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At the U.N. General Assembly in September, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, brandished a map titled “The New Middle East” and asserted that Israel’s ties with Arab states were helping to create a corridor of peace from India through the Persian Gulf, via Israel, to Europe. A week later, the U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, declared, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
A lot has changed in six months. The Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands — ignored in those expressions of optimism — has come back to the fore. Missiles are darting across the Middle East as the war between Israel and Hamas spills over into neighboring countries, with Iran and Israel exchanging direct missile and drone strikes for the first time.
To keep track of what is going on between some of the key players, we sketched out a social network of friends, enemies and frenemies involved in the region. Examining the web makes it clear how snarled and precarious the current situation is.
Our network is far from comprehensive in its scope. Two of Israel’s neighbors with whom it has peace treaties — Egypt, which is part of mediation efforts with Hamas, and Jordan — are not featured here. In Jordan in particular, public outrage is palpable, often spilling into the streets. Anger rose a notch following Jordan’s cooperation (hesitantly acknowledged by its leadership) in responding to the April 13 Iranian drone and missile strike on Israel.
Also excluded from the graphic are countries that normalized relations with Israel, including under the Abraham Accords: Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Morocco. These ties have proved resilient under the strain of six months of war, and the inaction of these Arab states as Israel kills tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians lays to rest any naïve notion that the Abraham Accords could help deliver Palestinian rights and freedoms.
Readers may notice that the Palestinian node in our graphic shows Hamas rather than the Fatah-led Palestine Liberation Organization and its arm of limited governance in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority. The Authority is deeply unpopular, and continues to cooperate with Israel even as Israel entrenches its control over the Palestinians while expanding illegal settlements. Calls for political change are rife in Palestinian society, at home and abroad. Excluding Hamas from future Palestinian political arrangements is an Israeli-U.S. pipe dream.
Meanwhile, successive U.S. administrations have sought to pivot away from entanglement in the Middle East, especially in the wake of America’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, a trend accelerated by America’s sharper focus on China and now Russia. Both the Trump and Biden administrations had seen promise in a version of a Pax Americana with less of a direct role for the United States and deeper military cooperation with regional allies as deterrence, particularly against Iran and its axis. That, in turn, would necessitate closer cooperation between Israel and more Arab states.
The human cost and horror of Israel’s actions in Gaza have diminished these possibilities. Moreover, the shattering of the myth of Israeli invincibility and the Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence and operational shortcomings since Oct. 7, combined with the Israeli government’s growing extremism, render closer relations with Israel far less attractive for many Arab states.
Countries in the region have also driven de-escalation on their own in recent years. The four-state blockade of Qatar, led by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, came to an end, and the Gulf states are all back on talking terms. Turkey (also not in our network) has mended fences across most of the region. The Saudi-led military action in Yemen has been winding down. In March 2023, China brokered a breakthrough, re-establishing ties between two of the region’s heavyweights, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Our network also shows that America is still somewhat trapped in this region. (Imagine that we swapped out the United States for China or Russia; neither would be connected to any other node by a red line of hostility.) America’s options remain circumscribed while it continues a lockstep alliance with an Israel that appears unwilling to shift course on the Palestinian question and is increasingly internationally defined as an apartheid regime. Israel’s campaign in Gaza — the killing of some 14,000 children, according to the Gazan health ministry, the devastation of cities and the humanitarian crisis, all while the United States has continued to arm Israel and support it at the United Nations — may only exacerbate America’s troubles.
Amid current tensions, it’s hard to imagine a transition toward regional de-escalation that would include rights and justice for Palestinians. But the magnitude of the current war in Gaza has upended calcified strategies, and that could be a harbinger of previously unlikely openings.
Daniel Levy is the president of the U.S./Middle East Project and served as an Israeli peace negotiator at the Oslo-B talks under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Taba negotiations under Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
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