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The Arab Gulf’s Response to the War on Gaza [1]
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Date: 2023-12-29 08:02:07-05:00
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2024, pp. 18-19
Four Views: The World Reacts to Israel’s Attacks on Gaza
By Jack McGrath
ON NOV. 16, the fifth annual conference of the Gulf International Forum (GIF) convened at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The event was held amid the deadliest period of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent history, and the crisis took center stage from the outset.
In her opening remarks, GIF’s executive director Dania Thafer delivered a trenchant critique of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy, based on the 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy. The document lists U.S. priorities in the region as “counter[ing] Iran’s destabilizing activities” and “countering terrorist threats” to “support de-escalation and integration.” Thafer contended that “these objectives are distant from reality” because Washington’s actions (such as facilitating the Abraham Accords between a handful of Arab states and Israel) amount to “surface-level de-escalation, prioritizing optics over durable solutions and overlooking grievances in the region.”
Contrasting U.S. goals to outcomes, she observed, “With each photo out of Gaza, Iran [which ardently supports Palestinian resistance] gains more influence across the region.” At the same time, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) views the involvement of Yemen’s Houthi group in the Israel conflict as a message that “Iranian proxies can target us and our allies,” she said. (Saudi Arabia launched a devastating war against the Iran-aligned Houthis in 2015. A ceasefire was reached in April 2022 and has since remained in place, despite formally expiring in Oct. 2022.) According to Thafer, “The U.S. failure to work for a two-state solution has harmed Israelis, Palestinians and U.S. interests and brought the threat to the Gulf. Tensions mean that a small spark could set the region ablaze.”
At the same time, the war has in some ways facilitated closer Arab-Iranian ties. Most notably, Saudi Arabia invited Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to Riyadh in November to participate in an emergency summit about Gaza, the first such visit of an Iranian president in more than 15 years. There are also reports that Riyadh has offered Tehran greater economic investments if it prevents its proxies from turning the Israel-Gaza war into a regional conflict. Observers view such developments as fruits of the March 2023 agreement—brokered by China—to restore diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Middle East fellow at the Baker Institute, agreed that Palestine cannot be placed on the sidelines of the region’s concerns. “There is no going back to the pre-October status quo,” he said. “There is no more bumbling along and hoping Gaza goes away; this is not sustainable and never was.” Ulrichsen claimed that the significant difference in this conflict compared to prior Israeli wars is that the GCC states are now “some of the most influential diplomatic, economic and political actors in the region,” capable of playing a prominent role.
“This is the first time there could be serious potential for the GCC to be in the driver's seat,” concurred Paul Salem, director of the Middle East Institute. “Arab states initially believed the U.S. could solve it, but the U.S. refuses to influence Israel. This conflict needs a political resolution, and nothing other than a two-state solution is viable,” he said.
However, GCC governments have little appetite for playing hardball with Israel, as they have in the past, explained Abdulaziz Sager, chairman of the Gulf Research Center. “Arab countries are not interested in an oil embargo or boycotts. They don’t have strong military capabilities or a wish to get involved.”
Meanwhile, the staggering death toll wrought by the Israeli onslaught has provoked a public uproar across the Middle East. “Grief and anger have reached unprecedented levels,” Thafer reported. Roxane Farmanfarmaian, professor of international studies at Cambridge University, said that “the degree of popular outrage is misunderstood” in Washington. “The post-colonial moment in the Arab world is as strong as the Arab Spring, but this time not directed against Arab leadership, but directed against the West,” she said.
Abdullah Baabood, an Omani academic currently serving as Qatar’s chair of Islamic Area Studies, noted that Kuwait, Qatar and Oman have seen largedemonstrations in solidarity with Palestine, while public expressions of anger have been limited in Saudi Arabia. In Bahrain and the UAE, both signatories to the Abraham Accords, “The public doesn’t want to embarrass their governments, and public opinion is highly controlled, so it is difficult to tell” exactly what people are thinking, he said. However, reports indicate that the Bahraini government has violently cracked down on those taking to the streets in support of Gaza, even as the country has recalled its ambassador to Israel.
In contrast, there has been “very strong condemnation of Israel from Iran and Turkey, embarrassing some Arab countries that are not using the same language,” Baabood noted. “My worry is that this conflict is leading to the empowerment of Turkey and Iran among the Arab public,” which sees the non-Arab powers “supporting Palestine strongly while some Arab ones are not doing as much as they should.”
Iran’s leading role in the “Axis of Resistance” has bolstered the Islamic Republic’s regional reputation, but Tehran has distanced itself from the war to avoid escalation, Baabood said. “The Hezbollah conflict is within ‘acceptable’ conduct, Houthi missiles are low range and Iraq and Syria [militia proxy] attacks on the U.S. are sending the message that further war atrocities could lead to a larger conflict, which the region doesn’t want,” he added.
The Hamas attack on Oct. 7 was an attempt to sabotage the Abraham Accords, posited Jonathan Lord, director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. Over the past year, Israel strengthened economic ties with Bahrain and the UAE while U.S.-brokered Saudi-Israel normalization talks “advanced rapidly and publicly,” he noted. Lord predicted that “once the conflict subsides, normalization with Saudi will resume” because the Biden administration’s unquestioned military support for Israel “represents what Saudi wants for itself,” bolstering the deal’s credibility.
Omar H. Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, purported that the Accords were driven purely by the national interests of participating Gulf states. “Nothing whatsoever has been done in the past three years to advance Palestinian interests, which would have required effort and political will that they weren’t willing to muster,” he said.
Jack McGrath is a Marcellus Policy Fellow at the John Quincy Adams Society. He holds a bachelor of arts in political science with a history minor from George Washington University. He is also the assistant director of Middle East Books and More.
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