The Arab Street

I don't know anything about "the Arab street." I think I've read that it's a journalist cliche for an attempt to describe public opinion around the Middle East. But I've also heard the term used rather frequently following the Tunisian Revolution. This revolution involved the overthrow of a corrupt dictatorship that had been highly praised by the IMF and other representatives of Western imperialism. While depriving opportunities for its people and using mass repression and torture to keep them docile, we know (thanks to Wikileaks) that the Tunisian government was engaged in all sorts of corruption and theft. Then came Mohamed Bouazizi, a poor young man unable to find any other work than pushing a fruit cart. For whatever reason, the corrupt police confiscated his cart (and the fruit he had borrowed $200 to buy wholesale) without compensation. When Bouazizi complained to government officials he was spat upon, beaten, and treated with contempt. In despair, he set himself on fire and killed himself.

Bouazizi's death sparked the outpouring of rage that eventually toppled the dictatorship and successive governments. The fall of the Tunisian dictator has caused grumblings of concern in Libya and other Middle Eastern dictatorships. The revolutionary wave itself has spread to Egypt, where millions have taken to the streets against poverty, government corruption, government repression, and the overall hopelessness and futility of living in Mubarak's Egypt (which is an Egypt servicing US foreign policy and neoliberal economic diktat). After three days of demonstrations the Egyptian government has shut-down all internet, cellphone, texting capabilities, in an attempt to limit the organizational abilities of the protesters.

The US media's coverage of these events is said to be noticeably restrained. (I wouldn't know. I don't watch television news and I hardly read Canadian newspapers. I'm going on progressive commentators in the USA.) As well, the Obama administration has been definitely muted in its support for this democratic surge. The obvious explanation for this reticence is that the US government doesn't give a shit about democracy in the Middle East. It actively and enthusiastically supports a tiny claque of dictators who will keep the oil flowing to the US and its other allies in return for a cut of the swag, and to prevent the wealth from Arab oil being given to develop the Arab world itself. The Obama administration looks with trepidation at the teetering of the Mubarak dictatorship, given Mubarak's role as the prison guard of the western wing of the Gaza penal colony.

What could Obama have to say to the Arabs anyway? He has already given his public relations "address" to them, in Cairo itself, in 2009, when he said that Muslims and "America" must speak openly, honestly, and respectfully to one another, but that meanwhile, as his predecessors had, he would continue to wage war on the violent extremists who were apparently targeting the USA for no reason whatsoever, that he would do nothing for the Palestinians whose conditions were "intolerable" (as in: "Yeah. They're intolerable. Maybe they should move or something?") Obama is a public relations creature. He's a marketing creation. He's a suit and a face and a voice. He probably feels that his personal accomplishments are evidence of the rightness of his tactics, but all they've done is reveal the bankruptcy of the system he knows only well enough to have manipulated it when it simultaneously needed to manipulate him. Obama's p.r. campaign for the Middle East has failed under the weight of the reality behind the spin. He has nothing to say for the oppressed of the Middle East because he is one of their oppressors.

The "Palestine Papers" lays bare the callousness and cruelty of the US-Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority negotiators approached the Israelis with massive concessions asking for only the barest considerations in their desperate attempt to win something lasting for their people. What did Israel say? Israeli didn't say "Can you deliver on these promises?" It didn't say "If you can deliver on these promises, we will grant you x, y, and z." No. Israel looked at these gigantic concessions and said that they "do not meet our demands." These PA negotiators had been prepared to attack their fellow Palestinians in Hamas, so that they could bring Gaza into the concessions as well, although they failed at that. And their Israeli opposites were dismissing their sacrifices with a curt "Not enough."

There was poverty and acquiescence in the Middle East before. There have also been uprisings in the past and in the distant past. What's happening now though is an enormous human population has been sunk too long in poverty, oppression, and squalor. Vast sums of oil wealth have exploded inequalities. Ottoman imperialism was replaced by British and French imperialism, followed soon after by Israeli and US-American imperialism. Secular Arab nationalism rose up and failed in the face of these imperialists. It was replaced by religious fundamentalism (with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 just outside the Arab world). But, informed commentators say that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt are not led by the fundamentalists. They are the result of ordinary peoples living too long without hope and without justice.

In that regard they are similar to uprisings everywhere. Central and South America's populations have rebelled against the barbarism of neoliberalism and US imperialism in Honduras, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador. Obama, Clinton, and their ilk have nothing to say to those people either. When you have no work, no safety, no justice, year after year after bloody, miserable year, sometimes something can make you snap. The economic disaster of 2008 is still playing itself out in massive austerity programs in Europe and the USA. International finance is creating another world food crisis. No developed country governments are promising anything to their peoples outside of counterproductive assaults on government "waste" and tax cuts (that don't benefit the majority anyway).

What is happening today in the "Arab Street" is happening all over the world and it is spreading because the incompetence and failure of our political-economic system has given humanity no other choice but to rebel.