Sarah Leah Whitson is the Executive Director of DAWN.
On May 29, DAWN Executive Director, Sarah Leah Whitson, gave a keynote address to the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) and Muslim Public Affairs Council's (MPAC) 23rd Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.
The full text of the speech can be found below, with light editing for clarity.
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Amid the genocide in Gaza, there is no room to speak of democracy and human rights. They seem a luxury, a decadent and unattainable distraction, from what cannot but be our first priority and the focus of our attention: to save the people of Palestine from the savage Israeli slaughter underway. To save, yes, the Israeli people from the curse of being part of a genocidal nation. For those of us here in the U.S., this is our greatest responsibility because of our government's essential role in enabling Israeli crimes.
The atrocities in Gaza have lowered the bar on what is imaginable and permissible in the region for people demanding their rights. The new threat that now lingers for those disrupting their oppression—outright extermination—makes the crimes of President Sisi and Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman seem quaint in comparison.
The champions of freedom and democratic rule—thousands upon thousands—languish in jail watching the genocide in Gaza.
It makes me pause to wonder if this genocide might not have taken place, if it could have been stopped, were the Middle East to have actual democracies instead of dictatorships ruling the entire region—to put their collective weight in the region to persuade, pressure or punish Israel into ending its crimes, or even to end the catastrophic civil war in Sudan instead of fueling it with weapons to the worst culprits.
Only one Arab state has taken concrete action to sanction Israel: the Houthi-led government in Yemen, itself rife with gross abuses against the Yemeni people.
We know that many of these Arab states have the power and influence to act, particularly as a collective in the otherwise useless Arab League.
Instead, because they remain reliant on American protection, they have exchanged "normalization with Israel"—either under the Camp David architecture or the more modern iteration of the Abraham Accords—with the bill paid for by the Palestinian people.
It's pretty remarkable that today, we find ourselves pinning our hopes on Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, the sadistic sociopath leading Saudi Arabia, to use his financial power as leverage against Israel. To date, Saudi Arabia has held back on normalization but has not taken concrete action to end the war, much less the military occupation of Palestine.
The atrocities in Gaza have lowered the bar on what is imaginable and permissible in the region for people demanding their rights.
- Sarah Leah Whitson
The stark reality, as I stated at a conference last week commemorating 15 years since the Arab Spring uprisings, is that there are no Arab democracies. Iran and Israel are the only states where there is some measure of democratic rule. I judge this by a simple rule of thumb: We don't know who will be the president or prime minister in a country before the election.
Much of Arab youth and talent, indeed global youth and talent, now flock gratefully to the mesmerizing riches and financial opportunities in the Gulf states, seeing no value in their worth as citizens, in their freedom of speech, in their right to democratic governance.
Material wealth appears to be the only aspiration available to the lucky few in the region who make it to the petrodollar states. The dictatorial monarchies are today among the biggest investors in global markets and businesses, with foreign leaders, CEOs and heads of institutions falling over themselves to woo Saudi, Emirati and Qatari cash, with nary a hint of displeasure at their autocratic rule.
Meanwhile, the economies in much of the rest of the region are pauperized, stripped bare by the plundering ruling elites.
Some years ago, in early 2014, I met with Saif al Islam Gaddafi, when he was being detained by the Zintan militia in the Zintan mountains. He had been indicted by the International Criminal Court for his role in violently suppressing the democratic uprising in Libya.
When I asked him about his treatment in detention, noting the laws of due process designed to protect him despite the charges he faced, he remarked, "What Law? What Human Rights? I only see the law of the jungle."
More than ten years later, it's hard not to see his vision a reality.
Gaza has become the graveyard of international law, as Raji Sourani, the head of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which used to be based in Gaza, recently remarked. Not only has Israel's genocide in Gaza, aided and abetted by the U.S., the United Kingdom and Germany, exposed the West's fraudulent commitment to human rights, it has undermined the rule of law and human rights in Western countries themselves.
Our own freedom of speech, freedom of protest and academic freedom have been sacrificed for the cause of protecting Israel from criticism.
Our own democracies have shown themselves to be autocracies when it comes to Israel, where the mass popular support for Palestinian rights in every Western country, including the U.S., has had virtually no reflection in the policies of our governments. Instead, they continue to aid and abet the genocide in Gaza with military support and political protection for Israel, and mass suppression of dissent at home.
What tyrant anywhere in the world will feel even remotely restrained by the international "rules-based order," including the edifices of international justice, the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, if Western leaders have abandoned the rules themselves?
Role of U.S. in the Middle East
We must take particular pause to reflect on the role of the U.S. in the Middle East, given its role as the global superpower with the greatest presence and influence in the region among the nations of this world.
