This piece in the New Left Review tries to make sense of the Arab uprisings but falls into the trap of believing that there is no “anti-imperial” element to the movements. Perry Anderson writes:

Notable has been one further absence in the upheaval. In the most famous of all concatenations, the European 1848–49, not just two, but three fundamental kinds of demands intertwined: political, social, national. What of the last in the Arab 2011? To date, the mass movements of this year have not produced a single anti-American or even anti-Israeli demonstration. The historic discrediting of Arab nationalism with the failure of Nasserism in Egypt is no doubt one reason for this. That subsequent resistance to American imperialism came to be identified with regimes—Syria, Iran, Libya—just as repressive as those which collude with it, offering no alternative political model to them, is another. Still, it remains striking that anti-imperialism is the dog that has not—or not yet—barked in the part of the world where imperial power is most visible. Can this last?

It simply isn’t true that there has been no sign of anti-American or anti-Israeli sentiment. It has not been given any attention by Western media, that’s for sure, but it has existed nevetheless. In Tunisia there were protests when Hillary Clinton made her first post-Ben Ali appearance and in Egypt there were numerous slogans against Israel and US policy. Recently, there have been protests outside the building hosting the Israeli embassy in Cairo. What strikes me, however, about the question of the anti-imperial concerns of the Arab protest movements is that despite these examples one can cite, this searching for evidence is the wrong approach in the first place. The prime concern of the citizenry involved is removing and/or reforming unjust, predatory systems of government. The realization that this alone must be the aim of the mass movements of civil disobedience has been one of the ingenious secrets of their success so far. Why would protesters make anti-imperialism a central focus of their campaign when the regimes have long played that game? “Anti-imperialism” writ large would be the death knell of the uprisings because it would open the door to the regimes’ tricks to manipulate, coopt and subvert. For those who do have anti-imperialism as the key part of their agenda, the smart thing to do would be to focus purely on removing repressive regimes, which is exactly what people have done.

Secondly, the policy of the post-Mubarak Egyptian government has already produced convulsions of angst in Israel and in the Gulf. The new Egyptian foreign minister has opened channels to Iran and outlined a new approach towards the Palestinians, and it’s clear that Cairo is more enamoured of the independent role Turkey has drawn for itself than the perceived kowtowing of Mubarak to Washington. There is a long way to go before this new approach rises to the level of systematic challenge to neo-imperial power, while the pressures on Egypt from outside will be many, but it shows that concerns about foreign policy were at the heart of the uprising. The fight for dignity had two policy targets: both the domestic and the foreign. In Tunisia and Egypt protesters understood that their governments had been propped up by foreign powers. Resistance to Western hegemony is natural and intuitively understood, it does not need articulation for media and government in the West.