As Israel wages war on the whole region, the Arabs are finally turning
As Israel wages war on the whole region, the Arabs are finally turning
Before he set off on a suicide mission to shoot Israeli soldiers on the Allenby Bridge, the main crossing between Israel and Jordan, Abdul-Muttalib al-Qaisi wrote a will.
In it he said: "Oh sons of my Umma, for how long will we stay silent about the ones that occupy the lands, will we stay silent until it reaches our land and violates its sanctities?"
Al-Qaisi, and before him Mahir al-Jazi, another Jordanian who attacked Israeli forces at the border crossing earlier this month, are not Palestinians. They are from the East Bank.
His message was to "the honourable free people everywhere and especially our brothers in the Arab clans in Al-Sham: Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon."
And it was this: what is happening in Gaza will be repeated in Arab countries. Our silence is complicity. Do nothing and Greater Israel will come to us.
If this message represents, as I believe it does, a mood that extends far beyond the outskirts of Amman where it was written, then Israel is making a misjudgement of historic proportions.
Israel: The existential danger
The continuous rhetoric from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich, his finance minister and de facto pro-consul of the occupied West Bank, that Israel will be the only state west of the river Jordan is attracting an audience and creating alarm far beyond the borders of Palestine.
The threat Israel poses to the region is irrespective of alliances, politics, tribal identity or religion.
Nearly two years of war have seen parts of Lebanon as well as Gaza devastated, southern Syria occupied, and Israeli warplanes have killed Ahmed Ghaleb Nasser al-Rahawi, Yemen’s prime minister, and knocked out Iran’s top military leadership.
Israel is not only becoming an existential danger to the Palestinians but to all states of the region.
Try to negotiate with Israel, and its warplanes will target your negotiating teams, as they have done now twice, when they attacked Iran before talks were due to take place in Oman, and then when they attacked the Hamas negotiating team in Doha.
Drunk with power, or so desperate to cling onto it, that keeping the war going is his only option, Netanyahu thinks he can impose Israel’s new borders on the region by force.
Israel will never again get a more permissive US president than it has now in Donald Trump. He has already allowed it to annex the occupied Golan Heights, has recognised Jerusalem as the undivided capital of “the Jewish State”, and is now allowing Israel to raise Gaza City to the ground.
Nor will it ever again get a US administration so dominated by Christian fundamentalists.
Speaking in a tunnel dug under Palestinian homes of Silwan in occupied East Jerusalem, Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Tel Aviv, called Jerusalem the "undivided, undisputable, indigenous capital" of the Jews "from eternity".
He said: "It was 4,000 years ago here in this city, on Mount Moriah, where God chose His people. He not only chose a people, but He chose a place, and then He chose for the people in this place a purpose. The people were the Jewish people. The place was Israel, and the purpose was to be a light to the world."
For Huckabee, there were no grey areas in this conflict. It was Good versus Evil.
"You don't stand with Israel because you agree with their government…You stand with Israel because Israel is standing for a tradition of the God of Abraham."
This is the insanity that a man designated as US ambassador now speaks.
A religious war
But the insanity is less the ravings of an evangelical fundamentalist as it could be the starting pistol of a religious war.
In seeking total victory over a humiliated Muslim region, Netanyahu is making the mistake that many warrior leaders have done before him, notably Napoleon and Hitler, who attacked and were defeated by Russia.
He thinks that 7.7 million Jews in Israel can dominate 473 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, 92 million Iranians, or for that matter, two billion Muslims in the world.
The threat Israel poses to the region is irrespective of alliances, politics, tribal identity or religion
For that is what Netanyahu’s evocation of "super Sparta" means.
Because as this war has progressed, Israel’s military campaign has become less and less focused on erasing one armed group which attacked it, and more and more about extinguishing all regional rivals, first Iran and now Turkey.
Netanyahu’s "super Sparta" challenges the sovereignty of all nation states, young or old, near or far from Israel’s new borders. The threat Israel poses to the region is irrespective of alliances, politics, tribal identity or religion.
