U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in the Middle East this week mainly as a firefighter rather than a peacemaker. For the most part, Blinken’s nine-nation tour—the latest démarche by the Biden administration in a frenetic, monthslong campaign to avert a wider regional war—is about tamping down the conflagration in Gaza and preventing the United States from being pulled in any further.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in the Middle East this week mainly as a firefighter rather than a peacemaker. For the most part, Blinken’s nine-nation tour—the latest démarche by the Biden administration in a frenetic, monthslong campaign to avert a wider regional war—is about tamping down the conflagration in Gaza and preventing the United States from being pulled in any further.
But the administration is also hoping to begin laying down a scheme for a more lasting Middle East settlement. And Saudi Arabia—where Blinken landed Monday before heading on to Israel—is expected to play a significant part. In particular, U.S. President Joe Biden wants Riyadh to resume talks over recognizing Israel in return for Israeli restraint in Gaza and the West Bank and pledges to accommodate Palestinian interests, including an eventual Palestinian state or at least some degree of sovereignty.
Riyadh is, for the most part, going along, U.S. officials believe. “Our conversations with the Saudis in just recent weeks indicate they still want to move normalization forward,” said a senior administration official in late December.
Blinken, in remarks to reporters at a joint news conference in Doha with Qatar’s foreign minister, indicated he was having some success in overcoming initial Arab resistance to discussing “day after” scenarios, saying that “our partners are willing to have these difficult conversations and to make hard decisions. All of us feel a stake in forging the way forward.”
All of this is at the very beginning stage, of course—and most of it won’t move ahead anytime soon in the face of continued resistance by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government to anything that resembles a Palestinian state. Within Israel, Netanyahu is widely blamed for allowing the Oct. 7 catastrophe to happen—indeed, even abetting it by shoring up Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority for years—and his support is plummeting. But the gruesome Hamas attacks have also shifted Israeli public opinion far to the right, making the immediate prospect of any two-state negotiation all but impossible.
“The body politic in Israel can’t absorb that right now,” said longtime U.S. Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, who visited Israel at the end of December. “The emotional depth of this is remarkable. … Everybody knows someone who was killed in the south [near the Gaza border], someone who was kidnapped, a soldier who’s been killed or wounded.”
In fact, there is every indication that the politically embattled Netanyahu sees his opposition to Biden’s plans as the key to keeping himself in office—and possibly out of prison. (Netanyahu faces a slew of corruption charges.) According to Israeli media, Netanyahu has been telling members of his Likud party that only he can prevent the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank after the war. Public opinion inside Israel has increasingly backed Netanyahu’s idea that any degree of sovereignty granted to any Palestinian entity would mean future attacks on Israel—and that speaking of such an outcome now would only hand a victory to Hamas.
But Biden, in turn, wants to push even harder in an election year in which he’s suffering low approval ratings—especially since he and his administration have been harshly criticized within the Democratic Party for supporting Israel’s bloody crackdown.
And conceptually, at least, some pieces of an eventual peace plan may be starting to fall into place. Underlying those possibilities is one of the least-noted dimensions of the current Israel-Palestinian conflict: Despite the expressions of outrage that have come from Arab capitals since the Israel Defense Forces began operations that have killed nearly 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza in retaliation for Oct. 7, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, most of the Arab world simply isn’t very interested in the political future of the Palestinian people.
Indeed, it is far less interested than it ever has been. And many Arab leaders are secretly as keen to be rid of Hamas as the Israelis are.
“The most profound enemy of the Palestinians isn’t the Israelis; it’s the other Arabs,” said Ryan Crocker, a retired U.S. ambassador who has served throughout the region since the early 1980s, in a phone interview. One example: The secular military-run Egyptian government of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi erupted in fury when the Biden administration asked it to take in Palestinian refugees through the Rafah crossing of Gaza.
