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6/18/2025

The Middle East is a Class War: The Real War is Between Arab Haves and Arab Have-Nots By: Arturo Desimone and Anonymous from Nablus

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In the Middle East, a new regional neoliberal order has led to colossal upward transfers of wealth, greatening the rift between the working class and the national capitalist class in every Arab state, and more importantly, digging a greater gap of inequality between the Arab States in North Africa and the Levant on one side, and Gulf Arab monarchies on the other.

In this economy, a major part of Palestinian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and other Arab labor migrated to form a second-class citizenry  in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman — the lands of absolute princes and sultans. Poverty, war, and austerity rather than pilgrimage drive this Gulf-bound mass migration. In effect, the Arab region under neoliberalism became the first human experiment in neo-feudalism. Though by any objective measure, the system in the business-driven Gulf is late-stage capitalism, Gulf elites uphold the feudal codes privileging clan, family, and the superior status of those native to a Peninsula that is blessed by being home to Mecca. Gulf elites also pursue an interest in information technology, which was part of the initial appeal of the Abraham Accords’ (henceforth, AA) promise of tightening ties with tech-hub Israel. Put these factors together, and the resulting mix is a fascination with techno-feudal lifestyles under capitalism.

The Israel-Palestine problem and its possible resolution can only be understood against this wider regional backdrop. Unfortunately, those invested in the Western debate have thus far shown little inclination to take the bigger picture into account — it is inevitably more attractive to zone in on atrocities in the Holy Land. The loudest voices in the West are divided into two major sectarian fronts: on the one hand, an agglomeration of well-meaning Western activists, and their more powerful opponents, the reconstituted neoconservative contingent, whose language and prerogatives remain unchanged twenty-four years into the failed War on Terror. During his tenure, Biden situated himself firmly amid the neoconservatives even if the DSA democrats who voted for him identify with an anti-imperial sentiment of the kind expressed by podcasters like Abbie Martin or Max Blumenthal, who sometimes dangerously oversimplify the Middle East. Locked into these narrow perspectives, wherein either US-Israeli imperialism or Islamic fundamentalism become different theodicies or origin-theories explaining all that is evil in the world, both factions only stray further from understanding the tendencies and historical-material conditions that are motivating some very different strains of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism currently burgeoning in Middle Eastern civil societies.

A visible segment of the intellectual sphere in the West preemptively accuses Arab civil societies of “the anti-imperialism of fools”: for critics such as Gad Saad on the right, and Chris Cutrone and Moishe Postone on the left, Arab civil societies are purely anti-Western and antisemitic, and crudely conflate the critique of capitalism with the demonization of Jews and Westerners. This paternalistic view underestimates the capacity of Arabs to thoroughly understand that their main political opponent is the Arab regional neoliberal caste in the Gulf Monarchies, and their ruling allies in several poverty-stricken Arab countries.

A signature of the Trump administrations’ foreign policymaking has been the struggle to reconfigure the neoliberal class so it can become thoroughly inclusive of Israel. Before the October 7th 2023 Hamas attacks, Benjamin Netanyahu had not been making any effort to conceal the pro-business nature of the AA: in the UN General Assembly that year, Netanyahu boasted about the economics of the AA, claiming that they are a tool to create an alternative to the China Belt and Roads Initiative by carving out trade-corridors between the Arabian Sea and the Mediterranean. Arab leftists opposed AA, not only because this construct circumvents Palestine, but also because the AA overlooks the Arab word’s silent majorities. The Arab Left fears not only that joining the AA could strengthen Israel — even more so, Arab Leftists fear the AA would embolden the Arab neoliberal class.
Western pundits and members of the expertocracy like Daniel Ben Ami pretend that Israel remains isolated in the region, despite that few of the oil-producing countries which once boycotted Israel and the US during the Yom Kippur war would today endeavor so much as a ripple in the supply chain. Even Erdogan, despite his throaty condemnations of Israel, this year welcomed Netanyahu’s airplane to use Turkish airspace and facilitates fuel from Azerbaijan into the Israeli war-machine. Arab civil societies--meaning non-State popular movements--understood that the beginnings of normalization with Israel and the embrace of neoliberalism came to the region arm-in-arm, as far back as the 1970s.

