How Arab Governments Exploit Palestinian Suffering

That Palestinian suffering continues to be exploited demonstrates the utter uselessness of Arab governments for whom invoking the horrors of Palestine is a way to validate their own crimes.

by Mahmoud Yamak

The Syrian poet Fakhri Al-Baroudi once said in his famous poem, Bilad Alorbi Awtani, “the Arab lands are my homeland…no borders can separate us.” Historically, slogans like this nurtured pan-Arab sentiments that were instrumental in resisting British and French colonialism in the twentieth century, as well as creating an abstract yet unified Arab nation. But, while this saying persists today, the sentiments that inspired it are dead.

Palestine is perhaps the clearest example of this. Having once been an issue on which there existed near-unanimous consensus, the Palestinian cause is now something Arab governments barely pay lip service to, as the tragedies of the Palestinian people continue to pile up.