familiar with. What happened is that in 2013, when there was a popular coup that overthrew Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate who won the elections, is that there's been a counter-revolution essentially. And that counter-revolution has not ended until now. It's in fact being enacted on a day-to-day basis.

And it's kind of been historically the case that the decade or the couple of decades after any failed attempt at a revolution or uprising is where political activity is at its lowest. So it made me think about, is it only repression? Is it the severe repression that is...

being enacted by the current Egyptian government? Or is it a mix of different things, Severe Refression being one of them, the political defeat that comes from trying to change the status quo and then being so defeated? And I'm not saying that only about supporters of Muslim Brotherhood candidate Morsi, because a lot of people did not support him, in fact. But on the project as a whole, the project of changing the political system,

that failed and then not only failed but brought on a worse reality than what was the case before it and what that does to the psyche of the political subject and I say that as someone who's an anti-affect person, I'm a crude materialist

But it's prompted me to think about whether that is one of the effects of imperialism in the region and whether this process of defeat and depoliticization is systemic. And that's what I was talking about in this essay, as well as obviously the other more obvious thing that we didn't really mention is that the political engagement or political infrastructure that preceded 2011, for example, in Egypt,

Palestine protesting actually was really integral to 2011 happening because it was through Egyptians protesting the Intifada, the Second Intifada, protesting the Iraq War, that this political memory of being on the streets happened. And from within those organizations that organized for Palestine and organized to protest certain things that were happening on the roads,

regional and global scale, it was within that that these same protesters would find the courage to protest the domestic politics and the system. We're not seeing any of that now because all of the windows for protests have been shut down. So the current Egyptian regime learned from what it deemed to be the mistakes of Hossein Mubarak's state, and that doesn't allow any protests at all, even if it's for Palestine, even if it's not

for domestic-related reasons because they're now well aware that that kind of political infrastructure and political memory that laid the groundwork for 2011 happened there. And part of the reason why people are not on the streets, I'm presuming, other than repression is that there's just no...

There's no infrastructure for that. There's no student unions. There's no organizing on campus. Trade unions have been severely repressed. So even if people wanted to, they wouldn't know where to go, essentially. And that's why you see individual acts or sporadic acts of people protesting that obviously makes it quite easy for the state to pick them out and arrest them.

Contrary to the picture you paint there of there being actually plenty of support for the Palestinians and a desire to act and show solidarity, but that is prevented by the repressiveness of the regimes and the fallout from the Arab Spring with all its sort of psychological and emotional consequences. It's been argued, and we saw a lot of this prior to October 7th, that the

Arab public concern with the Palestinians was actually in abeyance. It was commonly pointed out that the Palestinians were ever more isolated, emblemised by the normalisation talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and that the populations of the Arab states of the region were too preoccupied with their own worsening material conditions to think about the Palestinians. And

And the fact that we have not seen a greater response from the public to the Arab states would seem to bear out that idea that the plight of the Palestinians carries less salience than it once did. But your view would be that actually we're mistaking the position of local elites for popular feeling more generally. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly the distinction I was trying to draw.

In fact, I would go further and argue that the aftermath of October 7th heightened the contradiction between the states and the masses the same way at a smaller scale we see it

heightened here in Britain. The political establishment here in Britain, whether it's Keir Starmer's Labour or Rishi Sunak's Tory party, they don't represent the political will of the public as it relates to Palestine. And we've seen that in Britain, 84% of the public that was surveyed think that Netanyahu should be arrested on arrival here.

