Israel’s Arab neighbors have declined to reinforce the notion that the Jewish state is hopelessly isolated as it pursues the dissolution of the Hamas regime.
The contours of the new Middle East were observable as early as 2014, when the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas inaugurated some of the fiercest fighting between Israel and Palestinian factions in the decade leading up to this war.
At the time, even the rote statements of solidarity with the Palestinian cause from Sunni Arab capitals that traditionally accompanied flareups were few and far between. Egypt, which had styled itself a mediator in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict since the Camp David accords, quietly tightened its blockade of the Gaza Strip. The Saudi regime held Hamas responsible for whatever bloodshed followed the terrorist group’s rejection of a cease-fire proposal. Jordan lobbed some perfunctory protests against Israel’s actions while maintaining its economic ties to and intelligence-sharing relationship with Israel.
These sharp departures from past practice eluded many observers of the region who chose instead to take Arab governments’ condemnation of Israel’s actions at face value. The same dynamic pertains today even as the thaw in relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors progresses.
Israel’s Arab neighbors have declined to reinforce the notion that the Jewish state is hopelessly isolated amid its explicit effort to dissolve the Hamas regime in Gaza. Indeed, they are cooperating with Jerusalem and even going so far as to contribute to Israel’s defense.
Jordan, the formal caretaker of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, announced on Sunday night that it had air-dropped medical supplies near a field hospital in Gaza — an operation that Axios reporter Barak Ravid speculated would not have occurred without Israel’s consent. He was right. “An Israeli official told Axios the Jordanian airdrop was conducted in coordination with Israel’s military,” Ravid later reported. The airdrop relieves some of the pressure on both Israel and Egypt to allow nonmilitary traffic through the crossing points into Gaza that they maintain.
With Iranian proxies engaged in fighting against Israeli and American positions across the Middle East, the Saudis are also abandoning their caution. One of those proxies, the Houthi militia group that operates freely in Yemen, fired off a variety of drones and missiles “toward Israel” in late October. Several of those missiles were shot down over the Red Sea by an American guided-missile destroyer before they could reach Israel, but one of those missiles was “intercepted by Saudi Arabia as it protected its airspace,” the Wall Street Journal reported. If any of the Houthi ordnance the Pentagon believes was “potentially” headed toward Israel also threatened Saudi assets, it hasn’t been publicly reported.
In the immediate aftermath of the report of an attack on a Gaza hospital (falsely) attributed to an Israel airstrike, some of the region’s Sunni governments took a step back from their relationship with Israel. The Saudis condemned the “heinous crime.” Jordan registered its dissatisfaction both rhetorically and by canceling a meeting between King Abdullah and President Joe Biden. And yet the event did not disrupt the behind-the-scenes drive toward the normalization of relations. “They’re scrambling to contain protests and working diplomatic back channels to push both sides to de-escalate,” read a Bloomberg News report on the thinking among Israel’s Arab neighbors.
Many speculated that the impetus for Hamas’s 10/7 massacre was the speed with which Israel and Saudi Arabia seemed to be racing toward an accord. The attack in southern Israel was supposed to scuttle that initiative and restore the “Palestinian issue” to the central place in regional geopolitics it had occupied for generations. If that was one of the strategic goals Iran sought when it unleashed its terrorist proxies in the Gaza Strip, the gambit may have already failed.