Despite the extensive—if now expired—rhetoric of the U.S. government's commitment to "democracy promotion," its role in the Middle East has actually been one of democracy suppression, supporting abusive dictatorships—whether dressed up as presidencies or monarchies or emirates—with military protection.
Whatever the millions in spending of USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy or the Millennium Challenge Corporation, for various "democracy and civil society development projects," the overwhelming power and influence of the U.S.—particularly the billions of dollars in U.S. weapons and the political protection that go with it—have been used to support and defend very undemocratic regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.
This U.S. support is primarily a result of the perception that democracy would be bad for U.S. interests, risking our control over pliable dictatorships and monarchs who can be bought with the promise of U.S. security protection.
These "U.S. interests" have been narrowly defined, accepted as unchallenged scripture by the foreign policy elites, as securing the free flow of cheap, dirty fossil fuels, securing Israeli impunity and maintaining U.S. hegemony—particularly military hegemony—in the region vis-a-vis its global competitors.
We've also seen massive corruption—by way of the military industrial complex, pro-Israel oligarchs and lobbies and, increasingly, the wealthy Arab regimes themselves—who have not just benefited from the game but have become its champions, creating a perverse incentive system to always reward American officials for doing the wrong thing for the people of the region, supporting wars and militarization, death and destruction for decades.
This corruption—and it's important to call it what it is—is now more naked and exponentially greater than ever before. But let's not pretend that this is something Trump or the Republicans created. No Democratic administration—not Clinton, not Obama and certainly not Biden—took any material steps to curb this corruption that has now reached epidemic levels in our government.
Rather than the Middle East becoming more democratic under the influence of U.S. democracy promotion, the U.S. has become more like the hereditary dictatorships of the Middle East, with its executive distributing largesse to friends and family and operating the entire country as his own family business.
While George W. Bush briefly detoured into some gestures of democracy promotion in Egypt and, ironically, Palestine, when the results produced outcomes that threatened U.S. influence, the administration quickly abandoned the democracy promotion project. Some justified Bush's war in Iraq in the name of democracy and human rights, but I think we're well past the point of needing to debunk those well-debunked lies, and of course Iraq remains a perpetually near-failed state.
President Biden was perhaps the end of the era of America's democracy promotion rhetoric. He arrived touting an alliance of democracies, promising to "end the blank checks for Egypt's dictators" and weapons to "pariah" Saudi Arabia, but soon found himself groveling for Mohamed Bin Salman's and Saudi's largesse, debasing himself and our country before the entire world with his servile, little fist bump.
Many in the region felt abandoned, believing that Biden would be different—that he would change course and genuinely support democracy in the region. I did not share their hope or optimism about President Biden because it was very clear that he remained as beholden to Israel and its backers, as devoted to the Gulf States and their dollars, as loyal to defense companies profiting like jackals on Arab corpses and as intoxicated by U.S. primacy and control—as were his predecessors.
Our own democracies have shown themselves to be autocracies when it comes to Israel, where the mass popular support for Palestinian rights in every Western country, including the U.S., has had virtually no reflection in the policies of our governments.
- Sarah Leah Whitson
Trump's speech in Riyadh in May 2025 marked an abandonment of this fictional rhetoric, which felt fresh in its candor: The U.S. was in town to do business, and the human rights abuses were mere "sins of the heart"—looking at you, Mohamed bin Salman—that the U.S. had no business meddling in.
Of course, his speech came with its own distortion, conveniently lumping the regime-change "Western interventionists," "nation-builders" and "neocons" with the "liberal nonprofits" "spending trillions failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad" and "lecturing on how to govern your own affairs"—as if the people in the region have any say in how their affairs are "governed."
Certainly, Trump's critique is not an entirely unfair one. Those champions of military intervention in the name of democracy and human rights—like recent USAID administrator Samantha Power, but also some in the human rights movement itself—who were ready to self-immolate demanding military intervention in Syria, for example, have much to answer for, particularly on their silence in calling for any intervention for Gaza. Their failures have now given Trump the justification to discard the entirety of the human rights agenda.
It bears repeating, however, that many of us never asked the U.S. to "promote democracy" or drop bombs on civilians in the name of human rights. We have simply asked our government to get its fist off the scale in favor of dictators, to do no harm and to end our military and political support for abusive regimes so that the people of the region have a fair shot at freedom.
No, we as Americans do not have a responsibility to create democracy in the Middle East or fix the broken, corrupt regimes there. Perhaps we owe reparations to the Iraqi people. We most certainly have a legal, moral and national responsibility to stop supporting tyranny and genocide.
