From Palestine to Iran: What Arab and Muslim Silence Really Reveals

I have always found it interesting, and at times revealing, when seasoned activists and intellectuals in the West, including those who see themselves as deeply committed to Palestine, raise the same familiar point: Arab governments must stand up to Israel and the United States in solidarity with their brethren in Palestine.

The argument often comes wrapped in a perplexed question: why are Arabs and Muslims not doing anything for Palestine?

What makes this particularly puzzling is that the question is often posed by respected analysts and historians—people who should recognize that the issue is far less sentimental than structural.

At first glance, the question may not seem bizarre. Palestinians are tied to their neighbors through history, geography, demography, religion, language, collective memory, and a shared experience of Western domination and Israeli colonial violence.

Additionally, Israeli leaders speak openly in expansionist terms, and they act accordingly, whether in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, or elsewhere. The people on the receiving end of this violence are often the same native communities of the region: Arabs, Muslims, and Christians alike.

Indeed, Arab and Muslim institutions themselves constantly invoke Palestine as a central cause. Arab summits still describe Palestine as a core issue, and public opinion across the region remains overwhelmingly aligned on that point.

For example, the 2024-25 Arab Opinion Index found that 80% of respondents across 15 Arab countries agreed that “the Palestinian cause is a collective Arab cause”, not solely Palestinian. The same survey found that 44% viewed Israel as the greatest threat to Arab security and 21% named the United States, far ahead of Iran at 6%.

So yes, the question of Arab and Muslim solidarity does not emerge from nowhere. On the level of popular feeling, it is entirely rational. It reflects a moral and political intuition that Palestine should be a point of unity.

But here is what that argument misses. Sentimental expectations aside, many Arab governments are not neutral actors waiting to be persuaded into solidarity. They are already positioned, structurally and strategically, within the US-led regional order. Some are client regimes in the classical sense. Others are so dependent on American protection, validation, or military partnership that calling them “partners” barely conceals the hierarchy embedded in the relationship.

The problem, then, is not hesitation. It is alignment.

The Gaza genocide offered a devastating example of this reality. While Palestinians were being starved and bombed, official Arab responses remained fragmented, cautious, and largely subordinate to Washington’s strategic priorities.

Some governments hardened their rhetoric later, but the early reactions were deeply revealing. Bahrain, for example, publicly condemned Palestinian resistance for October 7, rather than, at least, taking a position even remotely proportionate to the scale of Israeli violence and genocide. Egypt, meanwhile, allowed the narrative to circulate that it had warned Israel beforehand of “something big,” a framing that shifted attention toward Palestinian action rather than Israeli impunity.

Even more revealing was the economic dimension. As Ansarallah’s Red Sea operations disrupted maritime access to Israel in declared solidarity with Gaza, a land corridor developed to move cargo by truck from ports in the Gulf all the way to Jordan and finally to Israel.

Whatever diplomatic language Arab governments employed in public, trade and logistics were being quietly adapted in ways that helped Israel absorb the pressure and maintain continuity.

This was not an anomaly. It was continuity.

For decades, major Arab regimes have been deeply implicated in sustaining American military power in the region. US installations in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE and elsewhere have long served as the infrastructure through which Washington projects force across the Middle East. These bases are now the lifelines for the US-Israeli war on Iran.

This is why the constant demand that Arab regimes “develop” a stronger position on Palestine is ultimately misleading. Their position has already been developed. In many cases, it has taken the form of normalization, security coordination, military hosting, logistical facilitation, and political adaptation to US priorities. The action has already been taken. It is simply not taken in favor of Palestine.

And yet, despite this reality, the question continues to resurface. Why does it persist?

Part of the answer lies in the enduring belief that Arab and Muslim solidarity with Palestine is both historically logical and politically defensible.

Another lies in the fact that Israel’s ambitions do not stop at Palestine. Israeli leaders and institutions repeatedly articulate visions that implicate the entire region, whether through permanent military superiority, fragmentation of neighboring states, or the normalization of endless war.

These realities make the question emotionally and strategically compelling—even if it is ultimately misplaced when directed at regimes rather than peoples.

There is also a deeper reason: the historic failure of the West. Western governments are structurally biased toward Israel, and many intellectuals, activists, and ordinary people have concluded—reasonably enough—that if justice will not come from Washington, London, Berlin, or Paris, then surely it must come from the Arab and Muslim worlds. The instinct is understandable. But it confuses publics with regimes.

That misplaced expectation makes the current war on Iran all the more consequential.

The war on Iran may indeed become a wake-up call. As the joint US-Israeli assault on Tehran is faltering, new realizations may be emerging in Arab capitals that neither Washington nor Israel can ultimately guarantee regime survival or regional stability.

At the level of ordinary people, the war has also generated a familiar sense of pride in resistance, not unlike what many felt during the steadfastness of Gaza and Lebanon. That may yet produce new conversations, perhaps even a new collective political imagination.

Until then, we would do better to understand Arab regimes according to their actual priorities, not our expectations. They are not “betraying” Palestine in the emotional sense, because Palestinian freedom, the defeat of Zionism, and the dismantling of imperial domination were never central to their governing agenda in the first place.

To the contrary, their overriding priority is the preservation of the regional status quo, whatever the human cost. And if maintaining that order requires the slow destruction of Palestine, many of them have already demonstrated that they are willing to pay that price.

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