The world’s attention is on Gaza. But Israel’s neighbors worry about their own stability as they fear the chaos will spread.
Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud attends a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other foreign ministers amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Amman, Jordan, 4 November, 2023. (Jonathan Ernst/Pool photo via AP)
Israel’s relentless battering of the Gaza Strip since 7 October has reignited popular Arab sympathy for Palestinians, who had seen their cause slip into near-oblivion after years of international neglect, internal rifts and the hardline right’s grip on power in Israeli politics.
Arab leaders fear the brutal resurgence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will further destabilise the Middle East and possibly plunge the region into a wider war with incalculable consequences.
But they are also wary of demonstrations and other expressions of solidarity with the Palestinians, lest these snowball into demands for domestic change.
Arab uprisings in 2011 toppled several Arab autocrats, only to end in civil wars, military repression or disillusion.
Across the Arab world, from Morocco to the Gulf, leaders often try to channel anti-Israeli rage or articulate it themselves, while also curbing protests and cracking down on political activists.
“What’s happening to the Palestinian people clarifies the foundation of the problem for Arabs everywhere, that the problem is tyranny,” Abdurrahman Sultan, 36, a Kuwaiti who has joined pro-Palestinian sit-ins since the war began, told the New York Times in April.
Everything changed on 7 October
Arab rulers preoccupied with their own problems and ambitions were as shocked as the rest of the world when Hamas fighters broke out of Gaza into Israel, massacred about 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and took about 250 hostages back into the enclave.
Israel has retaliated for that atrocity with possibly genocidal atrocities of its own.
Since 7 October, Israeli forces have killed 35,800 Gazans, mostly civilians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, and reduced the Strip to an uninhabitable wasteland where famine and suffering stalk the population of 2.3 million.
Israel kept control of Gaza’s land, sea and air access after pulling out troops and settlers in 2002. It tightened the blockade, with Egypt’s help, after Hamas seized power in 2007.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the health ministry says more than 500 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October, including gunmen, protesters and bystanders, mostly by the army and 10 by settlers. UN figures say 10 Israelis have been killed in the same period.
Jordan walks a tightrope
For all the supportive rhetoric in Arab capitals, Palestinians can count on few, if any, wholehearted allies among Arab states. Some of these have peace treaties or normalisation deals with Israel which have brought Palestinian statehood no closer and which are often detested by their own people.
Arab leaders may share outrage at Israel’s scourging of Gaza and exactions in the West Bank, but still quietly cling to relations with the Jewish state which they see as enhancing national economic, diplomatic or security interests.
At the same time, Israel’s neighbors share acute concern over possible repercussions of the Gaza conflict and the failure of the United States to rein in the actions of its Israeli ally.
Jordan’s nightmare is any mass expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank into its territory, in a repeat of the forced displacements that accompanied wars with Israel in 1948 and 1967. Many of its citizens are of Palestinian origin, who coexist sometimes uneasily with native East Bankers.
“The Israeli authorities have said many times they do not want a Palestinian state, an end to the occupation or a Palestinian majority in the territories they control,” former Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher told Le Monde in March. “It follows that the only solution [for them] is to get rid of the maximum number of Palestinians.”
Jordan, which relies on the United States to protect it from regional turmoil and stronger neighbors, signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, but ties have remained mostly chilly, apart from security and intelligence cooperation.
The kingdom’s ambivalent role was highlighted when it helped intercept Iranian drones launched against Israel on 13 April. The authorities, mindful of Iran’s regional reach and domestic criticism, said they had acted to protect Jordan’s airspace, not the Jewish state.
War on Egypt’s doorstep
Egypt, like Jordan, fiercely opposes any new exodus of Palestinians. It has urged international pressure to prevent Israel from pushing Gazans into the Sinai Peninsula, already troubled by a long-running Islamist insurgency. Some Israeli government ministers urge such a transfer.
Cairo has no liking for Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has suffered severe repression in Egypt since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took power in 2014.
