Arab States 'Ally with Israel': Analysts
“The Arab states’ loathing and fear of political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel”, Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington and a former Middle East negotiator under several presidents, told New York Times.
“I have never seen a situation like it, where you have so many Arab states acquiescing in the death and destruction in Gaza and the pummeling of Hamas. The silence is deafening.”
Miller, like other analysts have noticed a huge departure from historic pro-Palestine Arab official stand.
Launching similar attacks on Gaza two years ago, Israel found itself pressed from all sides by unfriendly Arab neighbors to end war.
The situation has changed this time after Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi’s Egypt toppled Mohammad Morsi’s government, it has led a coalition of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan that has sided clearly with Israel against Islamic resistance movement Hamas.
Blaming Hamas directly or implicitly instead of Israel for Palestinian deaths in the fighting, Egypt has surprised the world by proposing a cease-fire that met most of Israel’s demands and none by the Palestinian group.
“There is clearly a convergence of interests of these various regimes with Israel,” said Khaled Elgindy, a former adviser to Palestinian negotiators who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
In the battle with Hamas, Elgindy said, the Egyptian fight against the forces of political Islam and the Israeli struggle against Palestinian militants were nearly identical. “Whose proxy war is it?” he asked.
Israel has been launching relentless airstrikes against Gaza since July 8 where hundreds have been killed and thousands injured.
Israel occupation forces started a ground invasion of besieged Gaza, home to two millions civilian, on Thursday, July 17.
Palestinian victims of the four-week war on Gaza have rose above 1,463 deaths with more than 7,600 injured.
More Extremist
Anti-Hamas extremist rants have appeared regularly in Egyptian pro-government talk shows so that the Israeli government broadcast them into Gaza.
“They use it to say, ‘See, your supposed friends are encouraging us to kill you!’??” said Maisam Abumorr, a Palestinian student in Gaza City, Gaza Strip.
Some pro-government Egyptian talk shows broadcast in Gaza “are saying the Egyptian army should help the Israeli army get rid of Hamas,” she said.
At the same time, Egypt has infuriated Gazans by continuing its policy of shutting down Rafah border crossings.
“Sisi is worse than Netanyahu, and the Egyptians are conspiring against us more than the Jews,” said Salhan al-Hirish, a storekeeper in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya.
“They finished the Brotherhood in Egypt and now they are going after Hamas.”
The shift in the Egyptian official stance has forced the US to seek alternative mediators such as Qatar and Turkey.
For Israeli hawks, the change in the Arab states has been relatively liberating.
“The reading here is that, aside from Hamas and Qatar, most of the Arab governments are either indifferent or willing to follow the leadership of Egypt,” said Martin Kramer, president of Shalem College in Jerusalem and an scholar of Islamist and Arab politics.
“No one in the Arab world is going to the Americans and telling them, ‘stop it now’??” as Saudi Arabia did, for example, in response to earlier Israeli crackdowns on the Palestinians, he said.
“That gives the Israelis leeway.”
As Egypt announced delivering aid to Gaza, some analysts argued that the Egyptian government was trying to balance its overriding dislike of Hamas against its citizens’ emotional support for the Palestinians, a balancing act that could grow more challenging as the Gaza carnage mounts.
Source: On Islam
