Speak long enough about solidarity, and the word begins to feel like sand, dry, shifting and ultimately slipping through the fingers of those who need it most. Every year, as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People approaches, the diplomatic machinery whirs into motion. Delegations gather, speeches are written and polished, statesmen from podiums gleaming under warm lights, proclaim their unbreakable commitment to justice, dignity, and the Palestinian cause. And then, as the cameras dim and the microphones cool, nothing happens.
The truth, plain, uncomfortable, and habitually avoided, is that the Palestinian people have long been deprived not only of justice but of genuine solidarity from those who most loudly claim to champion them. And this failure rests most heavily not on distant Western powers, nor on the familiar geopolitical villains that dominate the usual scripts, but on the Arab states themselves.
It’s an awkward conversation, politically, historically, and emotionally. But awkwardness is often where the truth lives.
For decades, many Arab governments have built an identity, sometimes a mythos, around the Palestinian cause. It has appeared in their speeches, in their schoolbooks, in their state media narratives. The Palestinian struggle has been used as a rallying cry for unity in a region that often struggles to find any. It has provided moral high ground for leaders who lacked it elsewhere, and excuses for internal repression disguised as the necessity of “national security” in the face of the Israeli threat. It has become a political currency, valuable precisely because it never needs to be cashed.
But solidarity, real solidarity, is not a currency. It is not a posture. It is not an ornament to be displayed during commemorative days and shelved during the rest of the year. Real solidarity costs something. And this is where the gap between rhetoric and reality yawns wide.
The uncomfortable reality is that many Arab states have retreated into a position best described as ceremonial solidarity, a symbolic stance that demands no sacrifice, no confrontation, no meaningful support beyond public sentiment and occasionally a donation carefully calibrated to appear generous without being consequential. The speeches grow more emotional even as the policies grow more indifferent.
In many capitals, the Palestinian cause is still spoken of in the language of shared destiny. But behind the curtains, geopolitical realignments, security partnerships, and economic ambitions paint a different picture, one in which Palestinian suffering has become diplomatically inconvenient.
Normalization, that once-taboo word, now moves from whisper to signature ceremony. Meanwhile, Palestinians watch from the sidelines, observing the same pattern they’ve endured for generations: their fate negotiated by others, their needs subordinated to alliances that do not include them, and their struggle reduced to a symbolic gesture performed annually to demonstrate moral sincerity without moral responsibility.
The Arab states are not a monolith, nor should they be treated as one. But across the region, from monarchies to republics, from wealthy petro-states to poorer nations navigating internal strife, a pattern repeats itself, lofty declarations paired with action so timid it barely rises to the level of gesture.
It is not solidarity to speak about Palestine only when it is convenient, or when global attention momentarily demands it. It is not solidarity to condemn occupation while quietly pursuing security cooperation with the occupier. It is not solidarity to express empathy while offering no meaningful political leverage, no unified diplomatic front, no sustained economic commitment, and often no protection to Palestinians living within these same Arab countries.
Perhaps the most telling indicator of this hollow solidarity is the patient expectation, shared by many Arab states, that the Palestinian issue will one day simply resolve itself. This hope is not rooted in political analysis but in exhaustion, avoidance, and the desire to move on without admitting to having moved on. And yet, the Palestinians themselves have never had the luxury of moving on.
To live in Gaza, in the West Bank, or in refugee camps across the region is to inhabit an ongoing crisis. To carry a Palestinian passport, if one is lucky enough to have one, is to exist in a liminal space between statelessness and recognition. To be Palestinian is to navigate a world where promises are plentiful but protections are scarce, where international law is invoked often but enforced rarely, and where solidarity is celebrated globally but practiced selectively.
What Palestinians need from the Arab world is not another round of poetic speeches or elegiac statements. They do not need another year of rhetorical crescendo followed by political silence. They need action: coordinated political pressure, humanitarian corridors that function, financial commitments that meet actual needs, policies that reflect not nostalgia for a shared past but responsibility for a shared future.
They need Arab states to treat the Palestinian cause not as a symbol, a slogan, or a shield, but as a real political and human priority.
Solidarity is ultimately a verb. It means standing with, not just speaking for. It means investing political capital, not merely moral sentiment. It means accepting that justice is not achieved through memory alone but through will.
Until that shift happens until the Arab world chooses to replace ceremonial solidarity with substantive solidarity the Palestinian people will continue to confront a cruel paradox: celebrated everywhere, supported nowhere.
And on days of international commemoration, amid the speeches and the solemnity, the truth remains unchanged: there is no shortage of words spoken in their name. There is simply a shortage of those willing to stand beside them when the microphones turn off.
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