From Israel to Iran .. How did the international powers change the awareness of the Arabs and the identity of their enemy? | policy

In the context, the first researcher at the Al -Jazeera Center for Studies, Dr. meeting Makki, believes that the Arab nation has been in a deep crisis since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, stressing that this event constituted a fundamental turning point in the history of the region.

But the roots of the crisis extend to the further, to the June 1920 revolution, when the Rumaita incident -which occurred on the railway line linking Baghdad and Basra -formed an ideal model for the national action that crosses sectarian and ethnic borders, where the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds participated from Basra until Tal Afar.

The Iraqi revolutionaries faced British forces with primitive weapons that included sticks and agricultural tools, but they were able to force Britain to think about national rule, which represents one of the foundational moments in the history of Arab resistance against colonialism.

Modern Arab countries were established in light of the colonial divisions imposed by the Sykes -Picot Agreement, but the Arab peoples refused to submit to foreign hegemony.

This was evident in leading democratic experiences such as that Syria witnessed in the early thirties, when free elections were held by a Christian prime minister in a country of absolutely Muslim, which indicates the possibility of building real democratic systems if people were allowed to mature.

And the wave of military coups in the region spread after the 1948 calamity in response to the inability of the royal regimes to confront the Israeli challenge, as the officers considered that the defeat of the five Arab armies in front of the “Zionist gangs” calls for changing the ruling regimes.

These coups led to the emergence of leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, who turned from a farmer officer to a national leader who inspired the Arab peoples.

The moment of nationalization of Suez in 1956 achieved a fundamental turning point in the history of the region, when Abdel Nasser faced the tripartite aggression, which ended the global hegemony of Britain and France as two colonial powers and entered America and the Soviet Union as new actions in the region.

The June 1967 setback deepened the Arab wounds, but it did not eliminate the will of the resistance, but rather encouraged the emergence of new Palestinian organizations and the Egyptian attrition war, which aimed to keep the conflict’s burning.

Makki notes that the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 formed a real fraction in the Arab spirit and a refraction of memory and hope, as a major Arab present fell in front of the invaders in a humiliating way.

This refraction led to the Arab governments that began to seek safety and fear for their thrones, while the people were broken internally and stopped asking their governments already.

Consciousness

The expert reveals a dangerous shift in Arab consciousness, as the enemy’s identity from Israel to Iran has changed in a number of Arab countries, which represents a major strategic setback.

He explained that the Syrian, the Iraqi and the Lebanese have become considered Iran their first enemy, not Israel, which serves the Israeli project in dismantling the Arab front.

The region suffers from a deep crisis in the elites that Makki described as corrupt, backward, and righteous, stressing that these elites were one of the first to blow sectarianism in Iraq after the American invasion.

He criticized the role of elites in promoting the defeat and new tyrannical systems, calling for the need to get rid of them and build new elites based on loyalty to the homeland.

– According to Makki, the Arab world faces fundamental challenges in light of the inability of governments to support the Palestinian issue despite the broad popular sympathy with the suffering of Gaza.

He pointed out that some Arab governments feel the defeat within them and fear their peoples and others, which made preservation of chairs more important than crucial issues.

Makki stressed that the real liberation requires time to mature and does not happen by a decision, which is a democratic similar to social construction, which needs decades to mature, as happened in France after its revolution.

He called for allowing political experiences to mature without external interference, warning that foreign interventions prevent peoples from gaining the expertise necessary to build mature political systems.

Makki stressed that social media has changed the rules of the political game, as peoples have been discovering the nature of the regimes in a few days instead of decades, which makes the deception of the masses more difficult in the modern era, and opens the door to new possibilities for change despite all the challenges.