On 22 March 1945, the Arab League was founded in Cairo by seven Arab states in the wake of a resurgence of Arab nationalism as a political ideology that asserts that the Arabs constitute a single nation. It was the dawn of what is now the Arab regional order anchored around pan-Arabism and connectivity.
More importantly, the organisation was also established in response to the threat posed by attempts to create a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world and to promote the Palestinian cause in the resulting conflict.
Today, the order that was in place at the time of the founding of the League is in decline, perhaps terminally, and it needs recasting in the shape of a new Middle East, one which offers a grim reminder of how flawed the previous order was over the last 80 years as the region was racked by wars, turmoil, destruction, and displacement.
Moreover, the Arabs have remained deeply disunited, and eight decades after the League’s founding their hopes of helping the Palestinians establish an independent and sovereign state have been dashed after repeated losses in several wars with Israel.
The Arab-Israeli conflict has proved especially devastating, causing the Arab world to be an epicentre of geopolitical tensions and upheaval and setting back the region’s socioeconomic indicators to poorer levels.
Though some of the Arab oil producers retain the rank of wealthy countries with financial firepower based on rising growth and income, the Arab region as a whole remains economically underdeveloped and fragile.
Though an agreement on Arab Economic Unity was signed in 1957, two phenomena are clearly evident in the Arab world’s economic order today: the lack of an innovative and competitive model of economic integration and exceptionally high levels of economic inequality compared to other regions in the world.
In a report last year, the Malcolm H Kerr Carnegie Middle East Centre reported that exceptionally high socioeconomic inequalities in the Arab world will have profound consequences for economic growth, social cohesion, and political stability in the region.
In terms of its aims and values, the Arab League has also failed to achieve the goals of its founding treaty in navigating internecine rivalries and disputes, boosting relations, and enhancing collective cooperation in areas of pan-Arab interest.
Over the eight decades of the League’s history, the Arab world has encountered major challenges and enormous risks that have left the region unstable and fragmented and facing dynamics of chaos and uncertainty that continue to threaten its ongoing multiple conflicts.
The problems of the Arab world today, which relate to its place in the world and its historical influence, are still the same as those that emerged in the wake of the creation of the Arab League and are centred around its inability to be a valuable forum and tool for advancing Arab interests on the international stage.
When the League was founded, consolidating the independence of the founding members – Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen – and of those that would soon join it was identified as giving the Arabs the means to ensure their unity and their rightful place in the world and in history.
But beyond rousing rhetoric from the Arab governments, this new “House of the Arabs” has not been able to create a collective Arab platform that can stand up for itself and for what many Arabs had hoped it would lay the foundations for – a strong and effective organisation in the post-colonial era that had seen the region divided into separate entities.
Many League integration endeavours were doomed to fail because they were created in the service of unrealistic objectives. Sometimes Arab governments had a poor understanding of what they were getting into, leading them to broadcast grandiose and unfulfillable goals.
With regard to its structure and effectiveness, the Arab League has demonstrated weaknesses and inefficiency largely because of political divisions and rivalry and competition in key areas such as foreign policy and defence.
A major constraint on the work of the League lies in its institutional setup. Its bureaucrats are considered to be employees who do not initiate plans or make decisions. It also lacks effective means to make member states comply with its resolutions.
The League’s effectiveness and viability have been further hampered by its structure as a voluntary association of states, with members refusing to sacrifice any of their sovereignty in favour of closer political and economic integration.
Indeed, a heterogeneity of views among the Arab countries on the emerging challenges facing the region has remained the characteristic of badly executed joint Arab actions.
Worse still, the Arab states and societies have fallen into traps of realignment and divisions on political and cultural or even sectarian lines. Islamic extremism and sometimes fundamentalism have posed dangers and have supplied ideas to jihadist militias that have carried out terrorist acts across the region.
Eight decades after the creation of the pan-Arab organisation, some 456 million Arabs remain trapped in stagnant political systems, poor governance, repression, or cycles of strife that rule out the possibility of progress.
The Arab world today is at a dangerous crossroads as a result. Several Arab countries are engulfed in armed conflicts, and political turmoil can be found across the region, stretching from Iraq in the Arab Gulf and Lebanon and Syria on the Mediterranean in the east to Libya and Sudan in Africa in the West.
Topping the League’s setbacks has been its floundering over the past eight decades to help the Palestinians in their fight for survival as a people. It has failed to use its member states’ economic, political, diplomatic, and moral resources to make the international community pressure Israel to accept an honourable and just resolution to the conflict.
Israel has ended up controlling virtually the whole of Palestine after four major wars with the Arabs, leaving generations of Palestinians stateless inside their historic homeland and millions of others homeless around the world.
Even after signing peace and normalisation agreements with several Arab countries, Israel has remained adamant about refusing a two-state solution that would ensure Palestinian statehood and which the Arabs have offered to end the conflict.
The consequences of such normalisation with Israel have been dramatic in splintering the region and risking deepening the divisions among the Arabs over the future of their region. By accommodating Israel in a divided and polarised Arab world, the rapprochements have shifted its old security order, bringing its already unstable paradigm into further question.
Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and its incursions into Lebanon and Syria will certainly shape the future of the Middle East, obliging the Arabs to ready themselves for a new narrative for the conflict and Israel’s dreams of bringing about a new regional order in the Middle East under its leadership.
With US President Donald Trump giving the green light for further ethnic cleansing, Israel’s renewed attack on Gaza threatens to become an all-out effort to empty the enclave of Palestinians by offering them “voluntary emigration,” the name Israel is giving to their expulsion.
Egypt’s plan for governing and rebuilding Gaza to thwart US-backed Israeli endeavours to relocate the Palestinians remains toothless because of a lack of concrete backing from key regional powerhouses, despite its endorsement by an Arab League summit earlier in March.
While it has received support from the European Union, some Arabs are reportedly lobbying the Trump administration to reject the plan.
The Arab world should begin to prepare itself for the geopolitical maze it will find itself lured into the day after the Gaza war ends. The war has poured high-octane accelerant onto the region, and the consequences of this will be dire for its already fragile order.
Amid Israel’s threats to liquidate the Palestinian cause and the geopolitical repercussions of a second Nakba, or catastrophic Palestinian displacement, the Arabs risk seeing not only their total surrender to Israel, but also the end of Arab world as we know it.
It must be accepted that the Arab world is currently so weak and fragmented that it cannot act on the regional stage to resist Israel’s attempts to reinforce its military superiority and impose its hegemony on the region.
Today, the Arab League is out of touch, and its further decay is a realistic prediction. Its foundations are crumbling, while non-Arab centrifugal forces in the Middle East are exacerbating the disintegration of a united Arab world.
With the region aflame, the League may soon fall into total inaction, disintegrating into irrelevance. This development will give rise to further chaos and conflicts, further exacerbating the Arab dilemma of disunity, uncertainty, and disarray.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 27 March, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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