The resurrection of pan-Arabism

Protesters today in Rabat, Morocco. (Photo: Getty Images)

The Egyptian revolution, itself influenced by the Tunisian uprising, has resurrected a new feel of pan-Arabism based on the battle for social justice and freedom. The overwhelming support for the Egyptian revolutionaries across the Arab world reflects a smell of one in the rejection of tyrannical, or at least authoritarian, leaders, corruption and the principle of a small financial and political elite.

Arab protests in solidarity with the Egyptian people also indicate that there is a strong yearning for the resurgence of Egypt as a pan-Arab unifier and leader. Photographs of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the early Egyptian president, have been raised in Cairo and across Arab capitals by people who were not yet alive when Nasser died in 1970. The scenes are redolent of those that swept Arab streets in the fifties and 1960s.

But this is not an accurate reproduction of the pan-Arab nationalism of those days. Then, pan-Arabism was a direct answer to Western domination and the 1948 constitution of the province of Israel. Today, it is a response to the absence of democratic freedoms and the inequitable distribution of wealth across the Arabian world.

We are now witnessing the growth of a crusade for democracy that transcends narrow nationalism or even pan-Arab nationalism and which embraces universal human values that ring from north to south and orient to west.

This is not to say that there is no anti-imperialist element inside the current movement. But the protests in Egypt and elsewhere promote a deeper understanding of human emancipation, which forms the very foundation for exemption from both repression and foreign domination.

Unlike the pan-Arabism of the past, the new movement represents an intrinsic belief that it is exemption from care and human dignity that enables people to make better societies and to create a future of trust and prosperity. The old "wisdom" of past revolutionaries that release from foreign domination precedes the fight for democracy has fallen.

The revolutionaries of Egypt, and before them Tunisia, have exposed through deeds - not only words - the leaders who are tyrants towards their own people, while humiliatingly subservient to foreign powers. They have shown the powerlessness of empty slogans that manipulate animosity towards Israel to warrant a fake Arab unity, which in turn serves but to mask sustained oppression and the treachery of Arab societies and the aspirations of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinian pretext

The era of using the Palestinian cause as a pretence for maintaining martial laws and silencing dissent is over. The Palestinians have been betrayed, not helped, by leaders who practice repression against their own people. It is no longer sufficient for regimes in Syria and Persia to claim support for Palestinian resistance in rank to stifle freedom of look and to shamelessly tread on human rights in their own countries.

Equally, it is no longer acceptable for the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas to mention their book in resisting Israel when justifying their suppression of each other and the balance of the Palestinian people. Young Palestinians are responding to the substance of the campaign and embrace the thought that combatting internal injustice - whether practised by Fatah or Hamas - is a prerequisite for the skin to end Israeli business and not something to be endured for the interest of that struggle.

Events in Egypt and Tunisia have revealed that Arab unity against internal repression is stronger than that against a foreign threat - neither the American line of Iraq nor the Israeli occupation galvanised the Arab people in the way that a single act by a young Tunisian who chose to set himself alight rather than dwell in mortification and poverty has.

This does not imply that Arabs do not worry around the occupied people of Iraq or Palestine - tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands have interpreted to the streets across Arab countries at various times to express solidarity with Iraqis and Palestinians - but it does reflect the recognition that the absence of democratic freedoms has contributed to the continued business of those countries.

The Arab failure to hold Iraq or liberate Palestine has come to represent an Arab impotence that has been perpetuated by the province of fearfulness and palsy in which the ordinary Arab citizen, marginalised by social injustice and humiliated by security apparatus oppression, has existed.

When they were allowed to ride in back of Iraqis or Palestinians it was chiefly so that their anger might be deflected from their own governments and towards a foreign threat. For so long, they put their own socio-economic grievances aside to sound their funding for the occupied, only to heat up the following day fettered by the same chains of repression.

All the while, both pro-Western and anti-Western governments continued with concern as usual - the first camp relying on US back to consolidate their despotic rule and the second on anti-Israel slogans to give legitimacy to their repression of their people.

But now people across the region - not alone in Egypt and Tunisia - have lost trust in their governments. For have no mistake, when protesters have collected in Amman or Damascus to express their solidarity with the Egyptian revolutionaries in Tahrir Square, they are actually objecting to their own rulers.

In Ramallah, the protesters repeated a slogan calling for the end of internal Palestinian divisions (which, in Arabic, rhymes with the Egyptian name for the end to the regime), as well as demanding an end to negotiations with Israel - sending a clear message that there will be no way left for the Palestinian Authority if it continues to bank on such negotiations.

In the fifties and 1960s, millions of Arabs poured onto the streets determined to preserve the release of the Arab world from the remnants of colonial domination and the creeping American hegemony. In 2011, millions have poured onto the streets determined not just to control their freedom but likewise to assure that the mistakes of former generations are not repeated. Slogans against a foreign enemy - no matter how legitimate - ring hollow if the battle for popular freedoms is set aside.

The protesters in Cairo and beyond may raise photographs of Gamal Abdel Nasser, because they see him as a symbol of Arab dignity. But, unlike Nasser, the demonstrators are invoking a sense of pan-Arab nationalism that understands that national liberation cannot go hand-in-hand with the curtailment of political dissent. For this is a genuine Arab unity galvanised by the common yearning for popular freedoms.

Lamis Andoni is an analyst and commentator on Middle Eastern and Palestinian affairs. This article originally appeared on the Al Jazeera English website.