Melancholia and Lessons from the Arab Spring

As Israel's genocide in Gaza escalated in the autumn of last year, there was much speculation as to whether we would see mass uprisings in the Arab States of the region. Yet although there have been major Palestine protests in the region, and other acts of solidarity, we have not seen the kinds of uprisings that many hoped for. Nihal El Aasar takes up this question and argues that repression and the threat of violence alone cannot be the sole explanation for the relative lack of public tumult. In our conversation we talked about the Arab Spring, the kind of political subject it brought into being, and the profound effects of the counterrevolution that destroyed the hopes that so many had invested in the Arab Spring. We also talked about how the demoralisation of the Arab publics of the region is critical to the regime of capital accumulation in the Middle East - and Israel's central role in that process.