Confronted with a vain and impetuous US president, Arab leaders consider themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place, writes Mouin Rabbani [photo credit: Getty Images]
The upcoming Arab League summit, scheduled to convene in the Egyptian capital Cairo on March 4, represents a moment of truth for Arab governments, individually and collectively.
For 500 days they have stood by, inert, as Israel conducted a genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip with the unconditional support of Israel’s – and their – patron the United States.
The not entirely unpredictable culmination of this slaughter, and of the comatose Arab response, is that Washington now wants to seal the Palestinians’ fate not in Palestine, but in the Arab world and at Arab expense. It wants to literally export the Palestine question to the Arab world and thereby make it an Arab problem.
One does not have to accept that US President Donald Trump’s proposal to seize the Gaza Strip and permanently expel its Palestinian inhabitants to Arab states is imminent or even serious to recognise the challenge it poses to Arab national security and regional stability.
Trump’s initiative provides political cover to Israel, which is chafing at the bit to derail the agreement concluded with Hamas in January, to resume its genocidal war. If and when it does so, it will be with an explicit agenda of forcing out Gaza’s Palestinians, and Israel has already indicated as much. Israeli leaders and politicians are also openly discussing extending this paradigm to the West Bank.
More broadly, the scheme and the manner in which it was presented seeks to once again transform the Palestine question from a political into a humanitarian question, to be resolved by housing, jobs, and social services rather than decolonisation, self-determination, and statehood.
The revolutions, coups, and civil unrest that characterised the Arab world during the 1950s and 1960s may have primarily reflected domestic factors, but they were also inextricably linked to the failure of Arab governments to prevent the transformation of Palestine into a Jewish state and the ensuing Nakba.
When Palestinians subsequently took up arms against Israel from the countries and territories to which they had been exiled to recover their homeland, often with Arab support, this set the stage for Israeli attacks on these states and territorial expansion at their expense.
In Jordan, Lebanon, and to a lesser extent other Arab states, it also led to direct confrontations between the Palestinian national movement and government forces.
This is not an experience Arab governments are particularly keen to repeat. It also explains why they appear collectively determined to nip Trump’s initiative in the bud.
Can the Arab League show Trump who’s boss?
Confronted with a vain and impetuous US president, and absent a countervailing superpower as during the Cold War, Arab leaders also consider themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.
As demonstrated by Jordanian King Abdallah’s recent visit to the White House, they are incapable of forthrightly informing Trump that his ideas are a non-starter if only for reasons of national security, nor dare engage with them seriously. Determined to avoid a similar spectacle, Egyptian strongman Abdel-Fattah Sisi promptly cancelled his own Washington audition.
Washington’s closest Arab allies are in the process of holding various preparatory meetings for the purpose of drafting the key elements of the formal, collective response that will be issued by the Cairo summit. By all accounts this will explicitly reject the expulsion – whether forced or camouflaged as “voluntary” – of Palestinians from Palestine.
It will instead propose a reconstruction scheme within the Gaza Strip that will be implemented in a manner that ensures Palestinians will be able to remain in their homeland, while apparently also providing yet further opportunities for the conglomerate known as the Egyptian military.
But other elements reportedly being discussed threaten to undermine this strategic framework. The determination to placate the US and Israel by installing an administration that consists of neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority, and that furthermore will not be unified with the Palestinian administration in the West Bank, threatens to promote not only further Palestinian fragmentation but also Palestinian polarisation.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnThe installation of yet more barriers on the Egyptian side of the Palestinian-Egyptian border to prevent the smuggling of arms to the Gaza Strip sends an additional signal to the most powerful Palestinian force in the Gaza Strip that the purpose of the Arab plan is to weaken and marginalise it rather than to reduce Israel’s iron grip over the territory and its population.
It is certainly true that the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) – and neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas – constitutes the formal counterpart of Arab governments and is itself an Arab League member.
But rather than laying the basis for further inter-Palestinian strife the Arab states and Aran League should instead be insisting that existing agreements on Palestinian unity and the incorporation of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the PLO finally be implemented. Its expanded leadership would then appoint a new PA government composed of neither Hamas nor Fatah representatives, but enjoying the consent of both, to administer all territories in which the PA is active.
By the same token, Arab proposals making the rounds are not limited to Gaza administration and reconstruction but also include a political component.
To demonstrate seriousness of purpose, and throw the ball back into the US-Israeli court, the Cairo resolution should insist on an end to occupation and establishment of a Palestinian state within a defined time frame, at which point – and not before – Hamas and all other movements will be required to surrender their weapons and either join the formal Palestinian security forces or otherwise demobilise.
The Cairo summit should of course also address the more pressing issues of Israeli impunity and accountability, and not less importantly immediately proceed with the delivery of urgent humanitarian supplies without a requirement for Israeli permission.
Israel will needless to say categorically and perhaps violently reject each of the above proposals, and initially Washington will as well. Yet the only alternative to confronting them with a combination of faits accomplis and hard choices is yet more accommodation, without which we would not have arrived at the present moment to begin with.
Finally, it bears recalling that although the Trump administration is riddled with ideologues, the president himself ultimately couldn’t care less for Israel, the Palestinians, or anyone else. Presented with an opportunity to claim success, and persuaded that for a change the only game in town emanates from Cairo, there is a realistic prospect he can be pried away from Netanyahu.
The more pertinent question is whether Arab governments are up to the task. The very real threats to their national security and stability notwithstanding, there are at best limited grounds for optimism.
Mouin Rabbani is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.
Follow Mouin on X: @MouinRabbani
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.