It is tempting for those acquainted with the critique of Orientalism to dismiss a thinker like the late Fouad Ajami as a simplistic Uncle Tom or “house Arab”— after all, the Stanford Hoover Institute professor wrote op-eds vocally supporting the Iraq invasion, and became a Washington-blob insider, advising policymakers on “the Arab mind”. But Ajami represented a more complex stage of decadence: he was a pioneering "Lebanon-First” isolationist, who believed the best way forward for Lebanon was to cut ties with the liabilities of international solidarity and Pan-Arabism. Solidarity with Arab and Afro-Asian causes were but the sandbags keeping the hot-air-balloon of Lebanese bourgeois democracy from heavenward ascent.  For that reason, he praised the peace and open-door initiatives of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Sadat proved essential to burying the ideology of Pan-Arabism and creating a nationalist-isolationist state-based regional order, where every Middle Eastern country has a closed-door policy with its neighbors — limited cooperation, no costly solidarity, and no welcoming of refugees from other Arab nations — while maintaining a red-carpet policy for Israel and Western investment. Ajami even commended the isolationist, counter-revolutionary tendencies of Syrian president Hafez Al-Asad, the father of Bashar Al-Assad and (according to the BBC’s Adam Curtis) likely mastermind of a string of suicide bombings the world over. That father-son duo introduced neoliberalism in Syria. Like many other Arab dictatorships, Syria’s ruling family had historically secured cooperation from citizens not merely through terror and coercion but through its generous and functioning welfare-state policies, but also wished to be conciliatory with the 1990s zeitgeist of neoliberalism.

By 2005, the Ba’ath Party’s 10th regional conference announced that “the social market economy” was replacing socialism as its economic philosophy, aiming for “middle class job creation”  via the private sector. Assad said it was time Syria’s economy became “more flexible”, adding that “for us, socialism is not the socialism of Karl Marx, i.e. the ownership of the means of production, but more of a general concept of equal opportunity[…]” This justified Damascus’ subsidy and pension cuts—bad news especially during years of drought.
 
Internally weakened by austerity, Syria could no longer adequately defend itself against international jihadism.
Many individuals in the Arab world might have adopted conspiratorial antisemitic thinking to explain the rapprochement of their dictatorial governments with Israel. For example, not along ago the Muslim Brotherhood accused El-Sisi of being Jewish, and El-Sisi retorted calling the MB “Masonic”—which is a coded way of saying “Judeo-Masonic”. Arab regimes also benefit from a popular misconception that Israel alone has the keys to Washington and is therefore all-powerful, since that logically excuses these governments from going beyond bluster to help the Palestinians. Yet in the post-ideological era, normalization with Israel—without demanding any preconditions of a resolution for the Palestinian issue—has been a bargaining chip in negotiations between the Arab neoliberal class and the US in the region, alongside the hope for tech-benefits to be acquired from a friendlier Israeli security state. Israel had always been able to conduct relationships with some Arab states, including the most vehement ideological enemies. The open declaration and celebration of these relationships, however, and Arab states’ moving from their policies of walking on eggshells to not anger Israel, towards joining Israel’s staunchest allies, has become beneficial to a careerist professional-managerial class in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Arab capitals including Ramallah. This transformation has degraded the peace-process into a fetishized commodity for a predominantly right-wing audience (including antisemites); it is telling that Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977 has been reportedly described as an event similar in its historical importance to the 1969 moon landing.               

The 2011 Arab Spring was a nightmare for Arab advocates of the neoliberal economic model because it exposed systemic weaknesses. If Pan-Arabism — and its goal of egalitarian regional-autarkic economic integration — erupted into crisis in the 1970s, anti-Pan-Arab populism, which served to prioritize the interests of each local national capitalist class through its connection to global capital, only entered its own phase of crisis after 2011. Back then, the US under Obama withdrew support of Egyptian dictator Mubarak, leaving him unable to fend off popular wrath, which temporarily ended the Egyptian ideology of isolationist populism. With the fall of the “Egypt-Firsters,” Riyadh and the United Arab Emirates were dismayed, and feared Egypt reclaiming its role as a powerful state competing with Gulf Arab Power, in a similar manner to what Nasser did in the 1960s. It was no surprise in 2018, that Saudi strongman Mohammad Bin Salman would express his disdain toward Abdel-Nasser, comparing him to the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran.

