What a moronic statement.
1. If there were liberal democracies in the Arab world, *they* would not make peace with Israel, because they would reflect the will of their public, and over 80% of the Arab public reject Israel
2. Israel is a counter-revolutionary force backing dictatorships and preventing democratization. It backs coups and sells cyberweapons to dictators to target pro-democracy activists. It knows well that democratization in the Arab region is a threat.
Do these people believe their own lies?
The statement may sound benign but it's really just racism. "Oh we wish there were Arab democracies to make peace with, but there's only dictatorships, so we're kinda stuck in this neighborhood". When in fact they're actively backing the dictatorships.

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More from @iyad_elbaghdadi

Feb 2
Yesterday, Amnesty released a report identifying Israel as sustaining an apartheid regime under international law. Israel was pissed, but also, there were Palestinians who were unimpressed. A thread about the strategic significance of the report for the Palestinian cause:
In straightforward terms: Israel can do whatever the fuck it wants to us because it's more powerful than us. It's more powerful than us because it has the explicit or tacit support of a broad segment of the "international community", and benefits from the existing world order.
As someone recently said, "The reason we cannot defeat Israel is that we are not *only* fighting Israel". We are fighting an entire world order. Nearly every global system of oppression intersects upon us. I tweeted about this previously here:
Read 16 tweets
Feb 1
It's because they're freaking the fuck out. When it's HRW *and* Amnesty agreeing that this is apartheid, it's a watershed moment for the normalization of the apartheid framing across the entire global human rights community. This *is* indeed big.
From here on, it's Israel vs the global human rights community. They can't even use their normal whataboutism to attack Amnesty - "hey why don't you call out human rights violations in Mozambique!" - because Amnesty is *global*.
And so they'll go to their usual offence/defence - accusing everyone and everything of antisemitism. That strategy may work against individuals or small teams. But not against *the global human rights community*.
Read 6 tweets
Jan 31
10 rules if you want to stay safe as an outspoken Arab:
1. You can't be an independent intellectual in the Arab world. You must stop being independent, or stop being intellectual, or stop being in the Arab world. Maybe "stop" is too harsh, but you have to compromise, or you'll be unsafe.
2. As the world order shifts, Arab regimes feel more threatened, and as they feel more threatened, they become more repressive. The same world order changes make it very difficult to campaign for the release of individual prisoners. Lesson: Avoid going to prison.
Read 14 tweets
Jan 28
According to this, MBS called Netanyahu in Sept 2020 asking to renew the license for Pegasus, which had been withheld by the Israeli defense department. Netanyahu agreed, on condition that Saudi Arabia will open its skies to Israeli flights.
news.walla.co.il/item/3485535
A month later, this happened. An Israeli commercial airliner landed publicly in Saudi Arabia for the first time. jpost.com/middle-east/fi…
So many idiots at the time hailed this as "progress towards peace". In fact what happened was that a corrupt politician facing indictment offered a bloodthirsty tyrant cyber weapons in return for a public gesture that he can sell as "diplomatic victory" to his electorate.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 26
I don't think we've fully grappled with the insidious and deeply destructive impact the last 7 years have had on the social fabric of Gulf countries. The rise of hyper-nationalism (and of Mohammad bin Salman) has had traumatic and mostly* invisible effects
I say "mostly invisible" knowing full well just how traumatic the visible effects have been - the treatment of activists, dissidents, and a whole lot of others in these countries, or the mass traumatization of Yemen. Yet, yes, I think the invisible is larger than the visible
Some analysts think the rise of Mohammad bin Salman caused this bent; I actually think it was correlation and not causation. Mohammad bin Salman was meant to be a model, and was a symptom/external effect of a deeper cause/agency that is yet to be fully exposed.
Read 8 tweets
Jan 24
NEW: We've launched a new podcast! It's called "Intergalactic Tarboush" (@tarboush_pod), will be short format (20 mins), and will run weekly. Links to the first two episodes below, but first, some background
Our flagship podcast, the Arab Tyrant Manual (@ArabTyrantMan) was launched in 2017 and came out of hiatus this month. It's a serious, long-format, deep-dive political podcast. We thought we also needed a faster paced, shorter, more eclectic podcast, hence @tarboush_pod
Intergalactic Tarboush is about... eclectic conversations between political activists from MENA. We talk about anything and everything (from disinformation to evolution to sports), but we're coming from a very specific background. Political activists from the MENA.
Read 7 tweets

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