When Law Becomes a Weapon: What the World Can Still Do for Palestine
by Laala Bechetoula “Arab peoples want the liberation of Palestine. Their governments want the stability of their thrones. These two ambitions are structurally incompatible. That is the real conflict — and it runs deeper, and older, than anything Israel has ever done to its neighbors.” The Myth of Unity There is a persistent fiction in Arab political discourse and in much of Western analysis: the idea of a potentially united Arab world that chooses not to act for Palestine. As though passivity were a reversible decision — a switch that just needs the right hand to flip it. Arab regimes have not simply chosen not to act for Palestine. Over decades, they have constructed architectures of interest in which any meaningful action on Palestine’s behalf directly threatens their own political survival. Passivity is not a choice made in the moment — it is the output of a system. Since the Nakba of 1948, three major military confrontations have opposed Arab coalitions to Israel: 1948, 1967, 1973. But the 1967 defeat — by its totality and its speed — produced a lasting political effect that historiography has consistently underestimated: it shattered the Nasserist project of Arab unity as a shared horizon, and left in its place nation-states that have progressively made regime survival their primary foreign policy doctrine. What exists in its place — a mosaic of regimes with contested legitimacies, dependent economies, and armies frequently bound by defense agreements to external powers — does not constitute a collective actor. It...
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