Since Israel started its brutal onslaught on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, the entire Arab world has become dominated by the bloody war.
For the Arabs, the full-scale invasion of Gaza is not just another regional flashpoint, it carries with it the potential hallmarks of another painful defeat in the bloody Arab-Israeli decades long conflict.
US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan that he hopes will end the conflict with the backing of the Arab governments is heavily biased in favour of Israel and potentially a choice between two paths: genocide and the displacement of the Gazans or the Arabs’ surrender to Israel.
Israel’s two-year war marks a critical turning point in the Arab world’s regional order, reintroducing high intensity conflict and dismantling the illusion of peace.
It has forced the Arab world and its 22 nations, united by shared interests and ties as members of the Arab League, into uncharted territory and has caused them to struggle to meet the demands of the rapidly evolving new regional “disorder.”
Israel has triggered a massive military offensive in Gaza and swiftly expanded its footprint in the Strip, taking control of most of the enclave and razing record levels of infrastructure and carrying out ethnic-cleansing operations.
The campaign has taken a devastating toll on civilians crammed into tents in the open air. Over 66,000 people have been killed since October 2023, mainly in airstrikes and artillery bombings and sometimes at food-distribution sites.
Though the declared objective of the war is to “cleanse” the Strip of Hamas and secure the return of the hostages, the post- October 7 strategy driving Israel’s actions is aimed at punishing the population and making Gaza uninhabitable, creating the conditions for the forced expulsion of all the Palestinians from the Strip.
Many leading organisations including the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) have declared that Israel by its military campaign, starvation tactics, and near-total demolition of housing in the territory is committing genocide in Gaza.
On a broader regional basis, Israel plans to use the war in Gaza and its incursions into Lebanon and Syria and attacks on Iran and Yemen to expand its military reach in order to dominate the region and reshape it in its own way.
In order to achieve these goals, Israel has changed its security strategy from its traditional deterrence and punishment focus seeking to remove immediate threats into employing its full military strength in a new paradigm that is a quest for regional hegemony.
Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have repeatedly proclaimed their version of an Israeli-dominated Middle East and have demonstrated their willingness to achieve this goal through a multi-front military strategy.
The ripple effects of this Israeli strategy have created chaos and instability around the region and impacted the stability of countries beyond Gaza’s borders.
Israel’s targeted killings of senior Hamas, Hizbullah, and Houthi leaders in Iran, Qatar, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere show that it no longer adheres to the redlines set by international law and in Qatar’s case diplomatic courtesy.
Israel has not sought to limit its military actions to Gaza. It is now holding several outposts in Southern Lebanon and has created a buffer zone inside Syria.
Its air force continues to attack targets inside the two countries and is pushing to have a permanent security presence there.
Israel’s attack on Iran in June demonstrated that it is willing to establish goals that are far more ambitious than the ones it has pursued in the past to contain foes in its immediate neighbourhood, even if this could jeopordise the security of its regional allies.
What Israel is aiming at is to dismember Iran and other regional states, create a chaotic power vacuum, and drag the US and Europe into a prolonged regional quagmire to advance the illusion of the so-called “Greater Israel.”
Taken together, these developments present an extraordinary set of threats for the Arab world that must make its nations look beyond Gaza without discarding the vital role that the Palestinian question has played in shaping the region’s security landscape.
As for Trump’s plan, which promises an end to the Gaza war and the reestablishment of the momentum to find a broader regional peace, the proposal allows Israel a range of opportunities to veto moves it does not like and seems out of step with public sentiments in the Palestinian Territories and other Arab countries.
Trump’s 20-point plan seems to be designed to establish the goals that Israel has so far failed to secure in its brutal military campaign in Gaza and to create a new reality in the Middle East favourable to it.
It is a political roadmap to help Netanyahu achieve his objectives of defeating the Palestinian resistance movement and fully controlling Gaza with the diplomatic support of American and regional allies and partners.
Most of the points in Trump’s plan were cheered by Netanyahu, who managed to secure changes to the original proposals in order to keep his motives vague and avoid any commitment to a lasting peace.
The edits pushed by Netanyahu into the original text, in particular on the conditions and timetable for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, which ties it to the progress of disarming Hamas, are significant because they give Israel a veto over the process.
One of the controversial proposals is for the coastal enclave to be temporarily governed by a transitional committee of qualified Palestinian and international experts, with oversight from a new international transitional body, referred to as the “Board of Peace.”
The committee, which Trump said would be under his tutelage and tasked with sorting out Gaza and is expected to have controversial former British prime minister Tony Bair as its chief executive, has provoked serious questions about the body’s function and the choice of Blair in it.
Trump’s framework excludes the Palestinians and their legitimate representatives from the process and is in breach of international law on self-determination and would effectively place Gaza under a colonial mandate.
The overarching goal of Trump’s “big and beautiful” Gaza plan seems to be to crush the Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation and to create a broader dynamic for normalising relations between Israel and some of the Arab states that survived the Arab-Israeli agreements he sponsored earlier.
As a result, the war on Gaza, its regional ramifications, and Trump’s neo-colonial plan must be seen as an episode in much larger, longer, and deeper historical and geopolitical context.
Critical questions about the conflict’s aftermath hang in the balance. The future existence of the Palestinians in their shattered homeland remains uncertain, and the threats from Israel’s expansionist military policies to the region are likely to become more prevalent.
The biggest concern now is that in the aftermath of the Gaza war the Palestinians will remain subjugated to Israel’s apartheid system, with the Arab world left with a narrow window in which the choices made will determine the shape of its future for decades to come.
This great turning point will divide the history of the Arab world into two parts: before and after Gaza. It will be similar to other historic ruptures such as the ethnic-cleansing of the Palestinians by the newborn state of Israel in 1948, known as the Nakba, or catastrophe, and the defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 War with Israel known as the Naksa, or setback.
But since the old world cannot die at once, and the new world cannot similarly be born, the Arab generations that live between these parts will witness many psychological shocks and hopefully a new awakening.
This will be a long and complex process, but there are already signs of the ripple effects of the Israel war of aggression on Gaza and Israel’s ambitions of regional domination on the Arab conscience and of the dangers that threaten the entire Arab world.
While these fears are increasingly becoming a subject of debate on social media, history is unfolding behind closed doors as the Arab leaderships again show a lack of imagination, weakness, and a reluctance to stand up to the Israeli challenge.
In a region marked by a fragile security order, rising tensions, dysfunctions, sectarian fragmentation, and regional and international geopolitical competition, the war on Gaza has become a key test of the Arab world’s strength, stability, and future.
Israel and Hamas signalled their willingness this week to move forward on Trump’s Gaza plan, which was hailed by many Arab and Muslim countries even as it has created illusions that a lasting peace is finally in their hands.
The announcement of the plan has failed to recognise the depth of Israel’s ambitions and the risks the Palestinians and the Arabs face.
There is a general agreement among experts that the Trump peace push, or the Kushner-Blair Gaza plan, will not work because it is built on a deal-making mentality that views the conflict as simply a matter of real estate.
The ultimate test of the plan will be the Israeli and US declaration of a clear and public commitment to the two-state solution, including a sovereign and viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 October, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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