Israel-Gaza war: Western failure to see new realities thwarts peace

Arab governments want the US to understand that popular outrage could undermine the normalising of relations with Israel and spark anti-Western movements
Grasping this is essential for Washington as youth and minority voters are increasingly sympathetic to the suffering of Palestinians

Amr El Henawy

Published: 1:30pm, 18 Nov 2023

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This past month, as I travelled through many countries in the Middle East, I was repeatedly reminded of the failure of Western elites and media to understand the Arab world. The conflict in Gaza has revealed their deep ignorance of new realities.

Fifty-seven countries – more than a quarter of the membership of the United Nations – attended the joint Arab-Islamic Extraordinary Summit in Riyadh on November 11. The summit issued statements condemning Israel’s inhumane bombardment of Gaza and supporting the UN General Assembly’s resolution of October 26 for a sustained humanitarian truce leading to cessation of hostilities.

The summit received less coverage in the Western media than the humanitarian conference in Paris on November 9, at which Group of 20 nations and Western NGOs played major roles. Such coverage as the Arab-Islamic summit did receive emphasised the unity of the attendees in sending a strong message to Israel. In fact, summit unity was largely cosmetic and the message was not directed at Israel but at the United States.

Unity in the Islamic world has never been other than performative. The hostility between Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his host at the summit, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, remains the region’s primary geopolitical fact. Many Arab governments – but not Qatar, which is home to a Hamas political office – share a deep distaste for Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, but even this degree of unity fragments over any issue of responsibility for the post-war governance of Gaza.

Only one issue united the summit: no one wants a regional war. Yet the Western media, focusing on Iran’s aggressive pan-Islamic ideology and its allied insurgent movements – Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen – obsesses over this risk.

Ignoring obvious geopolitical facts – such as that neither the United States, China, Iran, nor any Arab government, including Saudi Arabia, wants a wider war – the media hypes the dramatic prospect of conflict on Israel’s northern border.

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The substance of the message that the summit’s Arab attendees sent to the US and its Western allies is of the acute region-wide risk of political and social turmoil in a repetition of the Arab spring. The Arab monarchies and the governments of Egypt and Turkey share an existential fear that the Muslim street will come to blame and rise up against them for abandoning Gazans to Israeli carnage.

Arab governments want Washington to understand that popular outrage could not only undermine the recent regional trend toward normalising relations with Israel, it could also endanger the Abraham Accords and even provoke popular anti-Western political movements across the region.

Accusations of hypocrisy are rare in diplomatic relations between friendly governments. However, Arab diplomats have not hesitated to contrast Western moral outrage over Russia’s strikes against Ukraine with the muted concern over the even more destructive Israeli attacks on Gaza. They point as well to the moral damage Washington will suffer for arming and encouraging Israel in what many – not only in the Middle East but throughout the Global South – see as a colonial war of occupation and oppression.

The humanitarian case against civilian deaths is also gaining strength in the Western media. Israel’s official information is increasingly countered in coverage of events in Gaza with reports from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, Unicef, Medecins Sans Frontieres and other humanitarian NGOs.

As international blame is heaped on Israel, the memory of Hamas’ horrific acts has begun to fade. This is in contrast to the ongoing international rehabilitation of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which was guilty of a mountain of wholly unprovoked atrocities. Israel was responding to the massacre of its citizens; Assad’s regime is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its own people.

The anger of the Arab street has a strange parallel in the swelling pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Western capitals. The administration of US President Joe Biden is worried not only by the marches and demonstrations against Israel in US cities and campuses, it faces potentially grave electoral threats in the mounting criticism of its pro-Israeli stance among progressive voters and in the overwhelming support for the Palestinian cause among young people and minority voters.

Biden must also reckon with former president Barack Obama’s emotionally expressed concerns about civilian deaths in Gaza. Meanwhile the Republican Party, which is far more committed to Israel than to Ukraine, seems to be gaining politically from voter backlash against the antisemitism of some immigrant Palestinians.

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There is a sophisticated understanding among Arab elites that what happens next in Gaza will be largely decided by the course of the domestic politics of the US. They also understand that the post-war future of Gazans will be shaped to some extent by what happens in Israeli politics.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, like Golda Meir 50 years ago, will probably be held responsible for the intelligence failure of October 7. But will Likud fracture as a major party? What kind of Israeli government will emerge as the conflict in Gaza winds down?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of history’s great moral tragedies. Two peoples – neighbours who share so many cultural practices, victims respectively of the Holocaust and the Nakba, both suffering from pathological mutual hate – are locked in a struggle that each believes is existential but which was imported to the area by Western powers.

Perhaps the world’s shocked reaction to the atrocities of October 7 and to the rising toll of civilian deaths in Gaza will force new international efforts to achieve some version of peace between the two peoples.

Ambassador Amr El Henawy is a former senior Egyptian diplomat with an international career spanning over 30 years, most notably as consul general to London and Hong Kong and ambassador to Slovakia

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