Arab countries are not interested in a war with Israel

Watching the recent exchange between Bezalel Smotrich and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi made me feel like I was watching two different centuries talk past each other.

Smotrich, speaking this month, floated the prospect of a future Egyptian attack and answered it with a threat: what would stop Egypt, he asked, except the understanding that if it attacks Israel, there will be no Sinai. He went further, suggesting that Israel should keep the peninsula if it ever took it again.

El-Sisi replied at the October 1973 commemoration without naming him. Who said we want war, he asked, insisting Egypt had no such agenda, that its land was in its hands, that the matter was settled. As long as the borders stayed quiet, he added, the peace treaty governed everything, and Egypt had no ambitions toward Israel or its territory. Smotrich’s answer was that he does not trust these statements, and that Israel should judge its neighbors by their capabilities, not their intentions.

The timing matters, and it is not incidental. These statements land in the middle of an Israeli parliamentary election period, with the vote set for October 27 and the parties competing hard. In moments like this, some figures reach for hardline rhetoric because it sells. It tells the Israeli electorate that they are the ones most serious about security, the ones who will keep the state safe from everything the region supposedly has waiting for it.

Smotrich’s threat is partly aimed at Cairo and partly aimed at a ballot box. But once you account for that, the more interesting thing is what the rhetoric reveals about the mindset underneath it, because the fear it is selling is a fear the Arab world stopped holding a long time ago. In other words, one side is still fighting 1967, and the other moved on decades ago.

The Israeli security mind, or at least the version Smotrich performs, is frozen in the 1960s and 1970s. It still pictures a ring of Arab states coiled for the next invasion, waiting for the moment of weakness. That picture was once accurate. It is now a museum piece. The Arab world that fought those wars no longer exists, and the failure to grasp that is an intellectual stagnation, the error of a security doctrine reading a map that has already been redrawn.

Begin with why those wars happened at all. They were not simply about borders. They were the military expression of an ideology. Arab nationalism was born as a reaction, to Ottoman decline, to European colonial carving of the region, to the humiliation of peoples who had been ruled by outsiders for generations and were now trying to name themselves. Out of that reaction, it told every Arab that they were one people, one ummah, bound by a single destiny and a single struggle. Solidarity was not sentiment; it was obligation. You helped the other Arab because his cause was your cause. Gamal Abdel Nasser embodied that idea, and within it Palestine was not a foreign file. It was the shared wound, the proof of the project.

This fit the moment exactly. Newly independent states, freshly out of colonial rule, needed a framework large enough to give their decolonization meaning, something that turned the end of empire into the beginning of a destiny rather than just an administrative handover. Arabism offered that, the way Pan-Africanism offered it elsewhere and third-worldist solidarity offered it more broadly: an incubating idea that lent legitimacy to young nations still proving they deserved to exist. Add a Cold War that rewarded anti-Western postures and a global mood that made resistance a badge of honor, and confronting Israel stopped being a policy choice. It was who you were supposed to be.

Even then, the unanimity was a myth. Not every Arab state actually subscribed to the creed. Morocco opened quiet contacts with Israel early, under Hassan II, precisely because Arab nationalism was never Morocco’s organic project. It was imposed from outside, carried on the wave, and Rabat had its own reasons to resist a pan-Arab framework that answered to Cairo rather than to Moroccan interests. The cracks were there from the start for anyone willing to look.

Then the ideology died. It died in the defeats, in the exhaustion, in the slow discovery that the one-nation promise delivered neither unity nor dignity. And when a collective myth collapses, people go home. Each Arab state returned to its own soil, its own history, its own population, and began building an identity from what was actually there rather than from what a slogan demanded. This is the real meaning of the language you now hear everywhere: Morocco first, Egypt first, the Gulf states first. It is not arrogance. It is the normal behavior of states that have stopped outsourcing their purpose to a cause.

What replaced the ideology is pragmatism, and pragmatism asks only practical questions. How do I keep my country secure? How do I grow my economy? How do I give my people something better than the last generation had? A war with Israel answers none of these. It burns the budget, scares off investment, and risks the regime itself for a return measured in nothing but rhetoric. The modern Arab state does the arithmetic and declines.

So the correct reading of el-Sisi is not that he is bluffing. It is that he is bored by the premise. He is not restraining an army that wants to march. There is no such army and no such want. Egypt fought to recover Sinai, recovered it, and closed the chapter. Smotrich’s threat is aimed at an enemy that retired from the field half a century ago.

None of this is because Arab states fear Israel, though on a pure balance of force they have every reason to. The point is larger. They have moved past the entire frame in which fear or courage would even be the question. You do not threaten a war you have no interest in fighting, and interest, not intimidation, is what has changed.

What confuses outside observers, and what hardliners exploit, is the gap between governments and streets. Arab publics still chant the vocabulary of the 1970s. The flags, the slogans, the funeral-march certainty that liberation is one battle away. That energy is real, and it is loud, and it will never become a state-to-state war. It cannot, because the states have no appetite for it and the publics have no army of their own.

The only actors still willing to actually fight Israel are not countries at all. They are proxies, the Houthis and Hezbollah, movements that fight precisely because they answer to an ideology or a sponsor rather than to the cold interests of a functioning state. An established Arab country with a budget to balance and a population to feed behaves nothing like that.

The point holds even for the Palestinians’ own would-be state. The Palestinian Authority, led by Fatah, is the internationally recognized body that would actually inherit statehood, and it has no interest in war with Israel either. Mahmoud Abbas has said as much repeatedly and in public, committing to a negotiated peace and to security coordination rather than armed struggle.

The entity meant to govern a future Palestine has already made the same calculation every functioning Arab state made before it: that confrontation delivers nothing it can use. The appetite for war does not sit with the prospective state. It sits, once again, with Hamas, a proxy that fights for the same reason the rest of Iran’s so-called axis of resistance fights, because its purpose begins and ends with the fight, and a movement built to resist rather than to govern has nothing left to be once resistance stops, unlike a state, which has roads to pave and salaries to pay and a population that will judge it by whether the lights stay on. Struggle is not a means for these actors but their entire reason to exist, and an actor that is only a struggle cannot afford the peace that would dissolve it.

Here is the conclusion Israel’s strategists should sit with, however uncomfortable. Nearly every Arab state already maintains some relationship with Israel, open or quiet. Some normalized in daylight. Others keep the channel under the table, limited and deniable, for domestic reasons, because their publics are not ready and because leverage is more useful ambiguous than declared. But the contact is there, almost everywhere, because cooperation now serves these states better than confrontation ever did. And many of them would privately prefer a permanent arrangement with Israel over the rise of a new Arab state, a Palestine, whose politics they cannot predict and whose grievances they do not wish to inherit.

That is the real map, and it is the opposite of the one Smotrich is reading from. Israel’s genuine strategic position is not a hostile region waiting to pounce. It is a region that has quietly decided war with Israel is a waste of a future it would rather spend on itself.

Israel can keep governing by the fear of 1973. Or it can notice that the Arab world it fears no longer wants what it is being accused of wanting. The threat is not that Egypt will take the war to Israel. The threat is that Israel is the last one in the room still preparing for it.