The frontmen of the Arab neoliberal class have helmed a regional counter-revolution, taking advantage of the regional wealth gap, to cause huge disruption in weaker Arab states. The 2011 revolutionaries included liberal center-leftists, communists, Pan-Arabists, and Islamists. While the UAE and Riyadh sought to undermine all these factions, Qatar wanted to marshal Islamists across the region to take the reins of counterrevolution for Qatari interests. These Gulf connivances made the Arab Spring fail. The aftermath was the reinvigoration of a more extreme version of Arab isolationist populisms, which allowed the enlargement of national security states, the complete destruction of the remnants of 20th-century populist state capitalism, and the full movement towards an ultra-neoliberal authoritarian state capitalism. As part of these changes, the neoliberal Arab class has adopted an approach of hyper-normalization with Israel, thinking that pro-Palestinian ideology would shorten the life expectancies of their regimes while a pro-Israeli stance might yield longevity, among other fruits. The “Arab Spring” showed that the power of the average Arab regime has proven incapable of sustaining itself without alliances with the US and Israel.

Total “normalization" between Riyadh and Tel Aviv — only temporarily put on ice by the Gaza genocide — meant that Israel has officially gotten involved in class-warfare across the Mashreq, while still engaged in a colonial war against Palestinians. That colonial war, however, makes class war more unmanageable because it undermines the public credibility of the Arab neoliberal class, who rather be seen as emancipators and as patriotic bastions of pride. One example is the Sudanese coup-regime’s neutralization of relations with Israel just before the genocide: Sudanese officers’ circles have often hoped such agreements would grant Khartoum legitimacy on the international stage despite the unpopularity of neutrality. After October 7th, there is no doubt that rebel groups in Sudan have successfully leveraged local discontent with the AA.

On the other hand, there has been a staggering shift in Saudi society in preparation for normalization with Israel. While Riyadh’s foreign policy still instrumentalizes the hollowed-out shell of an ethnically diverse Pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism as ideological tools to achieve its international objectives, the Saudis in effect have become isolationists to the extent of adopting strict Arabian “peninsular ethnonationalism.” Ever since introduction of the AA, the Saudi loyalist propaganda machine unleashed an army of online trolls, bots, and influencers--for example, Emirati Hassan Sajwani tweeting lines like “why can’t Palestinian protestors just vacate #AlAqsaMosque and simply go home?” Gulf paparazzi, even soap opera screenwriters spread an image of Palestinians as parasitic ingrates who scheme to hold back progress for the very Arab societies that had in the past sheltered and stood up for Palestinians. This state of mind is best summed up in the words of chief of Dubai's police in the UAE, Dahi Khalfan, saying that “Nine million Jews sic [in Israel, according to his estimates] are better [for the UAE] than 400 million Arabs because of their superior scientific, financial, and political capabilities.”

The words of Saudi blogger Raof Al Sa'een are most revealing on the ethnonationalist nature of Saudi ideology, in terms that strike uncanny resonances with 1930s European eugenicists describing Jews:

You [Palestinians] do not have a cause nor a land, this is the Land of Israel in the Quran, and you are Roman remnants; Mongols, Turks, Circassians, Armenians, Gypsies, you have no claim over Palestine, Palestine is an Israeli state for the People of Israel. The People of Israel are the sons of Issac and we Arabs are the sons of Ismael, both are the sons of Abraham, they are our cousins, but you are outsiders among us… Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Golda Meir were heroes, but Netanyahu is a coward because he did not burn you [Palestinians], I don't know why he keeps stockpiling his weapons. Netanyahu; burn those gangs, miscreants, and remnants for you, for us, and for the world to be spared. Why are you keeping them alive? Why won't you spare the world their harm? If you are a real man and a hero, spare the world from those dirty lowlifes. Why do you have all these weapons Netanyahu if you will not use them to finish them off? Finish off the child before his mother, finish off the elderly before the young, finish off the child before his father, and spare us those who harmed and overwhelmed us… among the rats, there is no clean rat.

