Many well-meaning pro-Palestine commentators have long urged Arab nations to unite, put pressure on Washington to reassess its unwavering support for Israel, and take decisive actions to lift the siege on Gaza, among other crucial matters. While these steps may hold some value, the reality is far more complex, and such wishful thinking is unlikely to change the behaviour of Arab governments. These regimes are more concerned with sustaining or returning to some form of status quo, one in which Palestine’s liberation remains of secondary importance.
Since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza on 7 October, 2023, the Arab position on Israel has been weak at best, and treacherous at worst. Some Arab governments even went so far as to condemn Palestinian resistance in UN debates. While countries like China and Russia at least attempted to contextualise the 7 October Hamas assault on Israeli occupation forces imposing a brutal siege on Gaza, countries like Bahrain placed the blame squarely on the Palestinians.
With a few exceptions, it took Arab governments weeks — even months — to develop a relatively strong stance that condemned the Israeli offensive in any meaningful terms.
Although the rhetoric began to shift slowly, the actions did not follow. While the Ansar Allah movement in Yemen (the “Houthis”), alongside other Arab non-state actors, attempted to impose some form of pressure on Israel through a blockade, Arab regimes instead worked to ensure that Israel could withstand the potential consequences of its isolation.
In his book War, Bob Woodward disclosed that some Arab governments told the then US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that they had no objections to Israel’s efforts to crush Palestinian resistance. However, some were concerned about the media images of mutilated Palestinian civilians, which could stir public unrest in their own countries. That public unrest never materialised, and with time, the genocide, famine and cries for help in Gaza were normalised as yet another tragic regional event, not unlike the civil wars in Sudan and Syria.
For 15 months of relentless Israeli genocide that has resulted in the killing and wounding of over 162,000 Palestinians in Gaza, official Arab political institutions remained largely irrelevant in terms of efforts to end the war. The US Biden administration was emboldened by such Arab inaction, and continued to push for greater normalisation between Arab countries and Israel, even in the face of over 15,000 children killed in Gaza in the most brutal ways imaginable.
While the moral failures of the West, the shortcomings of international law and the criminal actions of Biden and his administration have been criticised widely for serving as a shield for Israel’s war crimes, the complicity of Arab governments in enabling these atrocities is often ignored. The Arabs have, in fact, played a more significant role in the Israeli atrocities in Gaza than we often recognise; some through their silence, and others through direct collaboration with Israel.
Throughout the war, reports surfaced indicating that some Arab countries actively lobbied in Washington on behalf of Israel, advocating against an Egyptian-Arab League proposal aimed at reconstructing Gaza without ethnically cleansing its population, the latter being promoted by the Trump administration and Israel.
The Egyptian proposal, which was accepted unanimously by Arab countries at their summit on 4 March, represented the strongest and most unified stance taken by the Arab world during the war. The proposal, which was rejected by Israel and dismissed by the US, helped shift the discourse in America around the subject of ethnic cleansing. It ultimately led to comments by Trump on 12 March during a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, including, “No one’s expelling anyone from Gaza.”
For some Arab states to actively oppose the only relatively strong Arab position signals that the issue of Arab failures in Palestine goes beyond mere disunity or incompetence; it reflects a much darker and more cynical reality.
Some Arab regimes align their interests with Israel, whereby a free Palestine isn’t just a non-issue, it’s a threat.
The same applies to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, which continues to work hand in hand with Israel to suppress any form of resistance in the West Bank. Its concern in Gaza is not about ending the genocide, but ensuring the marginalisation of its Palestinian political rivals, particularly Hamas. Thus, blaming the PA for mere “weakness”, for “not doing enough”, or for failing to unify the Palestinian ranks is a misreading of the situation. The priorities of Mahmoud Abbas and his PA allies are very different: they want to secure their control over the Palestinians, which can only be sustained through Israel’s military dominance.
These are difficult, yet critical truths, as they allow us to reframe the conversation, moving away from the false assumption that Arab unity will resolve everything. The flaw in the unity theory is that it assumes — naively — that Arab regimes inherently reject Israeli occupation and support Palestine.
While some Arab governments are genuinely outraged by Israel’s criminal behaviour and are increasingly frustrated by the irrational policies of the US in the region, others are driven by self-interest, including their animosity towards Iran and the fear of the rising influence non-state Arab actors. They are equally concerned about instability in the region, which threatens their hold on power amid a rapidly shifting world order.
As solidarity with Palestine has expanded from the global South to the global majority, the heads of Arab regimes remain largely ineffective, fearing that significant political change in the region could directly challenge their own positions. What they fail to understand is that their silence, or their active support for Israel, may very well lead to their own downfall in any case.
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