Why? The Islamist leadership of Hamas, with its ideology largely based on the radical Muslim Brotherhood born in Egypt, is anathema to nearly every Arab regime. “For Egypt, Hamas is almost an existential threat,” said Crocker. This is in stark contrast to decades ago, when secular Palestinian fighters found refuge and support in different countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Libya—and even gained the backing of some Arab leaders in their efforts to topple Jordan’s Hashemite Kingdom.
That, in turn, could open the door to a settlement by which the Saudis, Egyptians, and other Arab states help to reconstruct Gaza with major investment, but without pushing too hard for a political solution—at least until some viable alternative to Hamas and the discredited Palestinian Authority emerges.
Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, now “seems to be aligned with—if not to lead—a broad Arab coalition united in its terms for contributing to Washington’s ‘morning after’ strategy,” said Nimrod Novik, a former senior advisor to the late Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and a fellow at the Israel Policy Forum..
In remarks last October, Biden said that Hamas’s attacks on Israel were intended, in part, to derail the potential normalization of the U.S. ally’s relations with Saudi Arabia. “They knew that I was about to sit down with the Saudis,” Biden said at a campaign event. “Guess what? The Saudis wanted to recognize Israel.”
The key sticking point now is whether the Biden team can finesse its way around the question of who will emerge to lead the Palestinians. The U.S. continues to insist that governance of both Gaza and the West Bank needs to be “connected under a revamped and revitalized Palestinian Authority,” as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said during a mid-December visit to Israel. Netanyahu’s government refuses to consider this, but if he is eventually toppled, it is possible that a successor such as the popular Benny Gantz, a retired general who chairs the more moderate National Unity party and is a more centrist member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, would reconsider. In the past, Gantz has spoken of a “two-entity solution” but stopped short of endorsing a Palestinian state.
Gantz has already begun to publicly criticize the prime minister, suggesting that Netanyahu was responsible for an angry cabinet dispute on Jan. 4, when right-wing ministers allied with Netanyahu attacked IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi over his plan to launch an inquiry into the mistakes that led to Oct. 7.
Tensions between Washington and Israel were also somewhat ameliorated after Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, announced on Jan. 4 that Israel would move into a new stage that focuses on a more targeted strategy in the north of Gaza. He added that there would be “no Israeli civilian presence in the Gaza Strip after the goals of the war have been achieved,” though Israel would still reserve the right to operate in the territory.
This was a move in the direction of what the Biden administration has been pushing for. But Blinken was certain to meet with more resistance from Netanyahu over Gaza after the two traded pointed words, with the secretary declaring that Israel must stop killing civilians and that Palestinians “must be able to return home as soon as conditions allow.” Netanyahu retorted that the war will go on until Hamas is eliminated, adding, “I say this both to our enemies and our friends.”
Still, the senior administration official said that even Netanyahu’s hard-line government understands the geopolitical costs of continuing to kill thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
“They have recognized the need to shift from high intensity operation to lower intensity,” the official said. “We are asking them tough questions about what that looks like and trying to share with them our lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan.” He added: “We believe this is the important next step, and we are near the endgame of the conflict.”
For now, Blinken’s main task in a nation-hopping tour that includes stops not only in Israel and Saudi Arabia, but also Turkey, Greece, Jordan, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt will be to prevent a second front by Israel against Hezbollah—and to create a broader coalition against Iran. Yet the common interests of these governments in pursuing this goal, and their common concerns about Iranian influence, could also deliver a tailwind to future peace negotiations.
Ross, the career U.S. negotiator who was a central player in the implementation of the failed Oslo Accords three decades ago, says it’s possible that the national trauma of Oct. 7 could eventually force Israelis into a debate they have never really had about the Palestinians.
“There’s going to be a political reckoning here and also a debate about what their relationship to the Palestinians is,” he said. “They didn’t have it over Oslo, because Oslo was a secret deal. Now it’s as if you have an entire country going through PTSD. They need to sort it all out.”
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