Did “Muslim leaders” betray Gaza, asks Usamah Dockrat
As the world watches Gaza burn, many say the Ummah has been betrayed by its leaders.
I understand why. You see the bodies, the hunger, the rubble—and then you hear official statements that sound sympathetic while real policies move in the opposite direction. It feels like treason in plain sight.
But betrayal assumes something important: that loyalty once existed.
What Gaza has truly exposed is not a sudden moral failure. It has exposed a system behaving exactly as it was designed to behave—one built to preserve a regional status quo that serves foreign powers and to keep the Muslim public contained whenever it threatens to overflow imposed borders. The regimes that dominate the Arab and Muslim world are not malfunctioning.
They are functioning exactly as intended.
When the bombs began to fall and the siege tightened, the pattern became impossible to ignore. Across the region, statements of “support” for Palestine sat comfortably alongside policies that prioritised security coordination, border control, and “stability” over any meaningful pressure on the occupation.
When sea routes were threatened, land bridges were opened.
When rockets were launched, interception systems went to work.
When Muslim masses moved toward borders, they were met with batons, bullets, and prisons.
And when internal collaborators were needed inside Gaza, they were cultivated and funded.
All the while, speeches were delivered. Statements were issued. Carefully worded “concerns” were expressed for Palestinian suffering.
That contradiction is not a glitch in the system.
It is the system.
To understand why this pattern keeps repeating, we have to go back to the moment the modern Arab nation-state order was forged.
During the First World War, Britain encouraged and supported an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Caliphate with promises of independence. That act of betrayal did not deliver the sovereignty they imagined. Instead, it cleared the way for British dominance in the region, the occupation of Palestine, and the implementation of a colonial project Palestinians would spend the next century resisting.
As borders were redrawn, power was distributed to figures aligned with British interests. Faisal, Abdullah, and Abdulaziz ibn Saud rose within a regional system Britain actively designed and enforced. That logic did not disappear when Britain faded. As American power replaced it, regime change and political sponsorship continued to shape the region—rewarding those who served Western interests and sidelining those who did not.
That history matters. When legitimacy is born inside an imperial arrangement, survival instincts follow a predictable path: keep the patron satisfied, keep the street quiet, and keep the “Palestine problem” from igniting the region beyond control.
This pattern was visible long before our current moment. In 1936, when Palestine erupted into revolt under the British Mandate—through strike and armed resistance—Britain turned to the Arab rulers under its patronage and deployed them as instruments of containment.
In October 1936, Abdulaziz ibn Saud, King Ghazi I, and King Abdullah I issued formal appeals urging Palestinians to end the strike and trust British promises. The intervention worked. It deepened internal divisions and brought the first phase of the revolt to an end. Britain later reneged. The revolt was crushed. Palestinian leaders were imprisoned, exiled, or killed.
This was not an accident of history. It was Arab rulers fulfilling the function on which their power depended.
Fast forward to today: the language has changed, but the structure has not. Britain has been replaced by the United States. The Mandate by “peace plans.” Colonial administrators by envoys, consultants, and security coordinators. But the role assigned to the region’s rulers remains the same: absorb the pressure, restrain the Muslim masses, and package Western demands in a form that can be sold to the people.
Concessions are branded as breakthroughs. Managed defeat is sold as realism. Palestinians are told they have been spared something worse—that this is the best they can hope for, that accepting less today is somehow a step toward more tomorrow. But when examined closely, the structure becomes clear. Israeli withdrawal is conditioned on Palestinian disarmament. Israeli forces remain in decisive areas. Gaza is placed under vague stabilisation formulas while reconstruction, aid, and political life are tied to security conditions defined by Israel itself. There is no vision of liberation in it—only managed defeat.
And yet this is the plan Arab and Muslim governments have pressured Palestinians to accept.
What makes this moment especially bitter is that, for once, standing with Palestine would not only have been morally right—it would have been politically easy. Public support across the Ummah has been overwhelming.
More striking still was the visible collapse of belief in a so-called rules-based international order—even among non-Muslim societies. What had long been presented as neutral law was exposed as selective and conditional. Israel’s war and the global framework insulating it were openly questioned in academic, media, and civil spaces in ways that would have been inconceivable just years earlier.
So profound was this rupture that even a resurfaced message from Usamah bin Laden, directed at the American public, went viral among Western audiences, because its critique of U.S. foreign policy resonated with disillusionment many felt toward their own governments. People who had never sympathised with him publicly admitted they could now understand the grievances he articulated.
For the first time in decades, Muslim rulers had both overwhelming public backing at home and an unusually permissive global climate abroad.
And still, they chose not to act.
That such a moment could pass without being seized is tragic. But it did not pass by accident. It passed because their survival depends on not seizing it.
We can no longer afford disappointment. Disappointment implies expectation—and expectation implies the lingering illusion that these regimes represent us or share our aspirations. They do not. Their allegiance is not to the Ummah. It never truly was.
Their value to Washington and other capitals lies in policing borders, coordinating security, and calming outrage. As long as they perform that role, their power remains secure. And as long as they perform that role, Palestine is prevented from becoming what it naturally tends toward: a border-transcending Islamic cause capable of awakening a force too large to contain.
As the news cycle moves on, the greatest danger is amnesia. The mask will be offered back. We will be told that these regimes are constrained, that patience is wisdom, that it is necessary to trust our leaders. We cannot afford to slip back into that illusion.
These regimes did not emerge from the will of the Ummah, nor were they forged in its defence. They arose from bargains that fractured the Ummah and tied authority to external approval—a structure they continue to preserve. The borders they defend, the institutions they govern, and the security doctrines they enforce were designed to serve interests elsewhere. They are not servants of the Ummah but its managers—vassal states administering a foreign-designed order, advancing external agendas, and suppressing any movement that threatens to escape that framework. Their legitimacy rests not on the Ummah, but on outside sponsorship and protection.
Islamic history offers a precise analogy. Masjid Ḍirār was condemned not because it lacked outward form, but because its foundation served division and the enemy’s interest. It was neither reformed nor repurposed—it was removed. Structures built to fracture the Ummah cannot become instruments of its liberation. Authority founded on external allegiance will not deliver freedom.
If we are serious about confronting occupation, the first step is clarity.
Palestine is not an exception to the regional order—it is its clearest expression. The same colonial architecture that sustains Israeli occupation also sustains these regimes. They are not external actors navigating the occupation from the outside; they are embedded within the very structure that preserves it.
What they represent is not an indigenous political order, but a post-caliphate arrangement imposed through imperial power and maintained through foreign sponsorship. In that sense, they function as an indirect occupation themselves. To treat them as constrained allies rather than structural components of this system is to misunderstand the nature of the problem—and to prolong defeat.
Once this is understood, the conclusion becomes unavoidable: they cannot be the vehicle of liberation. The responsibility therefore returns to the Ummah itself.
The shift required is structural. We cannot continue to invest our energy, loyalty, and hope in structures never designed to serve our interests. We must move beyond the framework itself.
That means building independent networks of solidarity, scholarship, charity, political consciousness, and mobilisation that are not dependent on regime approval or confined by their red lines. It means strengthening cross-border Islamic bonds that challenge artificial divisions. It means refusing to allow these regimes to define what legitimate action looks like. It means recognising that the current regional order is not neutral terrain to be navigated, but an obstacle to be dismantled.
The future will not be shaped by those who work within the existing order, but by those who work to construct something beyond it.
Excellent read.
The way forward.
Jazakumullah