Gaza’s resistance as a structural rupture of the dependent state
Arab regimes: a fully functional structure within the system of dependency on the imperial center. Gaza, in its model of resistance, puts this structure at risk - Part 3
In light of the second part of the series, it becomes clear that Arab regimes were not created as emancipatory entities; rather, they were designed as fully functional tools, made to protect the interests of ruling elites, safeguard the Zionist entity, and reproduce dependency on the global imperial system. Yet Gaza, with its resistance model, challenges this structure: it breaks the monopoly over authority and arms, threatens the existing class alliance, and exposes the security discourse underpinning these regimes. This is where this third part begins, uncovering the foundational pillars of the dependent Arab regime and demonstrating why Gaza’s resistance model constitutes an existential threat to its structure.
Arab regimes are fully functional; their legitimacy does not derive from popular sovereignty, national liberation, or economic independence, but from their ability to perform their role within the dependency system. The pillars of this dependent state can be summarized into three main supports:
First: Organic Structural Dependency on the Imperial Center
The dependent state functions as an organic (structurally embedded, historically produced, and self-reproducing) extension of the Western imperial center in political, military, and economic terms, meaning that its institutions, ruling elites, and key economic flows are deeply integrated into the logic of that center. This renders the regime’s survival conditional upon the continuation of this very relationship with the Western center, rather than on any autonomous or internally self-sustaining foundation.
Lebanese Marxist philosopher Mahdi Amel rejects the notion that states in dependent societies are “incomplete,” emphasizing that in colonial formations, the state is a fully functional class apparatus, operating as a tool for reproducing dependency rather than exercising national sovereignty. This analysis applies fully to Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority; the problem lies not in their failure to achieve liberation, but in their structural success in performing a counter-liberation function.
Second: Domestic Control and Popular Repression
The second pillar of the dependent state is internal control through repressive apparatuses that prevent any popular action threatening authority. Martiniquan political philosopher Frantz Fanon describes the national elites in such regimes as intermediaries without a productive project, seeking bureaucratic administrative roles within the colonial structure rather than leading a liberation project. This description fits the ruling elites in the Arab Gulf, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. These elites, Fanon explains, perceive the masses not as a historical force but as an existential threat, fearing popular revolutionary violence more than colonial domination itself, because revolutionary violence jeopardizes their function and position within the existing structure.
Fanon also stresses that unless these elites join a radical liberation project, they inevitably become local guardians of the imperial-colonial system, regardless of slogans about sovereignty and identity. He further explains how national elites in these regimes transform into violent intermediaries against popular classes. The Palestinian Authority, for example, is not merely a tool for political control but a class-control apparatus: it represses workers and camp residents, kills and arrests resistance fighters, protects the interests of the class that benefits from the continuation of the colonial system, and functions to ensure its persistence. This role is not a deviation but a direct expression of the class structure of the authority: any genuine change in its function would entail dismantling its structure, losing privileges, and confronting the occupation, effectively ending the system. Thus, the Authority’s operations align precisely with its function: a colonial administrative apparatus with a Palestinian facade, and a beneficiary class tied to its continuity.
Third: Demonizing Resistance and Criminalizing Solidarity
The dependent state completes its function by demonizing resistance and criminalizing popular solidarity, framing it as a threat to security and stability. In reality, it does not fear chaos but fears the possibility that solidarity will transform into class-based political consciousness, revealing the structural link between the Palestinian cause and the system of authoritarianism and dependency in the region.
Gaza Outside the Dependent State
These pillars reveal that the dependent state is historically functional but not invulnerable. Gaza has proven that the masses can convert their popular power into emancipatory historical action, breaking the monopoly on arms and political decision-making and positioning itself as an independent actor outside official institutions.
As a resistance model, Gaza threatens the monopoly over authority and arms, exposes the class alliance between ruling elites and imperial powers, and unveils the falsity of Arab regimes’ security narrative.
Monopoly over Authority and Arms
As Mahdi Amel analyzed, the dependent state monopolizes authority and arms, not to confront the Zionist enemy but to maintain dependency, control the domestic population, and prevent any emancipatory popular transformation. Gaza with it’s resistance however, broke the “arms in the state’s hands” paradigm, shattering the monopoly over political decision-making and redefining legitimacy as stemming from popular resistance, not international recognition.
Palestinian professor of sociology and international studies Saif Da’na demonstrates that these regimes are not failed states; they are successful in fulfilling their security function, reproducing elites and maintaining dependency conditions. Conversely, Gaza shows how popular classes can become historical actors through popular arms, exercising the right to self-determination. Arab regimes and ruling elites fear Gaza not as a geographic space but as a model demonstrating that people can determine their political path independently of dependent regimes.
