An Arab ‘MAGA’ Reset?

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US president Donald Trump’s visit to three of the world’s richest states in the Gulf calls for reflection on the prospects of an Arab MAGA (Make the Arab world Great Again). The idea is not to transform the Arab world in a Trumpian image. That is, not a MAGA modelled on spurious ideological discourses about the ‘other’ or indifference to democratic commitments in the Middle East. Rather, an Arab MAGA must fight back against the assault on the common dream of community with shared past and future. It must recapture the value of Arab solidarity and the quest for democracy, as elaborated in this article.

Arab precarity mirrored in the tragedy of Gaza

Is the glory of Arabs for ever buried in the dust of distant history? Have the 400-million contemporary Arabs ceased to harbour solidarity ambitions? Has Arab unity become a shibboleth in our hyper-nationalised times? There may be no answer. Or rather, Gaza is the answer. Like leaves from the books of Sophocles or Euripides on tragedy, Gaza has re-opened Arab wounds. The destruction and killing in Gaza have for over 18 months enhanced the Arab multitudes’ emotional connection with Palestine’s unhappy human condition.

It is Gaza that today warrants speaking of a spectre of precarity haunting the modern Arab world. Even if disproportionately experienced, in socio-economic opportunities or in backsliding democratic rights, Arab communities across multiple and interrelated human and cultural geographies live precarity through the tragic consequences of the destruction and killing inflicted on Gaza by Israel. Arabs today experience such precarity by association as Gaza starves and no architecture of Arab safety is in place. The tragedy of Gaza teaches lessons that states and civil societies in the Arab world seem to overlook at their collective risk.

It is as if the Arabs have been turned into gatherings of ‘sitting ducks’ unsure of what violent re-mapping of their communities and states awaits them. Today Gaza and Palestine, tomorrow maybe the rest. The representation of injustice for Palestinians provokes a much wider conversation regarding the nature of pan-Arab institutions and their efficacy in times of war and peace. 

Arab tribal and Islamic codes of justice and honour rest on a belief in a minimum moral obligation to uphold collective responsibility for communal safety. This is something that Islamic teachings and Arab traditions have transferred across time and space.  US diplomatic stewardship obliged Saudi lobbying, with Trump lifting longstanding sanctions on Syria. This correct policy was not matched to give Gaza relief from war and an 18-year-old Israeli blockade of the strip. One issue that has bedevilled public opinion on Gaza is in regard to the failure to leverage these codes of collective safety and responsibility, including by civil societies and official institutions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holding up maps in September 2024 in the UN, envisioning his binary interpretations of “The Blessing” and “The Curse” in the Middle East, stands for a carving-up strategy in which might determines ‘what’ and ‘who’ is right. His territorial envisioning is typical of an expansionist and colonial gaze not unlike horrors from yesteryear’s playbook. Tacitly and explicitly, Netanyahu’s cartography appears to be a tool of identitarian erasure. This brand of erasure is all too clearly rehearsed in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Netanyahu’s play at the re-production of Arab space without Gaza and the West Bank, or with a Greater Israel that covers territories from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, must not be taken lightly.

No solidarity without a Democratic Arab League

As inheritors of great anti-colonial resistance and consciousness, Arabs should not lose sight of their historic fights for freedom and equal human dignity, in Algeria’s 1962 revolution, in the hero Omar Al-Mokhtar’s anti-Mussolini resistance, and the like.  This is why Gaza is the answer. It awakens that inherited moral core of peoples standing united for equal freedom during Arab struggles for independence.

Rethinking the morality of freedom and humanity for Arabs, devising ends and strategies of normatively desirable, collective architectures of solidarity, must enable shared capabilities to recognise, prepare for and respond to common threats (economic, environmental, cultural, and geostrategic). An Arab safety / solidarity / security architecture must be geared towards strategic refashioning and a re-design of civilisational repertoires; human, material, and technological systems; and inter-relational frameworks not only to safeguard existing assets, but also to align them with new policies that enact common goals of prosperity and collective safety.  

