A New Middle East? Gimme A Break.
Amid the most dangerous moment in the Middle East in decades, as hot war looms between Israel and Iran, that irritating and truly ill-fated phrase has re-entered popular parlance. The four-word utterance of the peacenik’s parlance that the Israeli Right ‘reclaimed’ with the Abraham Accords: ‘A New Middle East’. It is what Benjamin Netanyahu essentially heralded in his speech to the United Nations (while unsurprisingly, the Saudi Ambassador didn’t wish to bother listening to such nonsense). It is what Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein now seem interested in, after spending months trying to stop the war between Israel and Hezbollah. It is what Einat Wilf seems to describe as ‘Arab Zionism’ because of the apparent bonhomie between Israel and the UAE, and it is what those fantasizing about an Arab Gaza trusteeship financed by Gulf oil money pin their hopes to. But much as the ‘New Middle East’ of Shimon Peres and Bill Clinton died in the flames of the al-Aqsa Intifada, this concept of a New Middle East is a fantasy that only the most delusional of politicians and so-called ‘strategists’ would ever pursue.
The Crucial Palestinian Component
I may be someone who strongly believes in a two-state solution, regional integration, and all that stuff that yields the same old half-baked talking points about Oslo and the Gaza disengagement. But I will scream off the top of a building: a political treaty does not mean true peace and reconciliation. Historically, this has been the case since Israel and Egypt concluded the Camp David Accords in 1978. Peace with Anwar Sadat did not herald a new dawn for relations across the Red Sea, and the treaty with Jordan has scarcely led to historical reconciliation with Amman. The benefits of peace will come through more elusive ways that tend to go under-appreciated. During the Oslo years, Israel was able to open trade offices across the Arab world and enjoyed an influx of foreign investment that fueled the tech boom. But this came despite a lack of true acceptance rather than because of it. The failure of the Camp David Summit in July 2000 and ensuing five years of bloodletting across the Holy Land called the bluff on the ‘New Middle East’ that Oslo promised. True, Israel benefits greatly from its security relations with Jordan and Egypt, without which ceasefires with Hamas in previous rounds of fighting and the shooting down of Iranian drones in April might not have been possible. However Egyptian and Jordanian societies remain firmly antagonistic to Israel.
The Israeli Right correctly identified that Oslo would not create this much-vaunted fantasyland. They noted that at the end of the day, a treaty with the Palestinians would involve litigating 1948 just as much as it consists of addressing 1967. Given the Palestinians have an attachment to lands greater than that which they would receive in a treaty with Israel, any path to such a treaty would not be smooth. Full marks to them for all of that; even Hussein Agha, one of the most intelligent people out there when it comes to Israeli-Palestinian relations, notes that the Israeli Right often better understands Palestinians than does the Left. But there is this new belief that Israel is poised to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and with it, call Tehran’s bluff on regional hegemony. Apparently, this is supposed to bring the Arab world together and facilitate a new axis of American-Israeli-Saudi-Emirati regional leadership.
It sounds a lot more strategic than the garlands of roses that the idealists of the Oslo years seemed obsessed with. But it is in many ways, even more divorced from reality. It has now become crystal clear that there will be no grand peace with Saudi Arabia without a major Palestinian component, that the Arabs will not come as white knights to serve Israel’s security interests in Gaza, and that no Gulf money will flow into the moonscape that is Gaza without the Palestinian Authority’s explicit invitation and involvement in its governance. The fundamental change between the Arab Peace Initiative and the world we live in today is that the Arab world is willing to normalize relations with Israel before a comprehensive, conflict-ending treaty is reached with the Palestinians rather than after it. But they need to know there will be irreversible steps to achieving such a treaty. Even states like the UAE are making this obvious. Though the UAE’s Foreign Minister correctly views the ineffectual PA as ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, as Kan News reported, Ron Dermer’s trip to Abu Dhabi where he asked for Emirati money and soldiers without a commitment to a Palestinian state yielded a curt response from Mohammed bin Zayed: “The UAE is not prepared to support the day after the war without a Palestinian state”.
The Gulf States are Realists
Without getting into the weeds of International Relations Theory 101, realism dictates that states act solely on their self-interest and for self-preservation in an anarchic international system. Iran poses a supreme threat to these states’ stability, ironically, because Israel is fighting Iran’s proxies (and with some success!), the Arab states are now dealing with a diminished Tehran. As such, they only need to slide down the middle: maintain good security relations with DC, sustain whatever secretive ties they have with Israel, keep Iran at bay while it wastes its energy fighting Israel both directly and through proxies, and at all costs avoid provoking any of these parties. Ideology is no longer such a big issue for these states: the recent rapprochement between Muslim Brotherhood-supportive Turkiye and Fateh Al-Sisi’s Egypt and the Beijing brokered Saudi-Iran normalization agreement show that much like taboos with Israel can be broken, enmities within the Arab world can be weakened to maintain calm. The most obvious display of this was in Doha, where in an evening meeting on 3 October, Iran’s embattled President Masoud Pezeshkian met with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud to discuss, according to the press readouts, Gaza and Lebanon.
In short, the longer the war goes and the hotter the de facto regional war gets, the dimmer the prospects of such a grand coalition. The Arabs don’t need to fight Iran’s proxies if Israel is doing it for them in Yemen and Lebanon, Iran has suffered ceaseless humiliations, and as the circle of violence continues, the Arab states will try their best to stay as far away from this as possible. I suspect what truly bothers them is the prospect of a major accident-a stray Iranian missile that lands in Saudi Arabia, or an mistaken hit against a ship or aircraft-would ultimately draw them into the conflict. Not to mention the economic impacts of such a conflict on commerce in the Red Sea and commercial aviation for the Middle East’s large transport hubs.
Can there be a New Middle East?
I want to end this article on a happier note, so why not> A new Middle East is possible, but one where three things are true. First, Israel may be part of a regional security architecture and will have decent relations with the Arab world, and Arab states like the UAE may amend their educational curricula to match Western standards rather than demonizing Israel. But any moral acceptance of Israel is unlikely for the next few decades. Second, even if there is no grand ‘reconciliation’, such a Middle East-where Israel formalizes shared interests with the Gulf world, would allow flows of investment, economic exchanges, and in the future, people-to-people activity that will benefit everyone-will still be a good thing. It is better to have prosperity and diplomatic acceptance without moral acceptance than to have no acceptance. And third, there must be a major Palestinian component to such an arrangement.
The best bet for a new Middle East would be for Israel to make its fundamental choice vis-a-vis the territories: will it stay or will it leave? The tension between a deal with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or keeping Kiryat Arba will be the defining feature of Israel’s foreign policy conundrums in the coming years. One might respond that the Palestinians would not give up the right of return, and so peace is not possible. I am not going to predict how any future negotiations will work, but it has been clear for some time that the Arab states don’t need a full-on peace treaty that ends the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By stating they desire Palestinian statehood and ‘irreversible steps’ to end the conflict, they tacitly signal that more creative approaches such as nascent or provisional statehood envisioned in the Bush Roadmap would be feasible. Many ideas regarding how to make this work have been floated among Israeli circles in recent years, from Gidi Grinstein’s contribution to this website to Yair Hirschfeld’s propositions in his fascinating article on Fathom Journal to even the INSS in 2017. There are plenty of risks associated with these propositions (I for one have serious doubts about the INSS ideas and tend to prefer Hirschfeld’s approach). But there are equally, great risks associated with the status quo. If you want a ‘New Middle East’, you need to know that it comes with a price.