74% think that Israel has committed war crimes in Palestine. And even surveys as far back as October said that the majority of the public wanted a ceasefire. And that is not presented by the establishment at all. In fact, we see Keir Starmer

from his press conference two weeks ago on Iran's response to Israel, still saying that Israel has a right to defend itself, the same thing he was saying in October a year ago. So if we take that to be the case in Britain, when it comes to the Arab world, where the Arab masses have routinely, since the enforced establishment of the state of Israel in our region since 1948, shown time and time again that

they understand that to be American imperialism in the region or at least American interference in the region and they understand this conflict

contradiction. And they understand that to be the case. And they understood that from Sadat onwards, that the accords, that they're enforced top down, but do not reach the masses. And that's shown to be the case because, you know, Egypt was the first Arab country to normalize. But 50 years on, Egypt has one of the most anti-Zionist populations in the Arab world.

And of course, support for Palestine in the Arab region comes in ebbs and flows. Like you said, there's sometimes domestic issues take precedence.

In the aftermath of Camp David and then the Oslo Accords, some people thought peace would lead to justice for Palestinians. Some people thought it's a different strategy. But obviously, the dividends for peace never arrived. So less and less people are thinking that that's the case now. And we've seen mass scale protests happening from Morocco to Tunisia, even to Egypt and Jordan in October 2020.

Sisi allowed a state-sanctioned protest to kind of, I think, test the waters to see where support for Palestine was. And we saw that people broke out of the legal route that the government laid and broke into Tahrir Square in their thousands and modified the famous Arab Spring slogan, bread freedom and social justice, to bread freedom in an Arab Palestine. And some even chanted for Nasrallah and Hezbollah.

And that was kind of like a slap in the face, not only to the regime, but also to the enforced normalization that has been forced on their world.

And how would you see the decline of pan-Arabism fitting into this? Because you sometimes see an argument made that as we move further away from the high point of pan-Arabism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that with that movement's defeat, over the decades, identification with

the nation states of the region has displaced more expansive modes of regional identity, which would more easily dovetail with a sort of pro-Palestinian position by sort of seeing all Arab peoples as one. What do you make of that kind of argument?

So I think pan-Arabism is a movement that was started before Nasser popularized it and took ownership and leadership of it for a while. And I think what has waned is kind of like Nasser's version of pan-Arabism. What was prevalent during the height of pan-Arabism that was tied with Arab socialism at the time was that Arab unity would bring Palestinian liberation.

But then after that, when that project failed with the huge monumentous loss of 1967, the other emerging idea that comes with the Palestinians taking matters into their own hands is

It doesn't become Palestine first, right? The idea is that it's Palestinian liberation that would bring Arab unity. So it's one or the other. Either it's Arab unity that would bring Palestinian liberation or it's Palestinian liberation that would bring Arab unity. And I would argue that while pan-Arabism, as was popularized in the 50s and 60s, has waned, but the larger idea of Arab unity still remains in a lot of large pockets.

And in fact, it's been a project of the right wing Arab states or like pushed by right wingers that, for example, Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat, Sadat's government adopted domestic policies that aim to change the values prevalent in society. And those targeted particularly the Arab orientation and commitment to Palestine that had characterized the Nasser era.

And this official discourse from the state media machine to the national education curricula were all reshaped to project this logic of Egypt first and discredit Nasser's Arab policies as futile adventures or were costly for Egypt.

And then you see that migrate to Jordan and Lebanon as well. And the aim is to obfuscate and isolate and sever historical links. And yeah, while you see a lot of these ideas prevalent until today, including obviously taken up in their world by big businesses, the bourgeois, etc, and so on and so forth. People still say like Egypt first, Jordan first, Lebanon first, but

You also see on the other side, people proclaiming that any attack on an Arab capital is like an attack on their own cities. And we've seen that more clearly with the attack on Beirut recently, or the attacks on Yemen. And we see more than ever that this idea of Arab unity has not disintegrated. Maybe the idea of pan-Arabism as espoused by Nasser did, but not Arab unity as a whole.

