With the war in Gaza having intensified following the end of the recent U.S.-supported pause in fighting, it has become clear that this conflict is upending President Joe Biden’s plans for the Middle East.
For the past three years, under both former President Donald Trump and Biden, Washington advanced the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab states, in an effort to facilitate Israel’s regional integration with a promise of peace and prosperity. All the while, the U.S. was chasing after the crown jewel of normalization—an Israel-Saudi peace deal.
But the war has dealt a body blow to Arab-Israeli normalization, at least on the terms previously considered. While Gulf states at the forefront of normalization like the United Arab Emirates are maintaining relations with Israel, the extraordinary death toll and destruction in Gaza is further stiffening public sentiment against normalization and constraining how far Arab leaders can pursue cooperation in such a regional climate.
Even before the war, normalizing states like Morocco were increasingly skittish about hosting U.S.-orchestrated regional meetings that included Israel due to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line government, which includes extremist pro-settler ministers intent on provoking Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Now, amid deteriorating conditions in Gaza, Morocco’s leaders are feeling further pressure to freeze if not reverse normalization. Jordan, which normalized relations with Israel in 1994, backed out of an energy and water deal with Israel and the UAE after the war began, and its leaders have forcefully criticized Israel’s military campaign, with Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi calling it a “systemic effort to empty Gaza of its people.”
As for Israeli-Saudi normalization, it was understood that closing the deal would require a “significant Palestinian component.” But hopes for a breakthrough prior to the war hinged on sweeteners for Riyadh from Washington, as serious Israeli concessions to the Palestinians were considered unrealistic given Netanyahu’s track record of dividing and undermining Palestinian national governance. The extent of Hamas’ atrocities on Oct. 7 combined with the continued hostage crisis in Gaza has only hardened Israeli views on the prospects of peaceful co-existence with Palestinians, making any concessions in the context of an Israeli-Saudi deal even less likely now.
While the war has jeopardized Israel’s regional integration, it has accelerated that of Iran. Many of Iran’s Arab neighbors remain concerned about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and regional influence. But the Israel-Hamas conflict is reinforcing the inclination to engage with rather than confront Iran. That has further enabled Tehran to break out of its regional isolation as it builds on restored diplomatic ties with a number of Arab states, including Saudi Arabia.
Just a week into the war, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman—the kingdom’s de facto leader—held their first phone call since the restoration of bilateral relations last March. The following month, Raisi attended an emergency summit hosted by Saudi Arabia on the Gaza crisis, the first such visit by an Iranian president to Saudi Arabia in over a decade. Saudi and Iranian defense officials are even discussing military cooperation in the wake of the war.
Not all is lost for the Biden administration. But it will have to make serious adjustments to its Middle East policies to mitigate the damage the war in Gaza has already done in the wider region.
At the same time, the war has scuttled informal de-escalation understandings between Tehran and Washington. After a months-long lull in attacks, Iranian-aligned militias have launched over 90 strikes on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since mid-October, while Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis have targeted U.S. warships and commercial vessels in the Red Sea with a number of drone and missile attacks as well. The war has also increased the risks for new attacks on U.S. naval forces and international shipping in the Persian Gulf.
Gaps are also widening between Washington and the Arab region, with popular sentiment blaming U.S. backing of Israel for the destruction in Gaza. The war in Ukraine had already made the U.S. and its European allies vulnerable to accusations of double standards, with many in the region asking why the determination to fight aggression was less pronounced when it came to the war in Syria. Now the war in Gaza has increased anger at what many perceive as a selective Western application of the “rules-based” international order. Against this backdrop, Biden’s ill-advised decision to link Israel’s war against Hamas to Ukraine’s war against Russia was a case of not reading the room, thereby highlighting inconsistencies in U.S policies to the benefit of global competitors like Russia and China.
Senior U.S. officials, and even Biden himself, are increasingly critical of the Israeli military campaign and expressing more concern about the high Palestinian civilian death toll. But the administration’s reluctance to back a cease-fire beyond the recently ended temporary truce has put it at direct odds with some of Washington’s closest partners. Early in the war, the optics of Biden traveling to Israel to meet with Netanyahu and offer his full-throated support as Palestinian civilian casualties mounted led Jordan’s King Abdullah to cancel Biden’s scheduled follow-up stop in Amman. Now U.S. diplomats are warning that Washington’s support for Israel’s military assault on Gaza “is losing [the U.S.] Arab publics for a generation.” And the U.S. veto of the United Nations Security Council resolution last week calling for a humanitarian cease-fire defied Arab partners that backed the proposal.
Not all is lost for the Biden administration, and its diplomacy on hostage releases has been deeply appreciated in Israel. But it will have to make serious adjustments to its Middle East policies to mitigate the damage already done in the wider region.
This will require shifts on regional priorities and a willingness to more openly confront an Israeli government filled with ideologues actively inflaming regional tensions and sabotaging any viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once this war ends. Though his influence among Palestinians may be more limited, Biden should deploy his personal brand of empathy there, too, in the hopes of rebuilding trust and helping them usher in a new generation of leaders as well. It simply will not be possible to make progress on the “day after” this war, even with renewed international and regional commitment, absent new leaders on both sides with the political will and legitimacy to make the necessary tough compromises for a lasting peace.
Biden’s remarks earlier this week, in which he warned that Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” is costing it international backing and directly identified Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners as a problem, suggests he realizes this.
There is no guarantee that new Israeli and Palestinian leadership will improve the prospects for peace after the trauma of this war. But failing to address the hard issues at the core of this dispute in the hopes of simply returning to the policies that preceded Oct. 7 is certain to prolong the conflict, bringing continued misery to the people of the region and endangering U.S. interests.
Dalia Dassa Kaye is a senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations and a Fulbright Schuman visiting scholar at Lund University.