In Egyptian popular literature, people and societies often arrive at crossroads where they must choose between three paths. One is the “Road to Safety” where reason and wisdom prevail. The second is the “Road of Regret,” which leads to that slippery path of ideas and ideologies that cloud clearsighted vision and lead to danger. The third is the road of no return, the road where all hope is lost. It’s like quicksand: the more those stuck in it struggle to pull themselves out, the deeper it sucks them in, until it has totally smothered them.
Several Arab countries have taken that treacherous path. Many of those states came into being in the 20th century. Like many other colonised countries, whether by Western colonial powers or the Ottoman state, they seized on the two world wars and the collapse of global empires to achieve independence and establish modern Arab states. Unfortunately, independence and statehood were not enough to preserve that achievement. Some countries, like Lebanon, erupted in Civil War. Others found themselves caught between two grim options: life under an iron grip or disintegration into warring factions, sects, and regions. “National identity” was fragile at best; identity often looked beyond territorial borders to a broader Arab-national or religious identity.
The “Arab Spring” countries faced all three choices: safety, regret, and no return. A decade and a half later, the fate of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya remains in the balance, hovering between remorse due to disintegration into rival armed militias in a country where the state no longer exercises sovereignty over its territory and the safe road to recovery from that chaos. Iraq now appears to be staying the course on the latter road, drawing on its civilisational heritage, oil wealth, and the battle fatigue felt by all its factions and sects.
The states that were spared from crucibles of “Spring” bear testimony to the wisdom of the Gulf leaders and the monarchies, in general, including Jordan and Morocco. Egypt, for its part, overcame Muslim Brotherhood rule thanks to the long-standing institutions of the state and two centuries of modernisation. Algeria had already sacrificed more than enough, with its million-and-a-half martyrs, to ensure the survival of the Algerian national bond.
The one case that seems to defy all classification is the Palestinian case. It took part in the Great Arab Revolt, which ended with the Sykes Picot partition – a colonialist pact on the one hand and the seed of the national states on the other. These new entities were detached not only from the Ottoman Empire but also from the Arab national projects of the day in Greater Syria or the Fertile Crescent. Every state in the Arab Levant was steered through the mandate and protectorate periods by national leaderships that combined popular resistance with negotiations and state-building up to the eve of independence. These leaderships managed to reach internal arrangements that allowed them to establish territorial states with established institutions and international recognition.
Only the Palestinian political elite failed – continually, from its birth after World War I to the present. Palestine’s misfortune was that its national movement was born almost simultaneously with the Zionist national movement, which aimed to gather Jews from around the world into the land of Palestine. European anti-Semitism was driven by latent desires within European states to be rid of the Jews – whether by expelling them (eventually to Palestine), or by mass killing through pogroms and, ultimately, the Holocaust.
The problem of the Palestinian national elite was no longer with Britain, the mandatory power, but with the Zionist movement – despite the opportunity presented by the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, which included a vision for coexistence.
Over the course of a century since then, the Palestinian national movement moved from failure to failure. The first principal cause of this was an enduring internal split, whether between influential political families (the Husseinis and the Nashashibis), between ideological factions (pan-Arabism, Marxism, Palestinian nationalism in the 20th century and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority and Hamas and its jihadist allies in this century), or geographically between Gaza and the West Bank.
The second source of failure was the incessant rhetorical posturing and one-upmanship that ignored local, regional and global power dynamics. This led the Palestinian movement to squander every opportunity presented to it: the 1937 Peel Commission proposal after the Palestinian Revolt, the 1947 Partition Plan, the establishment of the PLO in 1965, the opportunity after the October War in 1973, the PLO’s entry into the UN as an observer, and, most significantly, the 1993 Oslo Accords, which granted Palestinians the first ever national authority on Palestinian soil.
Internal division set in again after the establishment of the PA. Hamas launched suicide operations deep inside Israel, driving the first nail into the coffin of the project of an independent Palestinian state. It drove in the second nail by splitting Gaza from the West Bank. Then, on 7 October 2023, Hamas launched a war that shifted the cause from preventing Israel from seizing Palestinian land to resisting the process of mass forced displacement of Palestinians.
And so the Palestinians entered the road from which there is no return.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 17 July, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: