Hussain Abdul-Hussain

It used to be Palestine only, conveniently giving Arab autocrats the excuse to make everyone shut up and accept tyranny. But the Arab Spring has changed it all. Now every Arab country has its issues, its dead, its arrested, its dictators to topple and its future to think of. Finally Arabs have come to realize that their different problems are equally important. Claiming that Palestine trumps all other Arab causes does not cut it anymore.
 
This new Arab thinking was not born overnight. In the lead-up to the US war in Iraq, the Arabs were still thinking in terms of Arab countries versus imperialism. Only those Iraqis who had tasted the wrath of Saddam Hussein found themselves in a bind. The only force willing to rid them of their tyrant was the same power that they were raised to hate: The United States of America.
 
But America's liberation of Iraq did not buy it goodwill with the Arabs, who still measured Washington's benevolence with the yardstick of Palestine. As long as Washington granted Israel an unfair advantage over Palestinians and their territories, the Arabs were unwilling to see the good behind America freeing a whole people from one of history's most brutal dictators.
 
Contrary to almost everyone I knew in Beirut at the time, I was among those publically supportive of the US war in Iraq, believing that if given a chance, Iraqis might create the first Arab democracy.

The year 2005 partially vindicated my stance. After the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, an uprising broke out in Beirut with many "anti-imperialists" in Lebanon and Syria seeing that the problem was not with America, but with their own rulers and so-called resistance movements who hide their crimes behind the "Liberation of Palestine."

Samir Kassir, a Lebanese journalist, wrote that Palestine was a sick limb of the Arab body that had to be severed. A long-time supporter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and its leader Yasser Arafat, Kassir advocated on behalf of the not-very-popular two-state solution, which he believed would give the Arabs the chance to put the Palestinian problem behind them and focus on building democracies in their 21 other countries.

Kassir dubbed Lebanon's 2005 uprising against the Syrian regime the Beirut Spring, borrowing the name from the brief Damascus Spring of 2000. Against all predictions, Kassir wrote that the Syrians would rise and end the decades of tyranny by the Assad family. (Kassir’s forecast proved correct, even though his timing was wrong.) He was assassinated in June 2005 and a year later, Hezbollah provoked Israel into a devastating war that eroded the party's popularity in Lebanon, but boosted it across the Arab world, including in Syria.
 
In Washington last week, I had the privilege of meeting one of Syria's leading revolutionaries, Eiad Sharbaji, who had escaped the death squads of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad only weeks earlier. Sharbaji’s cousin Yehia was trapped by Assad's thugs and, along with activist Ghayyath Matter, died by torture and became one of the revolution's icons.
 
Sharbaji told me horror stories about how the regime’s thugs employ unimaginable brutality against their fellow citizens. Most importantly, he told me that until the outbreak of the revolution last March, he used to be a staunch supporter of Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian sponsors. "I believed all the foreign conspiracies that they told us about," he said.

Until recently, Sharbaji thought people like Kassir and me – who advocated an end to all kinds of tyranny and who supported democracy, freedom and human rights – were mostly "CIA and Mossad agents" and puppets on the payroll of Western and Arab Gulf governments. Now Sharbaji sees the world differently.
 
"When you see Assad’s brutality against his own people, and Hezbollah supporting it, you start wondering how such murderers can also be liberators of Palestine," he said. 

Further undermining the centrality of the Palestinian problem is that the number of Palestinian deaths at the hands of Israel pales next to of that of Arabs killed by their own dictators.
 
Consider, for instance, the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel since 1987 throughout two uprisings and several Israeli military campaigns: around 9,000. Assad has killed almost an equal number of his own only since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising less than a year ago.
 
Over the past year, Egyptians have been consumed by their revolution, the Syrians by their war of liberation, the Libyans by their government-building and the Yemenis by their post-dictator period. Meanwhile, the Lebanese have been hoping that the Arab Spring makes a show in their country. From time to time, these different Arabs show mutual solidarity with each other's causes. Palestine has lost its place at center stage.
 
The past decade has been a transformative one for many Arabs. While Palestine remains a problem, ending tyranny is the true liberation the Arabs are seeking.
 
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington Bureau Chief of the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai