From Regional Uprisings to Reactionary Regimes: How Sudan Relates to Palestine

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

On June 30, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took over Sinjah, the capital of Sinnar province in southeastern Sudan, and they have continued to expand their control over the surrounding areas since then. Tens of thousands of residents have fled this latest RSF incursion, deepening the crises of displacement and hunger that have spread across Sudan since war broke out between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in April of last year. Over 10 million people have been displaced internally as well as outside of Sudan since April 2023, making it the largest displacement crisis globally, with no end to the war between the two forces in sight.

At the same time, Israel continues its nine-monthlong bombing campaign on Gaza. On July 2, Israel ordered 250,000 Palestinians to evacuate Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, Gaza’s second-largest city. Israeli bombing and invasion campaigns have displaced at least 90 percent of Palestinians from Gaza since October, with many of them having been displaced multiple times. While the official number of Palestinians killed is just under 40,000 — a horrific number in its own right — The Lancet suggests that the death toll in Gaza could be closer to 186,000 or more. Both Sudan and Gaza are facing displacement and hunger crises, as well as deteriorated and destroyed infrastructure as a result of these two wars that began in 2023. UN experts have called Israel’s assault on Gaza a “genocidal starvation campaign;” similar outcries say two and a half million people could die from hunger in Sudan due to the warring factions restricting food deliveries, plundering resources and besieging areas of the country.

These two seemingly disparate crises, in Sudan and Palestine, are in fact deeply connected. Regional and international actors have invested in propping up reactionary powers in both places. More broadly, the fates of Sudan and Palestine are also linked by decades-long regional processes, meaning that increased brutality and oppression in one place often correlates to similar conditions in the other, and conversely, progress toward liberation in one increases the likelihood of the same in the other.

Global Players Connect These Crises

The two reactionary forces that have wreaked havoc across Sudan as they compete for power are the SAF, Sudan’s state army, and the RSF, a previously state-controlled militia formed from paramilitaries in the Darfur region. The RSF and SAF worked together to crush the popular uprising that emerged in Sudan in December 2018, jointly carrying out the June 3, 2019, massacre at the Khartoum sit-in, and jointly enacting the coup d’état of 2021. But tensions continued to rise between the two over who would rule their counterrevolutionary state, and these broke out into clashes and then all-out war in April 2023.

The two reactionary forces are each funded and supported by regional and international actors. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is perhaps the most directly involved in maintaining the current war in Sudan through its support of the RSF, leading Sudanese activists in the diaspora to call for boycotts of the UAE in particular. The Saudi-UAE coalition has recruited both SAF and RSF fighters as ground troops in Yemen over the past decade, with the RSF in particular gaining financially through its role there.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi — another counterrevolutionary military dictator who took power through a military coup followed by a series of massacres in 2013 — is currently attempting to act as peacemaker between the RSF and SAF, but previously propped up and still maintains close ties with the SAF. Sisi was keen on the SAF and RSF repressing the popular movement that had overtaken Sudan since 2018, as he saw it as a threat to his rule, which similarly took its hold through the crushing of a popular revolution, the Egyptian revolution of 2011.

Though the EU and U.K. currently insist that countries must stop funding the two sides of the war in Sudan, they in fact played an important role in the rise of the RSF. A decade ago, shortly after the RSF was formalized as an official militia attached to the military regime, the EU began funneling funds to Sudan to deter migrants from entering Europe through Sudan. This role fell in part on the RSF, despite the international outcry at the group’s brutality in Darfur beginning in 2003. The RSF proceeded to prevent Somalis, Ethiopians, Eritreans, and other migrants from crossing the border, often resulting in their deaths. This was systematized through the EU-led Khartoum Process of 2014, with the EU funneling over $200 million to the former Sudanese regime to turn the RSF into border control. Today, the EU continues to send aid to Egypt to curb migration — which has been used to push Sudanese refugees of the war back to Sudan.

These two seemingly disparate crises, in Sudan and Palestine, are in fact deeply connected.

Throughout the war of the past year and a half in Sudan, the RSF has also been seen using Israeli-made weapons. Leaders of the RSF — known as a predominantly Arab and sectarian militia — have expressed affinity not with Palestinians, but with Israel. Just before the war, in February 2023, Israel’s foreign minister visited Sudan and met with Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of the 2021 coup and head of the SAF, for normalization talks. Israel’s support for counterrevolutionary forces in Sudan should not come as a surprise, as Sudan’s 2018 uprising featured calls for solidarity with Palestine and an end to normalization with Israel, threatening to upend the region’s reactionary status quo.

Many of the actors that have fueled the current war in Sudan are also complicit in strengthening ties with Israel, and thus in maintaining Israel’s war on Gaza. Key among them is the UAE: In addition to supporting the RSF in Sudan, the UAE was one of the first regional states to cement normalization with Israel through the 2020 Abraham Accords. This normalization deal has worked to expand trade and business partnerships, and strengthen military and intelligence coordination between Israel and other reactionary regimes of the region — emboldening Israel to ramp up its violence against Palestinians in the years since.

The Abraham Accords initially involved normalization between the UAE, Bahrain and Israel, but Morocco and Sudan followed in the months after. Sudan’s move toward normalization with Israel entailed considerable struggle. Then-President Donald Trump pushed for Sudan to accept normalization shortly after bullying the country to pay $335 million in exchange for removing it from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. Discussions of joining the Abraham Accords led to numerous protests in Sudan against normalization from 2020 to 2023 — and showed that the post-revolutionary leaders of the country did not espouse the demands of the 2018 Sudanese uprising, central of which was solidarity with Palestine. Nonetheless, Sudan’s normalization with Israel was concretized by the reactionary heads of state.

Egypt, of course, has been as complicit in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza as it is in the war on Sudan. Egypt has shut down the Rafah Crossing and forced Palestinians to pay exorbitant fees in order to leave Gaza, and arrested and imprisoned activists who have spoken out or protested the government’s complicity with the genocide. Egypt’s reactionary role in Sudan and Palestine can be understood as it fears the revolutionary potential of mass protest and in particular of protest in solidarity with Palestine. Sisi will not have forgotten that solidarity with Palestine was one of the main elements of the 2011 “Arab Spring” revolutions, which upended the repressive status quo in Egypt — and threatened to upend the entire region and its imperial backers — for a period of two years.

The wave of revolutions that emerged in 2011 across the Middle East and North Africa held solidarity with Palestine as a central tenet — as well as anti-authoritarianism, and opposition to the corrupt deals of the elites and frustration at rising economic inequality. The defeat of these revolutions, beginning in 2013 with Sisi’s massacres and takeover in Egypt, has been a boon for Israel. Popular sentiment in solidarity with Palestine and against local and international forces of repression have been largely smothered across the region, allowing the regimes to push forward normalization deals with Israel like the Abraham Accords. Sudan’s 2018 revolution reignited the spark lit in 2011 by the Arab Spring, but the post-revolution stalemate followed by war deepened the region’s reactionary turn. As counterrevolution and war deepen in Sudan — as they have elsewhere in the region, from Egypt to Syria — Israel is further emboldened to carry out its genocide and push forward with its ethnonationalist project.

Nonetheless, the brutality of counterrevolution and war have not destroyed the support of the Sudanese people for Palestinian liberation, and solidarity with Palestine remains a potential trigger for renewed protest activity across the region.