will continue to bedevil the region and those with interests in it, to say nothing of the problems of those suffering from it.
Postscript (3/16/26)
Donald Trump did not follow the recommendation made in my article published five years ago to address the Arab dignity deficit by upgrading the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s capacities and commitments to improving education in the Arab world. Indeed, he abolished the organization and slashed the foreign assistance budget. The life prospects for the majority of Arab students have continued to deteriorate during that five years, causing about half of them in all except the wealthy oil and gas exporting countries of the Gulf to express a desire to migrate.
Disdain for the welfare and futures of young Arabs by their own governments and by countries of the Global North has been further intensified during that five-year period as a result of spreading conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. Israel’s war on Gaza since October 2023 that has caused more than 70,000 Palestinian deaths, has stimulated a wave of despair and helplessness among young Arabs. Their governments have done little if anything to aid Palestinians to say nothing of failing to pressure Israel to cease its attacks. What those governments have done is to increase repression of their youthful populations lest they protest, the target of which could easily shift from Israel’s war on Gaza to their own governments’ virtual war on themselves. For the most part Arab youth has succumbed to this increased, politically numbing pressure, thereby further eroding their personal dignity already suffering from diminished life prospects.
The Sudanese Civil War and conflict in Yemen have created in those two countries the world’s most profound, ongoing humanitarian disasters. Far from stepping in to separate the warring parties, the region’s governments and global powers have basically joined the frays by backing preferred proxies. Emboldened by its success in destroying Gaza and lack of resistance to its creeping annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel has lashed out militarily not only at Yemen, but also at Syria and Lebanon, depopulating bordering regions in both. In these cases, as in Gaza, Arab governments and global powers have stood idly by.
The one political hope that young Arabs had from the 1970s to about 2015 was that some version of political Islam would be sufficiently powerful and cohesive to stand up to authoritarian Arab governments and push back against external interventions. That hope died in the wake of the 2013 coup that overthrew Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government. No political movement has emerged it its wake, despite continuing decline in the life prospects of Arab youths, those most likely to flock to any movement that promised liberation from their despair.
And now Israel has joined the US in attacking Iran. While many if not most Arabs believe the regime of the mullahs had it coming, the message to Arab citizens is again one of marginalization. Their own governments tolerated the repression and aggression of the Tehran regime. These governments were disinterested in standing up for Iranian youths killed in their thousands by the mullah regime, and fearful of Iran’s military reach, directly or through proxies. So that left it to Israel and the US to address the host of problems caused by Iran’s theocracy. Although that military intervention may in theory be acceptable and even necessary in the minds of Arab youths, it further accentuates their own helplessness and irrelevance to events in their backyards.
In sum, the last five years has if anything intensified the difficulties for Arabs and especially Arab youths, to forge meaningful, rewarding lives economically, socially and politically, which are prerequisites for human dignity. Basically powerless to shape their own lives, it is not surprising that despair rather than dignity is their fate.
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