The United States’ unwavering military and political support for Israel is now accepted as the key enabling factor in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

But the US is behind another critical enabling factor in the genocide: the total suppression of political expression in Arab states by authoritarian regimes.

Most readers will remember that brief period in the 2000s when the US purported to care about democracy in the Middle East. If you missed the War on Terror in the post-September 11 period, count your blessings. For the best part of a decade, the world was subjected to a full court marketing press from the Bush, Blair and Howard governments about the risk of Islamic terrorism, the existential danger posed by weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the value of democracy. We haven’t seen a co-ordinated marketing campaign like it since.

The latter two pillars of that three-pronged global marketing campaign were a total charade. There were no WMDs, and democracy promotion was simply a trojan horse for the invasion of Iraq. Democracy in Saudi Arabia? In Jordan? In Egypt? Quickly, someone change the subject. Defenders of the invasion will say that whatever the intent, at least Iraqis got their democracy. But 20 years and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi dead later, former Iraqi PM (2020-22) Mustafa Al-Kadhimi recently wrote that “democracy in Iraq is a sham, serving as a cover for widespread violations against Iraqis’ human rights and political freedoms”.

One of the upshots of the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, along with a sharp rise in anti-Americanism, was to give the word democracy a bad name in the region. You might have noticed, for example, that during the Arab Spring, the most popular chants and revolutionary songs didn’t include the word democracy (rendered in Arabic as democratiyah). They were chanting for freedom. For bread. For social justice. For the fall of the regime. For the leader to go away. The D word was conspicuously absent.

And so it was that in his 2009 “A New Beginning” speech delivered in Cairo, Barack Obama sought to reframe America’s relationship to the region while defending the principle of democracy. He acknowledged the “controversy” surrounding democracy promotion in Iraq, spoke of his “commitment” to “governments that reflect the will of the people”, and stressed that “no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other”.

It was pure US hypocrisy. What Obama didn’t mention in his speech, of course, was the fact that the imposition of one system of government by another nation had been US policy in the region for decades prior to the invasion of Iraq. It’s just that the system of government being imposed wasn’t democracy, it was military authoritarianism. But how?

It’s a well-known fact that after Israel, Egypt and Jordan have historically been the second and third largest recipients of US aid respectively. Egypt is a military dictatorship and receives US$1.3 billion in military aid annually. Jordan is a hereditary dictatorship and receives US$1.45 billion in US aid annually, a quarter of which is military aid. Saudi Arabia, a monarchist dictatorship, doesn’t need military aid; it has enough oil revenue to buy US arms outright. In May, the US and Saudi Arabia signed a US$142 billion deal, touted by Trump as the largest in history. And how is all this US military hardware used? To crush domestic political expression and secure regime stability, of course. And that includes any organised or public expression of support for Palestinians as they suffer through a brutal genocide, whether that be in Egypt and Jordan or Saudi Arabia.

The crushing of pro-Palestinian expression in the region reveals a key enabling factor in the genocide in Gaza. It is now accepted by all good faith actors and analysts that the US’ unwavering military and ideological support for Israel is the critical factor enabling the genocide in Gaza (along with the violent expansion of the illegal occupation of the West Bank). This support is so unconditional, so resilient in the face of Israeli criminality, that it’s now uncontroversial to label the genocide as The US-Israeli Genocide of Gaza. Overt US support for Israel aside, there is another supporting pillar of the genocide that doesn’t get mentioned nearly as much, but is critically important: the total suppression of domestic political expression by Arab states propped up by US military support.

Israel goes about its genocidal business in Gaza safe in the knowledge that it will face no strategic blowback from neighbouring US supplicants in the region. It faces no blowback from these countries precisely because the voices of the Arab public have been so effectively suppressed. Gazans scream out for help from their Arab and Muslim neighbours, to no avail. So brazen has Israel become and so confident is it in the impotence of neighbouring Arab regimes, that Netanyahu now openly expresses support for the idea of Greater Israel, a Zionist dream which encompasses the lands in Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

There is a seething anger in Arab states about the the impotence (at best) and complicity (at worst) of their governments in the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza. For now, this anger is mostly being expressed as grief, depression and a deep sense of shame. But it won’t remain internalised forever. Over the past two years, in my observation, that anger has become like a bow being pulled back to breaking point. The bow will get released, sooner or later, with unpredictable results. There are signs that this is already starting to take place. What’s certain is that when the Arab public find their voice, anti-US sentiment will be a significant component of anti-regime protests. When this happens, is anyone in the US going to have the ignorance or audacity to ask: why do they hate us? Of course they will.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.