Today the Arab League (AL), created in 1945, appears like a relic from the past. It has failed to lend tangible support to Gaza during the Israeli bombing campaign. The Gaza war reveals a web of complex practices in which non-state actors fight Israel, supported by forms of contentious politics. The Arab states will not fight new wars with Israel. The AL’s 1950 Joint Defence and Economic Co-operation Treaty remains ink on paper.

A system of democratic governance is in order. To revive the sclerotic organisation, Arab citizens could for instance elect parliamentarians from its 22 member states to represent their preferences in the AL. One in which the people from the member states’ institutions and civil societies are equally involved in decisions that affect general Arab welfare, sovereignty, and safety.

Arabs and a ‘paradox of riches’

Arab riches have not spawned a ‘fortress’, so to speak. The Arabs have assets that in theory should allow them to compete to outmanoeuvre many of the world’s big power players. With more than 13 million square kilometres, the Arabs are the second biggest owners of the world’s landmass. Only the Russians have more territory (over 17 million square kilometres). The mighty European Union occupies only a bit less than 4.5 million square kilometres of Earth’s surface area. Yet the combined prowess of the EU’s states is staggering. The EU comes out ahead in nominal terms, boasting the world’s third largest economy (respectively after the US and China). The EU’s purchasing power parity (PPP) is neck-and-neck with China and the US.

In theory, then, the Arabs have a head start over the US. Their combined landmass of 13 million square kilometres is larger than that of the US – less than 10 million square kilometres. In terms of demography, there are close to 500 million Arabs compared to 350 million Americans. However, the combined Arab combined GDP does not surpass US $3.5 trillion as against America’s US $28 trillion. It is less than Germany’s US $4.5 trillion. The aim of this minimalist quantitative measurement is to identify power relations in which Arab potential has room for optimisation. This brief exercise verifies, in comparative numerical terms, who gets what in the global arena and how much. It paints a picture of how precarity is essentially performing below one’s assets – cultural and material.

The truth of precarity becomes more explosive at the realisation that the country that threatens Arabs most, Israel, sits on thousands, not millions, of square kilometers, excluding Gaza and the West Bank and the occupied Golan Heights, and a population of ten million. 

Arabs used to draw confidence and a sense of security and even pride from an imaginary of a “land that speaks Arabic”. Thus, the voice of the late Egyptian composer Sayyid Mekkawi soared in the 1980s and ‘90s. Millions in the Arabic-speaking world roared along with his songs, charged up at the thought that they all spoke and breathed Arabic, the language of the Quran and Islam. This shared linguistic and religious-civilisational background is a prime source of intersubjectivity, intersectionality and multicultural identity. Major states such as Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, amongst others, that once furnished legitimacy for an imaginary of an “Arab Nation,” must renew bonds of mutuality and reciprocity whilst promoting Arab values of social integration and justice. 

An Arab MAGA reset?

Making the Arab world great again calls for practical reconciliation of common futures and ambitions with existing assets, without recourse to chauvinism. There is no ‘Arab BRICS’ or an ‘Arab NATO’ on the horizon. This begs the question: is the absence of such a strategic regional partnership at the peril of all Arabs? Will the Arabs 40 or 50 years hence still own 13 million square kilometres of the globe’ real estate? If Syria is attacked, will Iraq come to the rescue? If Morrocco faces external threats, will Libya offer support? If Sudan faced new divisiveness will Egypt lend solidarity? The recent record seems to suggest otherwise.

Individual Arab countries’ policy of ‘us first’ (‘Tunisia first’, ‘Syria first’ or ‘Jordan first’, etc.) is a dark vision if not combined with proactive Arab-Arab genuine partnerships or capacity building to enhance collective safety. Arabs should cooperate to acquire new tools of global statecraft to command respect and influence in the world’s strategic theatres.

The quest for joint Arab solidarity does not go away simply because statesmen or states stop pursuing or believing in it. Today Gaza stands as a painful emblem of the truths of precarity that Arabs must counter by engendering solidarity and a democratic reset of polity, society, economy and knowledge.

Related articles from this author:

Tunisia’s Revolution 14 Years On: ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes’  (3-minute read)

Reconstructing the ‘New Syria’: Peacebuilding and Political Transition After Assad (10-minute read)