You've mentioned the 1967 war and its tremendous importance. And I have a question on that. So we'll maybe come back to that in a moment. But first, I just want to ask you regarding the article. So

With reference to the work of the Lebanese scholar Ali Kadri, you argue that the demoralisation and the defeat of the publics of the Arab states, a project that obviously Israel has been absolutely central to, that that is a precondition for the kind of US superintended regime of capital accumulation that exists in the region. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Absolutely. So like I know you're going to ask me about 67, but I think I'll start with 67 because U.S. support for Israel before 67 wasn't as fully fledged as we see now. And that only starts after the defeat of 67, the Arab defeat of 67, because the U.S. saw while it was busy in Vietnam that Israel not only defeated the Arab militaries, a heavy defeat, but it

it also defeated, like you said, this idea of pan-Arabism that was linked with Arab socialism and other Arab radical movements that seemed to be tied with the project of Arab unity and the liberation of Palestine. So a lot of people bought into Arab socialism and pan-Arabism and other secular ideologies because they

they saw that as a way to free Palestine in the region and for Arab national liberation. And in the Arab world at the time, and until now, socialism or left movements lent priority to national liberation before anything else, like before domestic issues or like issues of work conditions or wages or anything of the sort. It was national liberation, decolonization first, and

and then any other issues would come later. So the military defeat of 1967 landed a blow to the legitimacy of these movements and of the nascent left that was starting to take shape in the region while it was still in its embryonic stage. And when the U.S. saw that, it kind of saw the value of having this Israeli presence in the middle of the region as a way to, like Herzl said, be a bulwark against Israel

any sort of Arab, I would argue, not even leftist, but Arab sovereign project that could emerge, that could push any Arab state to either control its own resources or control its economy in a way that was contrary to what the US wanted to be or to create any kind of unified economic project because the region as it stands has a really crucial spot on the globe as it comes to resources. So,

It is in the interest of the U.S. to keep these people defeated and depoliticized. Otherwise, who knows what kind of radical project might emerge.

Yes, and Israel is a particularly reliable tool for that project because it is a settler colonial state. Its aims are so contrary to the people of the region. So it has to depend on outside support in a way that wasn't true of, say, the Shah's Iran or even Turkey, which, although, you know, hasn't gone the way of Iran in terms of becoming oppositional to the US, is far less dependable than Turkey.

than Israel. Yeah, and we saw extreme attacks on other sovereign projects in the region, like Iraq has been destroyed, Syria was destroyed, Libya was destroyed. And you wouldn't argue that any of these were leftist projects, but they were like fully sovereign projects. And they were contrary to US aims in the region. So they had to be destroyed.

And the presence of Israel in the region facilitates that. Joe Biden says if Israel didn't exist, we would have had to create it. And like you said, part of this also is that a lot of the Jewish residents of the region, for example, the Arab Jewish communists in Egypt were some of the first people to create communist parties. A lot of the communist parties in Egypt were started by Egyptian Jewish communists and

And the presence of Israel in the region forced a different type of Jewish project that wasn't leftist, but it was a country, it was like a colonial project. And it was the thing, the establishment of the State of Israel is the thing that put sectarian strain and created the binary between Arab and Jew that we see today that did not exist before that.

And it was mostly the protestation of Arabs in the region against the establishment of the State of Israel. Obviously, it wasn't that there was Jewish migration to the region, but it was the fact that this project of ethnostatism was so anti the project of Arab unity that was starting to take hold. It was anti the economical nature of this Arab identity that was starting to form. And it was not the project that...

Arabs wanted in the region. Going back to that quote you mentioned from Joe Biden about the necessity of inventing Israel if Israel didn't exist. You also mentioned there the fact that the US begins to throw its support behind Israel and starts to see Israel as a strategic asset after the 67 war, which is obviously very telling regarding US motivations because US support for Israel is always couched in terms of

humanitarianism, defending the Jewish state, defending the population who are very substantially descended from the victims of the destruction of European Jewry. But of course, it's not in the 1950s that the US becomes a very strong supporter of Israel, which is a point at which Israel is relatively, compared to later, is relatively weak. It's a much poorer country than it later becomes. It's less militarily impressive.

