For over a century and a quarter, the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli conflict has persisted through waves of warfare and violence. For more than half that period, this gruesome business was described as an “existential conflict”: if one side won, the other was doomed to fatal defeat. It was a zero-sum game. Even when the UN partitioned Palestine, both Arab leaders and Ben Gurion predicted another round of war. There was not just one, but several: the Suez War of 1956, the June War of 1967, and then the War of Attrition of 1968/1969.
The October 1973 War introduced a new, non-existential, phase. Following the October victory, Egyptian and Syrian forces met with their Israeli counterparts to negotiate ceasefire and disengagement agreements. Then, president Sadat undertook his historic visit to Jerusalem, which led to the landmark peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. US mediation aimed to make the 1973 war the last of the Arab-Israeli wars. Even so, new wars broke out, albeit not between Israel and Arab states, but rather between it and political-military organisations, such as the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Alongside the PLO – though not necessarily in alliance with it – other Palestinian organisations from the ideological left or right undertook acts of resistance. These ranged from airplane hijackings to operations in Arab countries such as Lebanon. Inside Palestine, the resistance took the form of the Intifada.
Over the next decade, another war erupted, this time in the Gulf, in order to liberate Kuwait. It coincided with the end of the Cold War. Then followed the Madrid Peace Conference, initiated by US president George W. Bush, giving rise to series of bilateral and multilateral negotiations, which culminated in Israeli-Jordanian peace and what became known as the Oslo Accords between the PLO and Israel. The Oslo Accords enabled the return of PLO leader Yasser Arafat to Palestine. Two decades later, four other Arab countries – the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco – signed the Abraham Accords normalising relations with Israel.
Developments since the Arab Spring had caused the political scales to shift towards peace, especially following the rise of an Arab reformist current within several countries, determined to prioritise development, modernisation and the renewal of religious and civic discourse. Accordingly, greater attention was paid to the need to resolve regional conflicts, including the Palestinian-Israeli one. The Abraham Accords (invoking the shared patriarch in the Islamic, Judaic, and Christian traditions) were informed by this spirit.
However, the “Spring” also brought Iranian encouragement of the so-called Axis of Resistance and Steadfastness, which revealed its face in the 7 October attack carried out by Hamas. This, in turn, triggered the still-ongoing fifth Gaza war, in which Israel aims to reoccupy Gaza, rebuild the settlements there and, above all, expel the Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel has changed. Domestically, this is reflected, on the one hand, in the “Israeli Spring” – the protest movement opposed to the Netanyahu government’s attempts to subordinate the supreme court to the executive – and, on the other, the far-right, ultraconservative religious-nationalist current that is pushing for the annexation of Gaza and the West Bank and the expulsion of their indigenous inhabitants.
The conflict has thus reverted back to its zero-sum existentialist form. Moreover, it has widened to encompass arenas in the Red Sea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon. Both Egypt, which had concluded a peace treaty with Israel, and Qatar, which has signed neither a peace treaty nor an Abraham normalisation agreement, have attempted to mediate between Hamas and Israel. Apart from those two countries, however, the entire matter is now in the hands of the US, which is acting as a party to a peace process while simultaneously taking part in the war.
What we have is a conflict that has: expanded to include Iran, which brought with it the nuclear weapon; been regionalised due to the activities of non-state actors; and become linked to a broader process of restructuring the Arab Middle East, as is playing out geographically and demographically in Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza.
History offers an important lesson here. While the US is of central important to the conflict, its efficacy as a peacemaker was only demonstrated in the early stages of the peace-making process, which is to say in brokering ceasefires and troop disengagements. The fact is that, in most cases, the actual peace was made by regional actors. It was president Sadat who flew to Jerusalem to forge the Egyptian-Israeli peace, King Hussein of Jordan who used the Madrid Conference as a platform to conclude the Jordanian-Israeli peace, and Yasser Arafat who engaged in the Oslo process as a first step towards peace for Palestine.
Even the Abraham Accords were the result of local and regional pressures. With Iranian expansion into four Arab capitals, the UAE and Bahrain saw normalisation with Israel as a way to offset that. Likewise, Sudan, designated as a state sponsor of terror, and Morocco, pursuing its claim in the Western Sahara conflict, had their own reasons to pursue normalisation.
So, if peace comes from within the region, why don’t the Arab reform, peace and normalisation states take the lead in confronting the ominous situation in the region?
* A version of this article appears in print in the 24 July, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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