Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel accomplished the movement’s principal goals. It reestablished the centrality of the Palestinian cause in Arab and Muslim politics, the importance of which had diminished significantly, beginning with the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 and culminating with the Abraham Accords that gave short shrift to the conflict. And just as importantly, the attack delayed, perhaps even ended, the normalization process that was underway between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Until now, Israel has behaved in ways that only strengthen Hamas and Iran’s aims and postpone indefinitely the strategic goal of establishing normalization with Saudi Arabia--and with this the promise of security and prosperity for itself and the region.
The Biden administration and the Saudi leadership have tried in vain to convince the Israeli government that continuing the war in Gaza does not serve Israel’s long-term interests and that the only path worth pursuing includes a ceasefire, negotiations on the release of the hostages, and a guaranteed timetable for Palestinian statehood. In other words, defeating Hamas will require a determined process of empowering Palestinian moderates, and granting this long-suffering people a state and hope for a better future. By implication, without this process, extremists like Hamas, and spoilers like Iran, will continue to thrive by sowing violence and chaos. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, reiterated this on May 26th 2024, when he said: “The issue of Israel recognizing a two-state solution is in its own interest. I firmly believe that a two-state solution, that the establishment of a credible Palestinian state, serves not just the interests of the Palestinians and delivers their right to self-determination; it is also in the interest of Israel and delivers the security that Israel needs and deserves.” Unlike Iran and its allies, who explicitly call for Israel’s destruction, the Saudi position upholds the promise of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative that acknowledges Israel’s right to exist within secure borders but asserts that this can only be achieved through the creation of a viable Palestinian state. This is a view that the Saudis believe reflects the majority position of most Arab and Sunni Muslims.
Yet instead of following this counsel, Israel continues its blitz of Gaza, as of this writing, turning itself into an international pariah, without accomplishing its tactical aim of defeating Hamas. Strategically, the war is proving to be a catastrophe for Israel, and, thus far, has only enhanced the global status of the so-called Axis of Resistance (mihwar al-muqawama), which is led by Iran and its allies and proxies. The Netanyahu government seems driven by a combination of factors that involve, above all, avenging the October 7th attack and the desire to reestablish deterrence of Israel’s vaunted military. Another factor is the denial of the Palestinian right to statehood by Prime Minister Netanyahu and his extremist right-wing allies, who desire to annex most of the West Bank. In this respect, and despite their many differences, the right-wing Israeli government and Hamas, are two sides of the same coin, each eliminationists that deny the right of the other people to self-determination. Finally, it is alleged that Prime Minister Netanyahu has a personal stake in the war’s continuation, as this will postpone the legal cases pending against him on matters of corruption. Netanyahu might also be extending the war in the hope that a change of administration after the November elections in the United States will give him a freer hand to accomplish his goals of eliminating all possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict. Whatever the combination of reasons, there seems to be no long-term strategy behind this war, and several high-ranking Israelis have admitted as much.
The Centrality of Palestine
The events since October 7th have shown the unique importance of the Palestinian cause for Arabs and Muslims. The suffering meted out to the population of Gaza by Israel’s massive retaliation has resonated and mobilized people like no other conflict in recent times. For instance, the ongoing civil war in the Sudan has barely registered anywhere in the Middle East or outside, despite the nine million refugees it has produced, five million facing starvation, tens of thousands killed, and an ongoing genocide of ethnic African tribes by Arabs in Darfur. Palestinian rights are so symbolically potent that in Yemen, for example, the battlefield enemies of the Houthi militia have supported the latter’s attacks on maritime shipping in the Red Sea because they claim these are aimed at defeating Israel and supporting the Palestinians. In fact, the Houthis, like the Iranian regime that supports them, have been remarkably adept at instrumentalizing the Palestinian cause to bolster their own waning legitimacy. Similarly, Saudi Arabia, a country that has a long-standing and bloody conflict with the Houthis--and has been economically harmed by their maritime attacks--has not voiced substantive criticism of their actions. Doing so, it seems, would amount to siding with Israel against the Palestinians and thus be seen as treasonous.
