A lightning strike and an altered landscape (updated)
Summary: in the early hours of 7 October Hamas launched a land,
air and sea attack on Israel that caught the IDF completely by surprise.
The Israelis’ military preponderance means they will prevail but Hamas’
early victories have sent seismic shocks across the Middle East.
With fighting dying down inside Israel, the bombardment of Gaza
continues as casualties on both sides mount. The reaction among Western
media and Western leaders to Hamas’ lightning raid into Israel was a
predictable condemnation of terrorism. The context of increased Israeli
intrusions into Al-Aqsa, the ongoing settler violence and the role
played by extremist ministers in the Netanyahu government in fomenting
and encouraging that violence received only glancing comment.
The official Arab response was more nuanced and tempered, although
some observers gave emphatic and unqualified support to Hamas.
Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, long a conduit for UAE government views, tweeted in the early hours of the surprise attack:
Resisting the usurping Israeli settler occupation is a legitimate
right that deserves the support of honourable people in the world. We
pray for your victory, heroes of the resistance.
On Sunday, however, as the scale of the attack and the number of Israeli casualties rose the Emiratis called for the protection of civilians on both sides and an end to violence while condemning the Hamas operation:
Attacks by Hamas against Israeli towns and villages near the Gaza
strip, including the firing of thousands of rockets at population
center, are a serious and grave escalation….(The UAE) is appalled by
reports that Israeli civilians have been abducted as hostages from their
homes.
The UAE along with Bahrain were the first Gulf states to recognise
Israel as part of Donald Trump’s so-called Abraham Accords. The Saudi
de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman has been in deep discussions with
the US about joining in the normalization. Displaying that, unlike
Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden he was in no need of a quick political
win, the crown prince set very high demands. He wants a US defense pact
with fewer restrictions on arms sales and assistance in developing a
civilian nuclear programme. The Saudis also called for Israel to make
some concessions to benefit Palestinians, though that was very much a
lower priority for MbS. (For more on the efforts to do a deal listen to
our podcast Biden blunders in the Middle East with the Cato Institute’s Jon Hoffman.)
Just last week a deal seemed barely a touch away from being realised.
Faisal Abbas, the editor in chief of Arab News, writing on 4 October implied as much in taking up the Palestinian question:
What Saudi Arabia can do — and, from what I understand, has been
doing for the past two years — is work on an initiative to make peace a
more attractive proposition than war for both parties. In fact, there is
a whole team at the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs that has been
working with serious and concerned parties such as the EU and the Arab
League on imagining a 2.0 version of the Arab Peace Initiative.
The new ‘2.0 version’, Abbas suggested, would be close to Jared Kushner’s Peace to Prosperity proposal
which would see swathes of the West Bank carved up into isolated
patches surrounded by an Israel enlarged through de jure annexation, the
‘Swiss cheese’ effect that Netanyahu has long sought to achieve.
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