Arab states like Egypt, Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have engaged in diplomacy and humanitarian efforts during the year-long Gaza conflict, but those doing the actual fighting against Israel are in fact Iran’s Arab proxies or non-state actors, Hamas and Hezbollah. This signals not just a big switch from past Arab-Israeli conflicts, but a growing threat of a wider regional war.
Arab governments have struggled to respond to the Gaza crisis. Rami G. Khouri, a non-resident fellow of Washington’s Arab Center writes they have been trying to balance support for Palestinians “without strengthening Hamas and other Islamist militant allies that most Arab governments see as radicalizing threats.” This, while providing humanitarian aid for suffering Gaza civilians.
Lebanese analyst Dania Koleilat Khatib explained the conundrum to VOA.
“Most Arab states, either have formal relations or they have taken the decision not to engage in any fight with Israel. Now the resistance movements have no sponsor. That’s why they go to Iran, why Hamas went to Iran,” she said.
Khatib, president of the Research Center for Cooperation and Peace Building in Beirut, said the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict has given non-Arab Iran a way to influence regional politics for its own purposes.
“They’re engaged, and they use the Palestinian issue as an entry door to the Arab community. If you take the Palestine issue aside, what do we have with the Iranians in common? Nothing. Of course, this creates friction. The Arab states are going on one course and these resistance movements are going on another course. The PLO was not Islamist, it was secular. But unless you solve the problem, you will have a problem that hasn’t been solved,” said Khatib.
Analyst Nicholas Heras of the New Lines Institute in Washington told VOA that Iran spent years building “committed proxies” like Hezbollah, Hamas, and others, most of which, he says, are of “Arab origin,” and that see defeating Israel “as the culmination of their ideological mission.” This allows Iran not to take on Israel directly.
That changed on October 1 with Iran’s biggest missile attack on Israel. Despite Israel’s downgrading of Hezbollah, once considered Iran’s chief defense line, Heras said Hezbollah may be down, but not out.
“On the longer term what Iran most likely will try to do is create a Hezbollah organization that’s younger, more extreme, and transnational in character so as to truly link all the different battlefronts in the region to force the Israelis to have to play a broader regional conflict and to continue to signal to the Americans that if the Americans get involved, it would require them to go to war with Iran,” he said.
Heras said that ultimately Iran wants missiles and drones capable of threatening “Israel in a manner that has never been done before by any Arab state actor in the course of Arab-Israeli conflicts.”
“The Iranians view themselves as the flag bearers of a revolutionary cause that is not Arab. It’s Islamic. The Iranians are hoping that the current conflict in Gaza, with all the difficult images of human suffering and destruction, will inspire a future generation of the Arab and the broader Islamic world, to take up arms against Israel,” he said.
Former Mideast Pentagon adviser Yasmine El Gamal told the BBC that Arab and Muslim states have now provided a “diplomatic offramp” to Israel: their recognition of Israel in exchange for “the end of the occupation and a two-state solution” to end the Arab Israeli conflict.
She and other analysts say the West needs to bring Israel back from the brink of a possible widening conflict. But will that be enough to settle the decades-long animosity between Israel and Iran?