And it's also, of course, the moment at which the population is more comprised of survivors of the Holocaust than is true at any later point.

So going back to the 1967 war, so in the article you write that "One cannot invoke the subject of defeat in the Arab world without mentioning the primary event that shaped the modern Middle East unlike any other: the 1967 loss to Israel by the Arab armies led by Egypt and Syria. This event is the central cause of left-wing melancholia in the Arab world and the benchmark against which all subsequent events are measured."

Can you say a bit more about why 1967 was such a profound loss and how that loss reverberates down to today? And you also mention in the article how 1967 can in some ways be compared to the moment of the collapse of really existing socialism in Europe and what was the Soviet Union.

Yes, as was touched on before, it wasn't only a military defeat, but it was considered to be a defeat of the nascent left that was forming the political project of the Arab region that was forming, of Nasser, who was kind of like the political leader. It was also considered to be a societal defeat. The more Islamist factions of society would say, there's a really famous quote by a sheikh in Egypt who said,

Something along those lines of like, I'm really happy that this defeat happened because it would have been a victory for communism, right? Yeah.

Palestine would have been liberated by communism. And then the Arab world hits a bit of a stalemate after that. Militarily, the Arab armies kind of get over that because there's a war of attrition that continues until 1970 from 1967 between Egypt and Israel. Egypt regains back some of its military wins, even though Israel continues to hit Egypt.

That would eventually lead to the 1973 battle win for Egypt, known as the Yom Kippur War. So militarily, one would say the Arab world would have gotten over it. But ideologically and societally, the left, I would say, never recovered from that.

And then what happens after is that Nasser's death in 1970 further cements that because Nasser's, like one of the negative things he did was not leave any mechanisms through which his project could continue after him because political parties were dismantled. The left couldn't really fight Sadat's rightist project afterwards.

And he was also able to suppress the left by giving rise to more Islamist political parties like the Muslim Brotherhood, which is quite ironic because he would end up being assassinated by some of those same groups for the Camp David Accords.

But then a lot of films, a lot of culture, a lot of literature happened around 67. It would be surprising for the non-Arabic speaker to know that most of these projects didn't even have Israel in them. But they considered 67 as an internal political failure or a societal failure rather than anything else. And everything harkens back to that.

Even in the Western press, like the latest LRB article by Adam Schatz, in which he talks about Nasrallah's death, he still invokes 67 as the loss, even though I would argue that those are not quite comparable, but kind of like remains the epochal, mythical date that exists in the history of the conflict.

And yeah, some of the works I use for this essay talk about how our world needs to find a way to grapple with this defeat before moving forward. And so for you, the 1973 war, which you mentioned there, and the initial victories that Egypt was able to achieve, doesn't sort of heal the wounds or make up for the defeat in 1967. Because in 1973...

Although Egypt is launching a war against Israel with its allies, it's doing so really through a sort of nationalist framing. As you said, the left have been sidelined and it's all leading up to the Camp David Accords. And it's all about Egypt regaining control of the territory that it lost to Israel, the Sinai, in return for becoming a US client state, basically.

Yeah, and also, 73 is quite contested. In Egypt, there's a lot of internal debates about it, even until now, of what really happened in the military. And because the Egyptian archive is so closed off that you can't even get the primary documents, military documents about what happened. But there are

memoirs of generals, the most famous of which is Saad ad-Din al-Shazli. In al-Shazli's memoirs, he says that Sadat actually gave the generals of the 73 War really bad military advice. And after they'd taken some gains in enemy territory, apparently they received a call from Sadat saying to consolidate these gains rather than to keep moving forward with the offensive, which all military generals instinctively, not only al-Shazli, disagreed with.

But he insisted that they do that.

