One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

(I suspect every Arab knows it is a pipe dream to expect that Palestine’s closest neighbors would be the ones to make this case before the International Court of Justice. For the gaggle of authoritarians who run most of the Arab world, there is nothing to be gained from meaningfully assisting a population so well versed in resisting oppression, lest that capacity for resistance prove contagious. There is, however, everything to be gained from empty sloganeering, and so when traveling through most every capital in the Arab world, one is greeted with massive Palestinian flags hanging from the buildings and across the billboards—and yet all this is coupled with the knowledge that, beyond placating the very real rage of the citizenry, there is very little impetus to do anything more substantive, to ruffle feathers, risk trade deals, provoke the ire of a superpower. If a ceasefire comes to pass, it might involve some behind-the-scenes maneuvering in Riyadh or Doha or Cairo, but one can’t help but wonder how many Palestinians would still be alive today if the leaders of the Arab world thought of them as something more than slogan fodder.)