The Existing Class Alliance
Gaza threatens not only so-called “Arab national security” but also the class alliance linking Arab ruling elites, rentier-comprador capital, and the global imperial system. Operating outside the rentier economy and dependency framework, Gaza reveals structural class danger and proves that emancipation and independent political action do not require a mediating class to protect foreign imperialist interests or local elites. Gaza’s resistance constitutes a direct threat to this alliance, exposing the class foundations governing Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority.
The genocide in Gaza is not an isolated event but a point of exposure for the Arab-imperial class alliance and the organic relationship between dependent Arab states and the global imperial system. The role of these regimes in the genocide must be understood as a conscious class choice executed by ruling elites in alliance with the Zionist entity, defending their interests and their position within the imperial system.
This genocidal policy operates regionally, as the survival of Arab ruling classes is organically tied to the persistence of the global imperial system itself. The Gulf funds the necessary repressive apparatuses to crush Gaza, viewing Gaza not as a cause of liberation but as a structural threat to the regional stability that guarantees the survival of their regimes. Gulf protectorates act as agents by reproducing the imperial-class alliance regionally and securing ruling elites’ interests at the expense of Palestinian lives. Their support for the genocide is not accidental, nor is it a political deviation--it is the response required by the very structure of these regimes. By design, they must e prevent any popular resistance experience, such as Gaza, from becoming a regional model, or else risk their own collapse.
Arab Regimes’ Security Narrative
Gaza represents a challenge because it operates outside the logic and borders of Camp David, Oslo, Wadi Araba, and Abraham, outside security coordination and border control, a counter-model that proves that people can act independently of authority. Gaza, as a revolutionary act, exposes the falsity of humanitarian and political discourse within the Arab regime, eliciting genocidal violence in response.
Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority are not mere spectators of genocide; they are part of the system itself. Their non-intervention sustains the genocide. Supporting or managing it under humanitarian discourse is not neutral; it constitutes direct defense of the conditions for reproducing ruling classes and the pattern of authority they embody.
The Authority’s hostility toward Gaza is not a matter of political difference, it is a response to Gaza’s exposure of class contradictions within Palestinian society, between those subsisting under Oslo and coordination policies with the occupation and those resisting them, a scenario most threatening to a ruling class. Saif Da’na notes that the Palestinian Authority is not a failed state but a successful security apparatus.
Gaza is dangerous not only becuase of its resilience, but also because it reveals the “incapacity” myth that regimes invoke; it demonstrates that Arab armies have been functionally neutralized and that their decisions are no longer national but subordinate to regional dependency within the imperial system. Arab regimes do not “betray” Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority does not “deviate”; each functions according to its structural role.
Gaza threatens the regimes’ legitimacy, their monopoly on arms, discourse, class structure, and comprador function, constituting a structural danger to the Arab regimes’ security narrative before their populations. Hence, their practices are not silence, incapacity, or betrayal but self-preservation. Gaza represents an existential threat as a model undermining the very foundations, legitimacy, and survival of these regimes.
Popular Emancipatory Violence as an Existential Choice
The martyr, the spokesman of the nation Hudhayfah al-Kahlout, did not call on Arab regimes to intervene to save Gaza from genocide. Rather, he exposed their participation and abandonment. He was aware that they were carrying out their function, the very function that the occupation had ensured they would perform to the fullest extent. These regimes are an organic extention of the machinery of annihilation; they secure its conditions, protect its perpetrators, and provide political, security, and media cover.
Appeals for intervention are illusory, presuming these regimes erred or misjudged, when in fact they are performing the function for which they were designed. Allowing them to continue means accepting the erasure of every Arab citizen’s dignity and transforming populations into an audience awaiting their turn on the genocide list. So do we wait until it is our turn?
There is no hope in regimes constructed through their colonial function or elites benefiting from their position within the dependency structure. The only hope lies in Arab peoples reclaiming their natural place in this struggle, not as passive masses, but as a historically conscious force. Within their revolutionary popular classes, they hold the decisive tool in the struggle: popular emancipatory violence, which terrifies dependent regimes because it threatens their very existence.
If these classes unite and organize politically, they can break dependency, seize political decision-making, overthrow their regimes and the dependent bourgeoisie conspiring against them, investing in their repression and trading in their blood. Only here are politics wrested from the grip of authority, human dignity reclaimed from the logic of annihilation, and the people restored to their natural role: the makers of history and liberation.
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