Geneive Abdo is a Middle East expert in Washington, D.C. She is the author of four books on Islam and the region. Her forthcoming book, The Other Muslims, which is on Arab Shia communities, will be published in 2025. Abdo has worked at several think tanks, including the Brookings Institution and the Wilson Center. She is the recipient of many awards, including the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim award, for her scholarship. Diwan interviewed Abdo in late October to get her perspective on the ongoing conflict in Gaza, particularly how the war, and the narratives surrounding it, are affecting societies in the West, as well as political outcomes there.
Michael Young: The conflict in Gaza has been, above all, a conflict over narratives: an Israeli narrative focused on the victims of October 7 and a Palestinian narrative focused on the context that made October 7 possible. If you needed to draw major lessons from this situation, what would they be?
Geneive Abdo: The first lesson for the United States, Israel, and the Gulf states—Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), in particular—is that spending years pursuing a strategy of trying to maneuver around the issue of Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was neither realistic nor sustainable. Israeli officials and experts have stated openly over the last month that the strategy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians was to make irrelevant the Palestinian national movement’s efforts to secure a homeland. Israel has done so by normalizing relations with Bahrain and the UAE, and was hoping to do so with Saudi Arabia. These three states were complicit in this strategy, even though extensive polling over the years showed that Arab public opinion was against normalization. Previous U.S. administrations before that of President Joseph Biden did make some attempts at a so-called “peace process,” but these efforts were non-starters because the Palestinians were sometimes not at the table and the proposals favored Israel’s interests.
The second lesson, which is crucially important in determining what will happen after Israel’s bombs stop falling on Gaza, is that Hamas cannot be defeated. Any future solution to the conflict, or negotiations, will have to include Hamas because it is a social and ideological movement anchored deep in the fabric of Palestinian society. Even if Israel defeats Hamas militarily as Netanyahu has promised (although there is a big question mark over this issue), Hamas’s religious practices and social support from Palestinian society will continue. You cannot separate Hamas as a movement from the Palestinian people. Khalil Shikaki, a professor in Ramallah who has conducted polling of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza for over 30 years, just released a poll that confirms how Hamas’s hold over Palestinians has been reinforced.
Biden’s misguided and ill-informed statements of support for Israel to “destroy” Hamas, and those of some high-level officials in his administration, have put on full display U.S. ignorance of Islamist movements. This has created policies in Washington over the past 30 years that were never successful in the Middle East. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, in his favoring of Israel, will go down in American history as one of the most biased diplomats to serve in an administration.
The third lesson is that Arab public opinion matters. Since the Arab uprisings more than a decade ago, the United States has tried to forget about Israel’s occupation. The governments of the Gulf states, in turn, ignored the views among their own publics in order to reap rewards from Israel and Washington. However, the so-called Arab street never forgot about the Palestinians. This has been evident over the last month, as tens of thousands of Arabs have demonstrated in support of the Palestinians, forcing their regimes to change direction. Now, Arab regimes and their publics are on the same page for the first time in many years. Jordan, a country with a decades-long peace agreement with Israel, has even withdrawn its ambassador from Israel.
Unlike the Arab states, however, Biden has yet to learn this lesson. Since October 7, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans have protested in major cities against the president and his support for Israel. Yet U.S. policy has remained virtually the same. Arab and Muslim outrage will likely cost Biden the 2024 presidential election. Arabs and Muslims, some who have family members living in Gaza and the West Bank, are vowing not to vote next year. It will be difficult for Biden to win states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania without their votes.
And finally, the fourth lesson is that the world is no longer dominated by the United States, Europe, and Israel. The United States has marginalized itself by being in the small minority of countries voting against a ceasefire at the United Nations General Assembly (one among the fourteen countries voting against, while 120 countries voted in favor), undermining the moral high ground it has taken on other issues.
Washington’s strong support for Ukraine was a signal to China to leave Taiwan alone. Any aggression directed at the island would have been met with similar Western support. But the lack of support for Gaza hints that Western backing might be conditional on whether a population is of a certain color. If the West remains unmoved by thousands of “brown” children being killed, will they really move to save “yellow” children? Beijing is probably pondering that question.
More generally, the United States has positioned itself along old, “colonial,” Western lines. For many countries, it confirms that Washington is not motivated by universal values but is just another imperial power. Many countries do not see any difference between an imperial Russia and an imperial United States. It is not about good and evil, which is why these countries will give their support in different situations according to their own national interests.
MY: You were traveling in the period after the Gaza conflict began. What differences did you see in the way the conflict was covered in Europe when compared to how it was covered in the United States? What did this tell you?
