“Where are the Arabs?” w/ Nihal El Aasar

As Israel's genocide in Gaza escalated in the autumn of last year,
there was much speculation as to whether we would see mass
uprisings in the Arab States of the region. Yet although there have
been major Palestine protests in the region, and other acts of
solidarity, we have not seen the kinds of uprisings that many hoped
for. Nihal El Aasar takes up this question and argues that
repression and the threat of violence alone cannot be the sole
explanation for the relative lack of public tumult. In our
conversation we talked about the Arab Spring, the kind of political
subject it brought into being, and the profound effects of the
counterrevolution that destroyed the hopes that so many had
invested in the Arab Spring. We also talked about how the
demoralisation of the Arab publics of the region is critical to the
regime of capital accumulation in the Middle East - and Israel's
central role in that process.