But it has joined mediation efforts for a ceasefire, which seemed within reach when Hamas accepted its terms on 6 May. The deal collapsed the next day when Israel began a ground assault on Rafah, deploying tanks and flying the Israeli flag on the Egyptian border, and forcing more than 800,000 Gazans, many already displaced, to flee yet again.
Perhaps partly to appease a domestic outcry, Egypt has since said it will join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. On 24 May, the court told Israel to halt its Rafah offensive, citing the danger to civilians. The assault goes on.
Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel has so far survived tensions over Gaza.
Under the volcano
Lebanon, still formally at war with Israel, knows it may be the Jewish state’s next target. Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas have often exchanged fire with Israeli forces since 7 October, prompting a civilian exodus on each side of the border. Some 60,000 Israelis have yet to return to their homes and about 93,000 Lebanese have been displaced.
Israeli attacks have killed around 270 Hezbollah fighters and 50 civilians. Hezbollah rocket fire has killed at least seven Israeli civilians and about 10 soldiers. So far both sides have stopped short of all-out war. Once the Gaza conflict ebbs, that may change.
Israel, shocked by Hamas’s cross-border incursion, says it cannot tolerate the threat of a similar assault by Hezbollah. If international diplomacy cannot make the militia stay north of the Litani river, about 29 km (18 miles) from the border, Israel may go to war again.
The Israelis have already used white phosphorus munitions in south Lebanon, as well as in Gaza, since 7 October, according to human rights organizations Oxfam, Human Rights Watch and others. The munitions are toxic and highly flammable, but are not classified as chemical weapons.
Nadim Houry, a former Human Rights Watch analyst, says the use of white phosphorus, like the cluster munitions Israel rained down in south Lebanon near the end of the 2006 war with Hezbollah, are intended to deter civilians from living in a potential buffer zone.
Lebanon’s dysfunctional government cannot deal with an economic meltdown that has crippled the country for nearly five years, let alone control Hezbollah, which has become a major political player as well as a formidable military force.
Any new Israel-Hezbollah war could spill into Syria or involve Iran and allied militias in Iraq and Yemen, sparking a regional explosion that might suck in the United States and others.
Mega-deal in peril
The Gaza war has already thrown a spanner into Washington’s efforts to broker a normalisation deal between Israel and regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia.
Riyadh was to be rewarded with a U.S.-Saudi defence pact and cooperation on a civilian nuclear program in return for recognition of Israel. The Saudis have conditioned the three-way deal on an end to the Gaza war and firm commitments on a Palestinian state.
On 21 May, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told a Senate hearing: “It may well be … that in this moment, Israel is not able or willing to proceed down that pathway.”
Palestinian statehood is anathema to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose hardline government’s program pledges to work towards annexation of the West Bank.
This month Ireland, Norway and Spain became the latest of 142 nations to recognise Palestine as a state. The UN General Assembly also voted for Palestine to become a full UN member, a move already blocked by a U.S. veto at the Security Council.
Diplomatic gestures, like the judicial actions at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, where prosecutors are seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister, may do little to stop the war in Gaza or end the broader conflict.
The bleak reality is that Israel, armed and shielded by the United States, is a law unto itself. Its reliance on force, repression and sustained colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem are designed to thwart any coexistence with an independent Palestinian state.
The United States and the rest of the world have left the conflict to fester for two decades. The ghastly blow struck by Hamas and Israel’s ferocious response are a foretaste of what to expect if Palestinians and Israelis are again left to their own devices.
Three questions to consider:
- How has the Gaza war revealed tension between Arab rulers and their people?
- Can the war lead to Palestinian statehood or long-term security for Israel?
- What role should the United States play in promoting Middle East peace?
Alistair Lyon is former Middle East diplomatic correspondent for Reuters. During three decades at the news agency, he covered conflicts as well as political and economic news in the Middle East and beyond. He began in Lebanon and headed bureaus in Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan/Afghanistan and Egypt/Sudan. He spent five years in London as Middle East diplomatic correspondent and five in Beirut as special correspondent, Middle East.