Take a young nation state like the United Arab Emirates. Super rich and super energised to take on political Islam with armed autocratic secularism, it has spent the last decade deposing Egyptian presidents, attempting to depose a Turkish one, funding and arming counter revolutions to the Arab Spring in Yemen, Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. It is currently feeding the civil war in Sudan by arming the RSF and bankrolling its leaders.
Its president, Mohammed bin Zayed, was one of the first Arab leaders to realise where the path to power truly lay. He mentored an unknown Saudi prince to make secret visits to Netanyahu, laying a path for him that led to recognition by the Trump family.
That man is now the de facto ruler of his kingdom, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
A political liability
The UAE was the first country to sign the Abraham Accords, which recognised Israel, and it should be the last country to pull out of them.
And yet the mood music in Abu Dhabi has soured towards Israel these days.
UAE political advisor, Professor Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, tweeted: "For the first time, a serious conversation [in the UAE] that it is time to freeze the Abraham Accords. The accord is becoming a political liability, not a strategic asset."
Or take as witness, Khalaf Ahmad al-Habtoor, the founder of an Emirati business conglomerate that runs a think tank which produced a research paper on how to hurt the Israeli economy after its strike on Doha.
The Habtoor Research Center study found that Israel’s economy could lose between $28bn and $33.5bn by a unified Arab decision to close its airspace to all Israeli air traffic.
"The message is simple and clear: with a single unified decision, we have the ability to weaken Israel’s economy, destabilize its foundations, and force its leaders to reconsider their calculations, without entering a cycle of violence or bloodshed.
"I call on decision-makers to carefully review these figures: closing airspace to everything related to Israel, reviewing investments and interests in countries supporting it, and activating mechanisms for unified economic coordination that prioritize the protection of our people and sovereignty above all else."
Neither man is musing off the cuff. Abu Dhabi is not the place to have blue-sky thoughts on foreign policy.
Now take Egypt, one of the oldest nation states in the world.
At the emergency summit in Doha a week after the strike against Hamas, Egyptian President Adel-Fattah el-Sisi described Israel as the enemy, the first time he has used such language since he took office in 2014.
Relations between Israel and the first Arab state to recognise it have been in sharp decline ever since Israeli forces occupied the Rafah border crossing and took control of the Philadelphi Corridor separating Gaza from Egypt.
Netanyahu’s plan to force over one million Palestinians southwards towards Sinai is treated as a direct threat to Egyptian national security. That fear has been compounded by Israel’s threats to strike Hamas leaders in Cairo.
Netanyahu’s super Sparta challenges the sovereignty of all nation states, young or old, near or far from Israel’s new borders
Sisi warned Israeli voters that their government’s policies "erode opportunities for any new peace agreements and even aborts existing peace accords".
These are not words alone. Netanyahu has complained to Trump that the Egyptian military have extended runways in Sinai so that they can be used by military jets, and built underground storage depots which Israeli officials claim could be used to store missiles.
There is no evidence that this is happening. But the claim alone ratchets up the tension and, as ever, sets the background for an Israeli attack in the future.
No plan to empty Gaza of half of its population could succeed without Egypt. As more and more Palestinians are forced south, Sinai is ever more firmly in Israel’s military crosshairs.
Threatening Jordan
A similar debate is taking place in Jordan, the second Arab country to sign a peace deal with Israel, about the current worth of the Wadi Araba agreement.
This, again, is less about a reassessment of Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood against which the kingdom has recently launched a crackdown, than it is about threats to the stability of the kingdom itself.
As the Jordanian commentator Maher Abu Tair wrote: "The Oslo Accords proved to be nothing more than a trap to extract recognition of Israel's legitimacy, gather Palestinian fighters from all over the world and subject them to the occupier's watch.
"In contrast, we ask: what about the fate of the Wadi Araba Agreement? Does it constitute a guarantee of Jordan's strategic security and stability? And who are the guarantors in the first place, given that we have seen the guarantors of Oslo watching it being dismantled and terminated, and the guarantors themselves are the potential traitors."