Opportunities
The outlook is bleak, and I'm sorry to have to be the messenger of such bad news.
I have struggled to find the sources of hope for democracy and rights in these dark times—not just in the region, but in the world. At this moment, these values seem like a blip, themselves an anomaly in human history, now reverting to imperial zones of influence after the brief heyday of a liberal world order.
There are a few things that remain on the side of what is good for humanity, for freedom, for democracy and for human rights.
First, we may be seeing cracks in Israeli diktat in the region, wedded to war and destabilization throughout the region.
Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks on Israel—cruel and unlawful in their targeting of civilians—were a game-changer for the region, forcing a reckoning on the question of Palestine that had been completely erased from the discussion as Arab states pretended they no longer existed.
And as I noted in October 2023, when this most heinous chapter of the long war in Palestine commenced, Israel's goal has been, and continues to be, to expel or exterminate all Palestinians in Palestine and to destroy all regimes and forces it sees as obstacles—from Hezbollah to Syria and Iran. The Biden admin was marching lockstep with these goals, and war with Iran felt inevitable.
The Trump administration, to its credit, has further shaken up the status quo approach in the region, sending important signals that it is breaking with Israel's chokehold over U.S. policy in the region, pursuing foreign policy goals without Israeli approval or veto.
This includes Trump's pronouncement of an effort at diplomacy with Iran around nuclear enrichment, despite Israel's demand for military strikes; ending the war against the Houthis with a commitment from them only to refrain from attacks on U.S. ships, which is where we were before Trump started the attacks on them; negotiating with Hamas to secure the release of a U.S. citizen without notifying or consulting with Israel; lifting sanctions on Syria; and pressuring Israel to allow in a tiny bit of aid—what passes for "progress."
Perhaps this is more a reflection of the Gulf states outspending the pro-Israel oligarchs and AIPAC, spending more than them to avert war with Iran and cool support for Israel.
None of these reflect a shift to democracy or human rights, but they introduce a long overdue measure of "decoupling" U.S. policy from Israeli interests, as my colleague Raed Jarrar has written.
These policy pivots reduce the risk of war with Iran and a broader war in the region, which is, of course, tremendously important for the physical survival of the people in the region.
With the growing global opposition to Israel and shifts in European policy now seeking to find some ways to sanction Israel, there may come a point where the decoupling from Israel intensifies, and Israel finds itself more isolated and alone, seeking to find an alternative approach and a way out.
In the Middle East, Israel remains the outlier, the single greatest liability for the U.S. in its endless conflicts and belligerence in the region. If we can solve the Israel problem, we will have lifted a massive weight off of America's balance sheet of harm.
I've just written a book that presents such an off-ramp for Israel, should its people seek an end to this status quo of global revulsion and isolation, setting out a transitional plan for, first, how to end Israeli occupation and apartheid, and then, to allow the people from the River to the Sea to decide how they wish to be governed—in one state, two states or some other model. It is possible and it is doable to achieve a peaceful resolution.
The volatility and unknown remain a source of hope: Just as the Arab Uprisings caught the world by surprise, the darkest forces in the world are no less subject to the forces of change than the brightest ones, as my colleague Michael Omer-Man has noted.
Dictatorship is very, very stable—until it's not. We need one successful model of democracy to set the path and serve as a model.
Most of all, I find hope in the people!
Today, I find hope in the Palestinians, whom settlers continuously try to displace but remain rooted in their homes; the Iranians behind bars in Evin who still find ways to write and dissent; and the Egyptian youth harassed by Sisi's forces, but who still speak out for change.
And especially in our own backyards, I find hope in the students who still protest Israel's genocide—despite the political witch hunts— and the reporters, writers, organizers, teachers and leaders who chose to stay and keep up their work. Their determination for freedom should inspire us all. Their courage in the shadows teaches us all.
We have, at our core, a very human instinct for justice, freedom and rights—a hope in human revival—that a new generation will follow the exhausted generation in the Middle East in a call for change.
As my friend Dr. [Esam] Omeish reminds me, "we choose hope, always. It is a choice." As he remarks,
"Because when we are faced with injustice and cruelty, we choose justice, fairness, kindness and love.
Because when we are faced with darkness and senseless violence, we choose life, human dignity and the courage to defend and resist.
We choose hope because it is most befitting of our beliefs, of who we are, of our outlook on life, of our definition of our purpose in life, of what makes our time on this Earth honorable."
For some, this comes from the "divine secret." For me, it is faith in righteous humans, that we will prevail, truth will prevail, justice will prevail, decency will prevail, love will prevail.
This is our journey. This is our challenge. This will be our story.
