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he Saudi Ministry of Information and Al-Arabiya news channel invited me to discuss the Gaza crisis and its implications for the Palestinian cause ahead of the emergency Arab summit that convened on Saturday. The times have never been so fraught. Israel is carrying out the largest ever crushing operation against the Palestinian people, even if its main objective is to eliminate Hamas which had delivered the most powerful strike against Israeli soldiers and civilians in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, resulting in 1,400 deaths and 240 hostages.

Israel is currently waging a ground offensive after aerial bombardments displaced more than a million people from northern to southern Gaza, killed over 10,000 civilians and wounded many times more, and destroyed thousands of buildings including healthcare facilities. Yet, while attention is focused on the fifth Gaza war, Israeli settlers in the West Bank have seized the opportunity to kill more than 500 Palestinians and drive the original inhabitants out of 13 villages. The scenes of the Nakba are unfolding again in both Gaza and the West Bank.

However, there are two other issues on people’s minds. One is whether conditions could be improved for Palestinians through pauses to allow in essential goods and humanitarian relief. The other is the question of the “day after” following a ceasefire and release of hostages. How will Gaza be managed, presuming that Hamas will become unfit to rule over directly the strip?

The three foregoing issues have been raised at the summit which will include meetings between foreign ministers, others between ministers concerned with military affairs and intelligence, and other consultative meetings between Arab parties based on how they connect with the perpetual Palestinian question. There will also be consultations between these parties and the US and various Western powers, although obviously the main address for the West is Washington where President Biden, the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Agency and the CIA are handling the crisis in their various capacities according to that administration’s approach. This summit will be followed by an Arab-Islamic summit. Undoubtedly, the Palestinian cause will receive great moral and material support from the two summits. However, the hardest part is how to end this war and reach a settlement that prevents further crises of this sort.

Unless certain conditions are met, it will be impossible to end the current state of explosive volatility. The first is to bring an end to extremism. The Arabs must take a firm position that as long as they are expected to offer full support to their brothers in Palestine, it must be clear that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. No other entity or faction should have the right to monopolise Palestine’s national will on matters of war and peace. At the same time, the Israeli government must be told to change. It must free itself of the far-right parties that are so extremist they openly declare designs to carry out another Palestinian Nakba to create a certain demographic “balance” between Israelis and Palestinians.

It will be difficult, if not impossible, to compel both sides to change, as both would at the very least complain of interference in their internal affairs. However, the core business of diplomatic work is to generate conditions conducive to understandings that lead to solutions which, in this case, entail roadmaps out of the crisis and towards the two-state solution, which all relevant international stakeholders call for. To this end, both sides must explicitly renounce extremism, a principle that was affirmed in the concluding statement of the nine countries that took part in the recent peace conference in Cairo and could be reaffirmed in the Riyadh summit’s resolutions. The renunciation of extremism can also take a practical form, such as a willingness to deal with the institutional forces that are ready to accept a comprehensive settlement. International stakeholders can be brought into play here to make it clear that the world can no longer tolerate forms of extremism that threaten international and regional security.

The second condition is that, whatever occurs amidst the political and diplomatic tensions and skirmishes in the coming phase, it is crucial to ensure the continuity of the reform processes that are taking place in many Arab states. Being in Saudi Arabia at the moment gave me an opportunity to see, first-hand, the extent of the progress that has been achieved by the deep and extensive reform process underway here. The change is not only visible in the great megaprojects being carried out but also, and more importantly, in the quality of the people, especially the youth, both men and women.

Meanwhile, in Egypt, not a single national development project has been put on hold, despite the economic straits. The same applies to the other Arab countries that signed the Cairo declaration condemning the murder of civilians and calling for a peaceful settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict based on the two-state solution. Perhaps this reform process is the main bulwark against the forces of extremism in both Israel and Palestine as it can generate forms of close regional cooperation that offer alternatives to the implicit cooperation between extremist forces in the region.

 It is important not to lose sight of the fact that the catastrophe the Arab summits are dealing with is the product of the collusion among the forces of death and destruction in the region which ignited a war in order to close the roads to construction and development. If, in the past, Arab generations have been lured by extremist forces under the guise of noble slogans and lost decades of progress and prosperity as a result, future generations will hold today’s generation to account for missing the current opportunity.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 16 November, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly