Arab leaders still denounce Israel’s war on Gaza, but their generals now plan beside Israeli officers under US command.
Salman Rafi Sheikh
Arab Realism
At the heart of Arab realism is the fact that these states are caught between a shifting geopolitical order and the imperative of maintaining popular legitimacy. As a result, Arab regimes are perfecting a dual-track strategy, one that reveals their perpetual struggle to survive amid competing pressures. Israel may never be their enemy or a friend, but it has become a necessary partner in a regional architecture only Washington can guarantee. The Arab states know no other way to manage this uneasy “frenemy” than through American mediation and military integration.
Yet rapprochement with Iran offers no real alternative. Tehran, despite its new pragmatism and rapprochement with Saudi Arabia, remains both a rival and an actor too powerful to ignore or even to embrace fully. Trapped between these poles lie Arab populations whose rage over Gaza continues to burn and whom rulers must pacify domestic actors through symbolic denunciations of Israel while deepening covert cooperation behind closed doors. For the monarchies and military regimes alike, legitimacy has become an act of balance between dependence and defiance, between what they say for the street and what they do for survival.
Arab Realism may prove less a strategy of survival than a slow act of self-erosion
But the Arab dilemma is that this dual-track strategy is very hard to keep from public attention and, although quiet, potentially dangerous scrutiny. Recent leaks are hard to miss. The Washington Post said in a report how Arab states have been expanding, via the US Central Command’s “Regional Security Construct,” military ties with Israel for the past three years at least. Several meetings have been held in places such as Bahrain, Egypt, and even Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base. They focused on air-defense integration, radar data sharing, tunnel-detection systems, and counter-Iran coordination. In May 2024, Israeli and Arab officers also met in Doha for a covert planning session, with the Israeli delegation entering on non-civilian flights to avoid exposure. Publicly, these same governments denounced Israeli aggression; privately, they trained together under CENTCOM’s umbrella. The leaks lay bare what Arab Realism truly means in practice. It is a doctrine of managed duplicity, where survival requires cooperation even with those condemned on camera.
The leaked documents also show that the driving force for this quiet cooperation was the threat posed by Iran. But, as we all know, Arab states are also using alternative means to ‘manage’ Iran, such as Chinese mediation.
The Domestic Realm
But the political conflict these states are facing is far deeper: they must maintain a façade of condemnation, and that too very intense. For instance, at the US General Assembly in September, the Qatari emir called the conflict “a genocidal war waged against the Palestinian people” and accused Israel of being “a state hostile to its environment, complicit in building an apartheid system.” The Saudi Foreign Ministry condemned Israel in August for what it described as the “starvation” and “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. Such statements are not mere diplomacy; they are instruments of survival. They allow rulers to perform moral outrage, to echo the language of their citizens’ anger, even as their militaries operate within a US-Israeli security framework. The principle at the heart of this politics is this: the louder the condemnation, the deeper the concealment.
The fact is that across the Arab world, public opinion remains overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Palestinians. Surveys and reports by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (Doha, 2023) and the Washington Institute (2024) show that large majorities in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf reject normalization with Israel and view its war in Gaza as unjustifiable. For regimes already dependent on patronage and coercion rather than popular consent, open alignment with Israel would invite unrest and moral collapse. Condemnation, therefore, becomes a tool of political survival, i.e., a symbolic act that projects autonomy and moral authority while concealing strategic dependency on the US and Israel. In this sense, the performative outrage from Arab capitals is less about principle than about managing the street: a ritualized defiance that legitimizes rulers even as their militaries secretly train beside those they publicly condemn.
The UAE’s management of domestic public perception illustrates how Arab Realism operates not only through policy but also through careful media choreography. Emirati outlets such as Al-Bayan, Al-Khaleej, and Emarat Al Youm systematically downplay or omit reports of cooperation with Israel, as seen in 2020, when the UAE’s Arabic-language press largely ignored coverage of joint medical initiatives with Israel during the pandemic. Yet, when details cannot be fully concealed, they are packaged in so-called humanitarian terms. At the 2024 World Governments Summit, a senior Emirati diplomat defended the country’s ties with Israel by citing its field hospital in Gaza and a maritime medical ship docked in Egypt’s Al-Arish port—casting collaboration as a moral necessity rather than a political alignment. Through such selective visibility and moral reframing, the UAE manages to sustain a partnership with Israel while preserving the appearance of solidarity with Palestinians.
But the problem for the Arab world is that the contradictions of this dual-track strategy—denouncing Israel to the public while cooperating with it in secret—cannot remain concealed forever. The more Arab states normalize under the table, the more they delegitimize themselves above it. In the end, Arab Realism may prove less a strategy of survival than a slow act of self-erosion. By condemning Israel in public while coordinating with it in secret, Arab leaders gamble their key source of legitimacy, i.e., the moral capital of Palestine. The illusion of stability may hold for now, but it rests on a fragile deceit: that Arab citizens will forever accept hypocrisy as diplomacy. When that illusion breaks—as it inevitably will—the very regimes that sought safety in secrecy may find themselves without allies, without legitimacy, and without a cause left to defend or be supported.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affair
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