As anger grows over Gaza, Arab leaders are cracking down on protests
Fear citizens’ ire over their own links to Israel
CAIRO — Like other governments across the Middle East, Egypt has not been shy about its position on the Israel-Hamas war. Its denunciations of Israel over the conflict in the Gaza Strip are loud and constant. State media outlets broadcast images of long lines of aid trucks waiting to cross from Egypt into Gaza, spotlighting Egypt’s role as the sole conduit for most of the limited aid entering the besieged territory.
This month, however, when hundreds of people gathered in downtown Cairo to demonstrate in solidarity with Gaza, Egyptian security officers swooped in, arresting 14 protesters, according to their lawyer. In October, the government had organized pro-Palestinian rallies of its own. Yet at those, too, it detained dozens of people after protesters chanted slogans critical of the government. More than 50 of them remain behind bars, their lawyers say.
It was a pattern that has repeated itself around the region since Israel, responding to an attack by Hamas, began a sixmonth siege of Gaza: Arab citizens’ grief and fury over Gaza’s plight running headlong into official repression when that outrage takes aim at their own leaders.
Out of step with their people on matters of economic opportunity and political freedoms, some governments in the Arab world have long faced added discontent over their ties with Israel and its chief backer, the United States. Now, the IsraelHamas war — and what many Arabs see as their own governments’ complicity — has driven an old wedge between rulers and the ruled with new force.
Morocco is prosecuting dozens of people arrested at proPalestinian protests or detained for social media posts criticizing the kingdom’s rapprochement with Israel. In Saudi Arabia, which is pursuing a normalization deal with Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, which has already struck one, authorities have displayed such hypersensitivity to any hint of opposition that many people are too frightened to speak on the issue.
And Jordan’s government, caught between its majority-Palestinian population and its close cooperation with Israel and the United States, has arrested at least 1,500 people since early October, according to Amnesty International. That includes about 500 in March, when huge protests were held outside the Israeli Embassy in Amman.
Afterward, the president of the Jordanian Senate, Faisal alFayez, said his country “will not accept that demonstrations and protests turn into platforms for discord.”
Arab autocracies rarely tolerate dissent. But activism around the Palestinian cause is particularly thorny.
For decades, Arab activists have linked the struggle for justice for the Palestinians — a cause that unites Arabs of different political persuasions from Marrakesh to Baghdad — to the struggle for greater rights and freedoms at home. For them, Israel was an avatar of the authoritarian and colonialist forces that had thwarted their own societies’ growth.
“What’s happening to the Palestinian people clarifies the foundation of the problem for Arabs everywhere, that the problem is tyranny,” said Abdurrahman Sultan, a 36-year-old Kuwaiti who has participated in sit-ins in support of the Palestinian cause since the war began.
Kuwait initially tolerated some of the sit-ins. But for some Arab governments, the connection evokes peril. Palestinian flags were a common sight at the Arab Spring protests that swept the region in 2011. In Egypt, where since taking power in 2013 President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi has quelled protest and muffled most criticism, authorities are ever mindful that activism can quickly boomerang against them.
“Today, they’re out to protest for Palestine; tomorrow, they might protest against him himself — the president,” said Nabih Ganady, 30, a human rights lawyer who represents the 14 activists arrested at the April 3 protest in Cairo.
The message, said Mahienor El-Massry, a human rights lawyer who joined the demonstration, “is that people shouldn’t even dream that there exists any margin for freedoms or for democracy, and that you should never gain confidence and then move toward bigger demands.”
Massry was arrested along with 10 other protesters during a smaller solidarity protest outside United Nations offices in Cairo on Tuesday, according to Ahmed Douma, a well-known Egyptian activist.
In interviews conducted around Egypt, Morocco, and Persian Gulf countries — including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, and Kuwait — many citizens described the Israel-Hamas war in stark terms, viewing the Palestinian cause as a struggle for justice, Israel as a symbol of oppression, and, in some cases, their rulers’ dealings with Israel as morally bankrupt.