Every major Arab country is now being kept busy in its immediate neighborhood. Egypt is busy with Sudan and Libya, Syria is busy with Lebanon, Saudi Arabia is busy with Bahrain, and Morocco is busy with the Western Sahara. These major countries were supposed to be leading the work of the Arabs and setting down a comprehensive political and economic strategy – a strategy which all their peoples would participate in implementing, so that it does not remain a matter of mere slogans, reminiscent of the slogan of freeing Palestine. What is meant by the people's participation is their involvement in an economic cycle and in ambitious future plans, so that they may have a single political purpose – that of preserving such plans and the regimes that established them. At the military level, the Joint Arab Defense Treaty was never implemented at any time. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the Lebanese, the Palestinian Resistance and the Syrians were left to fight alone. And in 2006, the Lebanese, or a group of them, were left to fight alone – such that when the war ended, disputes erupted between Lebanese, and between Arabs, over who had “dragged” whom into a war that “could have been averted”. Political disputes turned into sectarian and confessional disputes, and thus governments and political parties returned to ancient history and old disputes, interpreting history with epistemological tools that were not suitable in their day, and are certainly not suitable in ours. Such a reality, which puts pressure on everyone, has provided the opportunity for all countries, great or small, to interfere in Arab affairs, sometimes under the pretext of supporting the people in confronting authorities that belong in medieval times, and other times under that of supporting authorities in confronting their peoples, who are backward and do not accept democracy. In other words, racism finds in the state of affairs of the Arabs the opportunity to impose its policies in their most hideous forms (echoes of the theories of Bernard Lewis and Huntington can still be heard in what is being written by intellectuals, Arab or non-Arab). Yet neither racism nor the interpretation of history on historical and sectarian bases can explain what has been happening in terms of popular uprisings, from the Ocean to the Gulf. Proof of this is that the role of religious parties in those uprisings has been extremely marginal. Moreover, those engaged in the uprisings have raised modern slogans and insisted on having them included in constitutional texts. Further proof is their refusal to receive US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, based on the fact that the United States had partnered with the falling regimes in oppressing their peoples, robbing their wealth and making use of those regimes to serve its plans for a new world order and a new Middle East, in addition to waging successive wars alongside Israel, or on its behalf, and insisting on supporting Israel's religious discrimination – in other words, because it has been, with its allies, one of the main reasons for the spread of chaos and backwardness and for the immortalization of regimes. The uprisings are shaping what the Arabs have long aspired for, so that they may live in the present after having been forced to live in the miserable past, considered to be the basis of their society and the driving force of their history.