Because of the war, the Saudi government launched a humanitarian aid campaign for Gaza, and the popular response to this provides an indication of the depth of feeling about the issue among ordinary Saudis. Until now, the campaign has garnered nearly two million individual donations, amounting to around two hundred million dollars. Given the average size of the Saudi household, the participation rate represents about half the total population, and the Saudi government has had to respond to this public outcry about Palestinian suffering. The importance of Palestine for ordinary Saudis has made the government insist on an immediate cease-fire, a withdrawal of all Israeli troops from Gaza, and a guaranteed pathway to Palestinian statehood. Nothing less will permit normalization to take place. These demands contrast with those Saudi Arabia had made of Israel before October 7th, and which were less specific. They principally involved a freezing of settlements in the West Bank. Hamas has effectively raised the ante, and this again underscores why Israel should come to terms with the unique significance of Palestine for Arabs and Muslims, and consequently for their leaders too.
Why is the Palestinian cause freighted with so much symbolic weight in the Arab and Muslim imagination and politics such that comparisons with other sites of suffering (e.g., Sudan, Syria, Rakhine State, Xinjiang) are, in fact, irrelevant? There is no straightforward answer to this question because it includes both real and intangible feelings of harm. The conflict involves sentiments of Arab and Muslim dispossession by usurping Jews who are perceived as clients of the West. Thus, the conflict underscores a sense of disempowerment and an injustice greater than any elicited by other struggles. One of the ways to illustrate its force is to cite an anecdote. An elderly Saudi friend recently explained Palestine’s importance by stating that “as long as we resist Israel, we [Arabs and Muslims] can pretend that we have not been defeated by the West.” In other words, the salience of the cause is as much about the injustices committed against the Palestinian people by Israel and its Western backers as it is about the relative standing and power of Arabs and Muslims in today’s world. This conflict casts a long shadow and is about more than itself. And because of this, Islamists like Hamas, as well as regimes such as the one in Iran, can invoke it and mobilize large numbers of Arabs and Muslims to their side. In so doing, Iran’s mullahs also hope many will forget their crimes against the Syrian people during that country’s recent and bloody civil war. Likewise, Hamas’s extreme brutality seems more like a footnote for many rather than a central element of its ideology. Equally, the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis has silenced the most pro-Western Arab regimes and interrupted all efforts at peace-making. This is a reality that Washington and Riyadh understand well, as do many centrists in Israel who desire security and a lasting peace.
The Politicization of Arabia’s Youth
A recent feature of societies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has been the relative de-politicization of young people as compared to the older generations who are more engaged in, and incited by, regional conflicts such as those of Palestine or, earlier still, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the looming threat of Iran’s Khomeinist ideology after 1979. The government in Riyadh had for decades stoked pan-Islamic causes and sentiments among the population through school curricula, media outlets, and mosque sermons. Yet since the attacks of 9/11, and even more so under the reign of King Salman since 2015, the government has shut down propaganda efforts relating to regional or pan-Islamic causes, favoring instead a focus on a commitment to the nation and its leaders and to the project of domestic social and economic transformation. The war in Gaza has disrupted matters because it has brought forth in graphic detail to Saudi youth the trauma of the Palestinians. This has had the effect of raising their consciousness in an acute fashion about regional and world politics, and the implications of this phenomenon are unpredictable. Will these young people, who represent the majority of the population, start organizing politically, and might they turn their attention from Palestine to matters pertaining to domestic grievances such as the rate of unemployment or the increasingly high cost of living? These are some of the second order effects of the war in Gaza that leaders in Riyadh are having to consider, and which make any further accommodation with Israel more difficult as long as the war rages.
Tactics versus Strategy
This essay began with the classical distinction between tactics and strategy, arguing that the political leadership in Israel is mired in the former whereas Hamas--and Iran--are behaving as masters of the latter. In the long game of politics in the Middle East, countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE are pushing for stability and economic integration for the future prosperity of their citizens, especially as oil becomes less valuable with the impending energy transition. This is why they are pursuing a stronger alliance with the US and normalization with Israel. In other words, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are thinking strategically and have a vision for economic development and they welcome the continuation of American hegemony in the region. By contrast, regimes like Iran and its Islamist allies (Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas) are revisionists in that they want to expel the US from the region and topple or destroy America’s local allies (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, Egypt). Israel’s pursuit of the war in Gaza, involving overwhelming devastation of infrastructure and the massive loss of civilian life, has not helped further America’s interests nor those of Israel’s potential regional partners in the Gulf. In fact, Israel has helped enhance the status of the revisionist camp—the Axis of Resistance--and its vision of an Islamist hegemony over the region. It is time Jerusalem started playing the long game too, which will involve negotiating a Palestinian state. Without this, not only will normalization with Saudi Arabia be impossible, but violence, instability, and radicalization will continue to plague Israel and the region.
Bernard Haykel is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and is writing a book on the modern history of Saudi Arabia and the transformation it is undergoing under the leadership of Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman.