After the October 7th attacks, Al Sa'een reiterated his genocidal rhetoric:

Don't allow the Palestinian into your country, or else they would corrupt your morals, your mentality, your behavior, your education, your country, and with one phone call from your enemy, the Palestinian would start bombings, with one phone call, they would start riots, with one phone call they would become terrorists, don't let the Palestinian near your country if you want the best for your country and your people, expel all of them, let them go live in Europe, let's them go back from the place they came from.

Reading Al’Saeen, one cannot but conclude that regional inferiority complexes —colonialism’s residue — are as potent as weapons of mass destruction and far more influential in determining the geopolitics of these areas.
Slavoj Zizek said that Palestinians are Jews among the Arabs. He is right in the sense that Palestinians have been the embodiment of Arab diasporic cosmopolitanism, the backbone of Pan-Arabist internationalism. This is also right in a darker sense: 2025 is the 1930s for Palestinians, not only in Gaza or in the West Bank but across the region, where Der Palästinenser becomes the new Der Jude: the enemy of the people. As the European Jews before them found themselves trapped between Stalin’s Soviet “realism” (Stalin’s early pacts with Hitler in Poland) and European Fascism, the Palestinians today, once outside of Palestine, are caught in the complex and hostile web of a cold war between Iran and the Gulf.

The Right and Left in America do not understand such extreme vulnerability. The Left will go on fetishizing Palestinian national identity mostly through its aesthetic accoutrements, by yearning hopelessly for a one-state solution under capitalism without taking into consideration the need for socialism to create true social change in all of the Middle East. The fixation on a “one-state solution” as the only short-term way out of a bloodbath, is a form of idealism that represents the hope for achieving “Zionism in reverse”—a belief that the international community will be swayed into supporting a situation in which Israelis must agree to becoming the Jewish minority under a Palestinian majority government, without war immediately reigniting.

​This ambition in the pro-Palestinian left predicates a mistaken belief that the nation-state can be in and of itself an innocent formation, rather than defined by historic crimes. One need not look far for refutations of that idea. Instead, the left should want the borders between small countries like Lebanon, Israel, and a viable Palestinian state, to eventually wither into irrelevancy—but that process might require a generation of Israelis who grow up outside of military uniform, living through the civilizing transition of a post-occupation “Cold Peace” before the social consciousness, and Israeli cultural hegemony, are changed by new generations, in the form of a moral and countercultural reckoning with the Israeli past of racism, married to the will to make these borders and ethnic differences less relevant in the Levant. Because states are inherently flawed and reactionary constructs, the left cannot have a state solution as its maximal goal and instead aim for the longer process implicated by the slogan “two states, one future”—the viable  post-occupation Palestinian state bordering on Israel is the beginning, rather than the end of a reconciliation struggle. The aforementioned position however, will be quickly dismissed as liberal-Zionism or as “normalization” by the average activist.

The right, meanwhile, is trying to revive the Abraham Accords which the world suspected dead on October 7th. In its endeavor, the American Republican vanguard presidency has taken the side of Arab neoliberals in the regional class war. This is consistent with the Trump administration’s policy of enforcing economic nationalism and protectionism at home for the US market, while imposing the return of neoliberalism abroad — from traditional subjects of the Monroe Doctrine like El Salvador and Argentina, to the Middle East.

American and Western radicals of all stripes should learn to put themselves in the shoes of Arab civil societies, for if they have the privilege to think from the comfort of their podcast streaming-studios about revolutionary strategies to overcome the capitalist managerial politics of the Republicans and Democrats in the world's most powerful industrial economy, Arab Leftists and democrats are fighting a desperate struggle to survive a ruthless class war, waged upon them by the most powerful neofeudal lords. You can snub their struggle and spare your solidarity, or you can reduce the scope of that solidarity to mere sentimental commentary on the “Holy Land" — all at the risk that their present will one day be your future. Government crackdowns on protestors’ free speech in the US and Europe, alongside the expansion of Palantir—allegedly used to by Israel to enable AI killings of Gazans, currently being floated by Trump as a databank for monitoring Americans—suggest as much.


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Arturo Desimone and Anonymous from Nablus

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