Arab states that tried to pivot away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are back in crisis mode, facing furious citizens and a widening war.
By Kareem Fahim and Hannah Allam, The Washington PostPalestinians survey the damage caused by an airstrike to a home in downtown Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday.
Now, the UAE and other Arab states are grappling with a Middle East on the edge of calamity. Israel’s impending invasion of Gaza has threatened to trigger a multi-front war involving Iran and its allies. As the Palestinian death toll soars, protests have shaken regional capitals, with anger boiling over at Israel and the military support it receives from the United States.
Since Hamas militants attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,400 people and seizing about 200 hostages, at least 6,500 Palestinians have been killed during weeks of Israeli airstrikes, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Hundreds of other people are unaccounted for and presumed dead under the rubble, Palestinian health officials have said.
The wording of the statements varied. But the message was strikingly cohesive for “a group of countries that are not always talking in the same voice and tenor,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a Middle East analyst and director of the U.S. program at the International Crisis Group. New Palestinian militant groups began forming in the West Bank, carrying out attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians, their prominence and appeal eclipsing that of the weak and discredited Palestinian Authority. The situation prompted a rare high-level warning in February from CIA Director William J. Burns, who spoke of “greater fragility and greater violence” after a visit to the region.
There was little incentive for Israel to heed such warnings, analysts said. For years, the United States and its Arab partners had other priorities.For Washington, competition with Russia and China took precedence over the Middle East. Successive U.S. administrations treated the region primarily as a battleground for rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran, with little consideration for Arab states’ interests and politics, analysts and rights activists complained.
“So the only thing the United States did was pursue normalization agreements,” Muasher said, referring to the Abraham Accords, President Donald Trump’s foreign policy showpiece, later adopted by the Biden administration as a pillar of its Middle East strategy. “What was happening was the normalization of the suffering of the Palestinians, the normalization of an unfair situation, the normalization of occupation,” said Nancy Okail, president and chief executive of the Center for International Policy in Washington. “It was not the normalization of peaceful coexistence of Israel with other countries in the region based on fair and just terms. That’s why it was not sustainable.
Mohammed Thair, a 33-year-old dentist who protested near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Friday, said that for years, the United States and its Western allies have been “calling for human rights.” He delivered some of his remarks in English, talking about the frustration of seeing the international outrage over civilian victims of “another conflict” - a reference to Ukraine - go quiet when it comes to Palestinians in Gaza.
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