And the implication in those memoirs is that was done deliberately. And the argument here is that Sadat wanted Egypt to win, but he only wanted Egypt to win so that he could reach the negotiation table, basically. Yeah, and that indeed is what happened, right? Yeah, exactly. And so it's really contested on whether Egypt could have militarily won further. And some of the Nasserites, the Nasserist political parties still say that 73 was Nasser's win. It wasn't Sadat's win. And

And that was Nasser's army that won and Nasser's generals that won. And what Sadat did was actually impede the victory militarily by doing that and politically by signing the Camp David Accords.

You've already mentioned that a comparison is being made with the 1967 war and the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the general secretary of Hezbollah, as well as the Pager and Walkie-Talkie attacks. Would it be your view that that's a mistaken interpretation and that Israel's actions may count as tactical victories but not strategic ones and that it doesn't herald them, you know, really sort of reordering the security environment of the region?

It's an interesting comparison, but I don't think there's a lot of similarities other than the fact that, you know, strong men from the Arab world died, you know. I think '67 was a momentous loss because the West Bank was occupied, Gaza was occupied, and Sinai was occupied, as well as the Golan Heights.

So that's significant loss of territory from the Arab world in really key areas, three of which have not been returned yet. And we're still living the outcomes of it until this very day. The most recent attacks on Lebanon, while really alarming, they weren't on that same scale of loss. Israel was able to

obviously assassinated Hezbollah leadership, but we see that Hezbollah is still very much fighting back and actually gaining militarily in the ground invasion, like we've seen Israeli soldiers being defeated on the border still in their ground invasion. Actually, we saw some Hezbollah fighters chase IAF troops back to Kiryat Shmona.

So on the ground, we're still very much yet to see what's happening. And there is little Israel has achieved in this war beyond mass carnage and the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the expansion of the murder of civilians and journalists and medics to Lebanon as well. It was only able to achieve some of its military goals, not because it used precise or advanced technology, but because it widened the scope of its bombing. For example, in order to...

assassinate Nasrallah on Lebanese territory, it had to level eight buildings and kill hundreds of people. So yeah, I think that would be the similarities for me. So going back to the theme of left melancholia and the Arab political subject. So another writer you draw on is Hannah Proctor and her recent book, Burnout, the emotional experience of political defeat.

Could you say something on Hannah's work and how it informed your essay? Yeah, so reading, like, the way I got to write this essay was quite coincidental because I was reading Hannah's work and then I read this article about the death of the Arab Spring subject. I was reading Cannafani as well as Ali Qadri and I all kind of clicked in my head. Hannah's book convinced me that thinking about affect and thinking about defeat and melancholy and all of that doesn't have to be non-materialist. Like, it can very much be materialist and reading that in tandem with

Ali Qadri made me link the two together as like, oh, defeat can be an outcome of imperialism and colonialism in the region. It can be a process. It can be a thing that being done to the Arab political subject. And something clicked in my head about this question of

Arab defeat, as well as Nourie Ghana's book as well, was also instrumental in my thinking. And Nourie Ghana wrote this book called Melancholy Acts, and it kind of grapples with this question of defeating the Arab region and the post-67 moments. So I kind of had to think about the result of these intentional processes of depoliticization and political melancholy tied to the success of counter-revolutionary processes in

which reversed any gains that were had from the 18 days of uprising in Tahrir Square and the disastrous effects on the potential for the masses in Egypt and in the Arab world to view themselves as agents of history, as agents of change rather than witnesses, in addition to this loss of political memory regarding organizing.