Echoing what is rapidly becoming received opinion in Amman, Abu Tair said that Jordan could be attacked in two ways, over its custodianship of Al Aqsa - which has been subjected to an unprecedented level of settler incursions - and the West Bank. Israel could fabricate a security incident at the border as an excuse to reoccupy southern Jordan.
Abu Tair said Jordanians were very concerned that Israel could launch an exodus from the West Bank by revoking the residencies of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who still hold Jordanian national identity numbers, from the time when the West Bank was still part of the Hashemite Kingdom before the 1967 war
The second thing Israel could try is an attempt to destabilise the state itself, which would leave the borders open, he said.
Either would produce the required space for Palestinians forced out of the West Bank to resettle.
Netanyahu was very specific in his latest response to the recognition of Palestine as a state by Saudi Arabia, France, the UK and others. He said Israel should not allow the creation of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan river. Meaning there could be one east of it.
New alliances
Arab leaders have not been inactive. Defence alliances are being seriously considered which would have been unthinkable in the last ten years.
Back in 2016, the Saudi media were placed on nighttime standby to announce the death of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyib Erdogan in a military coup.
Erdogan survived but the coup itself very nearly succeeded.
Two years later, the two regional powers found themselves at loggerheads over the murder of the Saudi Journalist and MEE contributor Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Turkey released an audio tape of his murder to the CIA and consistently claimed the murder was ordered by the Saudi crown prince himself. This went on for three years. Khashoggi’s murder had the crown prince in purdah in western capitals.
Consider the thaw in relations that has taken place since.
Two years ago, Saudi signed a deal with the Turkish drone manufacturer Baykar for its Akıncı unmanned aerial combat vehicle, which was the largest defence export contract in Turkish history.
Riyadh is now interested in the Altay battle tank and missile system and in becoming a partner in the Kaan stealth fighter jet.
A report by the Atlantic Council said Riyadh’s interest in the Kaan stems from its long-delayed attempts to acquire US made F-35 jets, technology with which Israel used to strike Iran and which it stops the US from selling to anyone else in the region.
Similarly Turkey and Egypt - both longstanding rivals, not only about the place of political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, but in their rival maritime claims in the Eastern Mediterranean - have experienced a similar thaw. Egypt is also interested in Kaan as a co-producer. Both countries will hold joint naval drills for the first time in 13 years.
Saudi Arabia is also turning eastwards for its defence pacts. In the current fluidity, its mutual defence pact with the nuclear-armed Pakistan can not be underestimated.
The defence pact has been in the offing for some time, and certainly before the current Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif took power.
But the timing of the announcement of a pact with the only Muslim majority nuclear power, coming days after the Israeli attack on Doha, sent an unmistakable message.
Behind Pakistan lies China, and this also did not go unnoticed in Washington.
Arab disunity has been a rock on which the project to create a Jewish state has been built. But it would be a fool to think this situation will last forever
And then there is Turkey itself.
Not only does a naturally cautious Ankara find itself at loggerheads with Israel over its occupation of southern Syria and especially now its dams.
Not only has Israel appointed itself as the custodian of the Druze in the south and the Kurds in the north, which could at one point directly conflict with Ankara’s peace process with the PKK, but it is now inserting itself in Cyprus too.
Israel has delivered the Barak MX air defences to Cyprus, which are more effective than Russia’s S-300 and which can track Turkish air and land forces in the eastern Mediterranean.
Shay Gal, a former vice president of external relations at Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), which manufactures the Barak MX, argued in July that Israel should reconsider its approach toward Cyprus and devise military plans to "liberate" the island's north from Turkish forces.
"Israel, in coordination with Greece and Cyprus, must prepare a contingency operation for liberating the island’s north," Gal wrote.
From above and below these are clear signals that the region is preparing to push back on Israel’s hegemonic ambitions. It will not happen immediately nor will it happen evenly.
Arab disunity has been a rock on which the project to create a Jewish state has been built. But it would be a fool to think this situation will last forever as little Sparta becomes bigger and bigger.
Israel has clearly embarked on an expansion by brute force. Only the combined diplomatic, economic and military force of the region is capable of stopping it.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