GA: Watching mainstream European news compared with mainstream American media is watching two different wars. As a former journalist and Middle East correspondent for 25 years, I can say that the people in American media—particularly CNN and MSNBC, and even the New York Times—do not seem to follow the same ethical standards that existed when I was a journalist. Often, the Israeli and U.S. government position is featured, and the number of commentators who are Jewish or Israeli far exceeds the few Palestinians who are interviewed. Based on such coverage, I wonder if Palestinian lives do not matter because Hamas killed over 1,300 Israelis. For such media outlets, 10,000 Palestinian lives appear not to equal one Israeli life. Perhaps if these journalists had access to Gaza, the coverage would be more balanced.
More specifically, there is no historical context or memory in the American media’s coverage of the war. For them, the war began on October 7, when Hamas carried out the attacks that sparked an Israeli response. Nearly every newscaster begins with, “When the war began on October 7 with Hamas’s brutal attack…” But what about the last five decades of Israeli persecution of the Palestinians? What about cause and effect?
Until a few days ago, there was no Arab voice on American mainstream television. Stations interviewed only Israelis. By contrast, on the BBC, Sky News, French television, and Swiss television (I was in Geneva during the second week of the war), Arab voices were given equal time with Israeli and Jewish voices.
MY: One thing that commentators have noticed is that a rift appears to be visible between Western elites and their societies over the Gaza war. It’s not black or white, as many people in the West agree with their leaders, but more generally what does it mean that these societies are being torn apart by a conflict in the Middle East?
GA: This is an important development. The Europeans’ sympathy for the Palestinians and their opposition to the Israeli occupation is reflected in balanced media coverage, even as leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak give full support to Israel. In the case of the United Kingdom, the British public has staged several large demonstrations in support of the Palestinians and Sunak is under pressure from the public as well as from parliamentarians to change his policy.
In Germany, which has a longstanding guilt complex with regard to Israel due to the Holocaust, it used to be taboo to publicly oppose Israel, Israelis, or Jews in general. Now, there is a wave of anti-Semitism sweeping Germany and public protests in support of the Palestinians, which the German government has now banned.
MY: You mentioned earlier the impact that the conflict in Gaza might have on the U.S. presidential election next year. What makes you say this, and what are the consequences that you foresee?
GA: Yes, at this moment, the degree of Arab and Muslim anger and opposition to Biden will have an impact on his chances of reelection, as I stated earlier. This is supported by recent polling data published by the Arab America Institute, which found that Arab American support for Biden had dipped from 59 to 17 percent since 2020. Biden’s staunch support for Israel has unleashed a culture war—one that is perhaps even more dangerous than the culture war that former president Donald Trump launched. The conflict is playing out on college campuses, in particular, where Jewish students are being threatened with death. In Florida, Jewish housewives are learning to use guns, which they say are necessary to protect themselves and their families. Attacks against Muslims and Arabs are also on the rise across the United States. The animosity between these two populations, which was expressed in whispers, is now fully exposed.
As someone involved in the Arab American community, I think this war will empower Arab Americans in ways we have not seen before. There has always been a reluctance to speak out against a sitting U.S president, whomever he might be. But no longer. There are protests daily in Washington against Israel and in support of the Palestinians, and these protests are likely to continue as the war unfolds. The younger Arab and Muslim generation is professionally accomplished now and less concerned than their parents with integration. They have power in their jobs and on college campuses. However, the backlash has already begun. Jewish groups and Jewish corporate executives have issued blacklists of Arabs and Muslims whom they say should either be fired from their current jobs for criticizing Israel or not be offered jobs in the future. This discrimination has been widely reported in the media. In the past, pro-Palestinian university professors were the victims of such discrimination, but now there is a much broader national campaign. Jewish leaders and businessmen are also threatening to withdraw funding from universities if the actions they demand are not taken on college campuses.
MY: In the end, do you think that the number of Palestinian victims of the Gaza war, along with Israel’s poorly concealed desire to engage in the forcible deportation of the Palestinian population of the territory—in other words ethnic cleansing—will turn opinion decisively against Israel? Might this moment be a turning point in how Israel is perceived?
GA: I truly hope so. There is no justification for killing tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, unless the objective is to wipe out the population or forcibly displace the Palestinians to another Arab country. Israel has admitted that it has no definitive information about where Hamas commanders are located—let alone about the hostages they are trying to free. So, the “strategy” is the wanton bombing of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. I am not sure Israel’s standing among governments will change fundamentally, but I think societal opinion in the West will change, making it much harder for Jewish people to live happy and fulfilling lives in the West.
Having said this, we should look at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s rehabilitation as a cautious warning. It took nearly a decade, but he has been welcomed back into the arms of the UAE and other Arab states, as well as China. This is after massacring over 300,000 Syrians during the civil war.