So yeah, the question of the Arab masses in this age and the death of the Arab Spring subject and the emergence of the October 7th political subject is that pro-October 7th, the Arab political subjects or the Arab masses were pushed out of this lull that emerged in the post-Arab Spring moment and the counter-revolutionary moment and had to witness what was happening, like this disruption of the status quo that was happening in Palestine on the border

at the same time while the counter-revolution was closing in and limiting political action in their own locales. And the regimes as well, the Comprador regimes are aware of that. I mentioned this example, but it's a very pertinent example of the Sisi saying in January a statement that was

to the Egyptian people regarding Egypt's dire economic situation right now and devaluation of the pound and historic rises in inflation. He said, oh, you're complaining about hunger, but what about your neighbors? Like you see your neighbors were not even able to get food for them, get food in for them. And obviously other than the criminality of the statement given Egypt's role in enforcing the siege on Gaza,

What we can surmise from this as well is that the Egyptian regime is quite aware of what the masses are seeing in this kind of like

the people of Gaza resisting the status quo and rising up despite their conditions. And this was set as a warning to the Egyptian people. You know, if you do this, if you seek better conditions, if you choose to resist, then your fate will be the same. And that's kind of like the condition that we're finding ourselves in, the masses of the region seeing the axes of resistance increasing.

resisting imperialism and colonialism through its manifestation in Israel in the region, while the other masses in the Comprador states, who are also victims of imperialism in another way through defeat and impoverishment, are witnessing that from the other side. And this has resulted in many things, one of them being an intellectual relationship with the West that's been broken. A lot of Arab liberals, for

how much of a sham Western institutions and the rules-based order is, and they're rethinking a lot of things right now. So the question remains, what kind of geopolitical subject will arise in this moment? Just on the question of melancholia, so in the psychoanalytic sense, melancholia is identified with questions around sort of a preoccupation with a lost object, an inability to move on, repetition and so on.

And when it comes to the Arab Spring, do you see the lost object there being the condition of possibility, you know, the feeling of a tremendous opening and all sorts of possibilities emerging and then being closed, and that that preoccupation might prevent us from

looking more clear-eyed at the Arab Spring and thinking, you know, what is there to be learned from this? What are the useful tactics? What are the things that need to be jettisoned? What needs to be kept? Yeah, I don't know if you have some thoughts on that. Yeah, exactly. So I think the other side of that is nostalgia, right? You're looking at those mythical 18 days in Tahrir Square, the days that were about to bring a new social order, social and political order in Egypt. But

But the other thing to consider is, was that the best way that things could have been handled? What are the effects of not having any political leadership? What are the effects of the lack of political organization because of repression or because of other things that caused the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square to not

reach their political goals. Yeah, so those are all questions that I was hoping to tease out. And whether the political subject that relied on NGOs, relied on human rights, relied on the liberal international order, would that happen again? And also, from the other side, there are other questions. And I see a lot of those discussions happening.

What would have happened if October 7th had happened during the Arab Spring or in 2011? I mean, if you look back, 2011 is painted as this anti-regime, anti-cliest brutality, anti-corruption movement, but it was way more than that. A lot of foreign policy issues were tied in that as well that got pushed to the side in

In 2011 alone, the Israeli embassy was invaded twice by Egyptian protesters. The first time a protester climbed atop the Israeli embassy and brought the flag down, the Egyptian state then put the Israeli flag up again and then erected a wall around the embassy.

And then by the following day, the wall was torn down. Protesters had scaled the walls again, brought the flag down, invaded the embassy. A lot of embassy workers were hiding. So it was clear that the question of Egypt's foreign policy on Palestine and as related to normalization with Israel was on the forefront of protesters' minds.

Also, like in 2012, 500 Egyptian activists entered Gaza and, you know, using that political vacuum that was happening at the time. So that shows, I think, more clearly than ever that democracy

domestic issues and foreign policy issues in the Arab world are tied in, especially the question of related political fates or that question that we were talking about in the first place. It is because of U.S. empire that, you know, this authoritarian U.S. empire and capital and like our place in the global political and economic order that is tied to the presence of Israel in our region. Yeah.

And you don't need to be a political scientist to figure that out. You just need to live under US computer estate in the Arab region. You've been listening to Politics Theory Other. If you've been enjoying PTO and finding it useful, please do consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts. It really does help to bring in new listeners. The show's music and graphic design is produced by Planet B Productions. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week.