How the Israel-Hamas War Allows Iran to Corner the Arab States
Palestinian civilian casualties in the conflict have put Arab states on the defensive.
By: Kamran Bokhari
Hamas’ unprecedented Oct. 7 attack on Israel has created a major predicament for the Arab states.
Countries like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which have long sought peaceful relations with Israel and deeply oppose Hamas, have been forced to avoid criticizing the extremist Palestinian Islamist movement and instead take a public stance in opposition to Israel.
The attack has also created rifts between Arab nations and the United States.
The unfolding crisis is a huge gain for Iran, which has long sought to destabilize the Middle East in order to enhance its power and influence.
Some 500 Palestinians were reportedly killed on Oct. 17 in what Palestinian and Arab officials are calling an Israeli airstrike on a hospital in the Gaza Strip and what U.S and Israeli authorities are saying was an explosion caused by a misfired rocket launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group.
Arab states have harshly condemned Israel for hitting the al-Ahli hospital, where Palestinians wounded in the Israel-Hamas war were being treated.
Amid a growing number of anti-American and anti-Israeli protests in many regional countries, Jordan canceled a summit it was to host on Oct. 18 with U.S. President Joe Biden, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the country’s monarch, King Abdullah II.
The bombing of the hospital occurred as the American president was en route to Israel to help prevent the crisis from morphing into a regional conflict.
Biden was forced to cancel his trip to the Jordanian capital.
The fact that Biden had to travel to the region only days after both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were there underscores the heightened risks of a broader war in the Middle East.
The deaths of hundreds of Palestinians at the hospital have worsened matters for Arab governments.
They were already bracing for large casualties and displacement of Palestinian civilians, as Israel has been gearing up for a ground offensive to remove the Hamas government.
The last thing that many Arab capitals with chronically fragile political economies want to see is their own people protesting against Israel and the United States, which could threaten the stability of their regimes.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been a deep concern for Arab states.
Since their emergence as independent states in the interwar period and immediately after World War II, Arab states sought to end the then-nascent Jewish state but did not seek a sovereign Palestine.
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 in Cairo with the backing of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser as a tool to further his pan-Arab nationalist ambitions.
By the time the Arab states realized that even their combined forces were no match for the Israeli military following their massive defeat in the 1967 war, the PLO had established itself as a serious force championing the Palestinian national struggle, which ran counter to the competing interests of Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
Egypt’s 1978 peace treaty with Israel led to further divergence between the interests of Cairo and the Palestinians.
Within a decade though, the PLO also recognized Israeli statehood and sought through diplomacy to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel has occupied since the 1967 war.
It was an arrangement that the main Arab states saw as in their interest in the wake of the 1987 Intifada, in which Hamas emerged as a radical Islamist rival to Yasser Arafat’s secular Fatah faction, which had long dominated the PLO.
By this time, Iran had also begun to emerge as a regional power seeking to expand its influence in the Arab world.
Iran had already established Hezbollah as its principal proxy in the early 1980s, and Syria became its lone Arab state ally.
The end of its disastrous eight-year war with Iraq in 1988 and the weakening of the Iraqi regime in the 1991 Gulf War enabled Tehran to expand its influence in the Arab world.
The Islamist Iranian regime was particularly interested in leveraging the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and inspired the creation of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
It would not be long before Hamas, the main Palestinian Islamist movement, also gravitated toward the Iranian orbit.
As the PLO was moving toward negotiations, Hamas emerged as its main rival, assuming the mantle of armed struggle.
That same year, when the PLO signed the U.S.-backed Oslo Accords with Israel, which led to the creation of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Hamas along with PIJ launched a massive campaign of suicide bombings against Israel.
The inability of Israel and the PLO to reach a final settlement over the next seven years led to the Second Intifada in 2000, which further strengthened Hamas and weakened the Fatah-dominated PNA.
Realizing that the breakdown of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, along with the 9/11 attacks, had created more room for Iran to exploit the weaknesses in the Arab world, then-Saudi monarch King Abdullah in 2002 offered Israel a comprehensive peace in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza following the withdrawal of Israeli troops to their pre-1967 positions.
Israel’s rejection of the Saudi offer, followed by the 2003 Iraq War, Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas’ victory in the 2006 elections, further strengthened Iran’s hand in the region.
The political gridlock after Hamas’ electoral success led in 2007 to the Palestinian civil war, which resulted in two separate Palestinian entities: Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah ruling the West Bank.
Meanwhile, Hamas had acquired rocket capabilities from Iran.
Since 2008, the group has engaged in four wars and several limited clashes, all of which created crises for the Arab states that they were able to weather.
The scale of the latest Hamas attack has broken the cycle of the past decade and a half, in which every few years there was a Gaza war ending in a truce.
It has created a situation where the Arab states, which oppose Hamas and share an interest with Israel in containing the Iranian-backed group, have been forced to disregard its actions and instead criticize Israel.
The fear of regional instability among Arab governments has them on the defensive.
In this way, Iran and Hamas have been able to derive significant geopolitical dividends because as more Palestinian civilians are killed in the Israel-Hamas fighting, they stand to benefit.
By confronting Israel via Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran puts the Arab states on the defensive.
Tehran hopes that with time this process will weaken them, thereby creating more strategic space in the region for itself.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario