The Return of the Arab–Israeli Conflict

The fallout from Israel’s strike on Qatar drags the region back into the dangerous early stages of the Arab–Israeli conflict.

A senior Jordanian intelligence officer put it to me bluntly this week: “The Israeli strike on Qatar has ended the illusion about the ‘Israeli–Palestinian conflict’. This is the ‘Arab–Israeli conflict’ all over again.” The Arab Islamic summit in Doha on Monday brought together an impressive group of players at short notice, to not just show solidarity with Qatar but to single out Israel as a regional threat to peace and security.

From Regional War to Local Dispute

For decades we have grown accustomed to narrower terminology. After Egypt signed the peace agreement with Israel in 1979 and Jordan followed in 1994, the Arab front against Israel started to fracture. The wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973 faded into memory and what remained seemed local: a bitter dispute between Israelis and Palestinians over land, sovereignty and identity. Diplomats, journalists and academics increasingly spoke of the ‘Israeli–Palestinian conflict’, as though the wider Arab world had stepped aside.

Framing matters. The words we use signal what kind of conflict we think we are dealing with. ‘Israeli–Palestinian’ suggested something containable, soluble perhaps through diplomacy and partition. ‘Arab–Israeli’ meant something far larger, a regional confrontation implicating a clash of civilisations, armies, and a far wider spectrum of statecraft.

History has swung between these frames. From 1948 until 1973 it was unequivocally ‘Arab–Israeli’: Israel’s survival pitted against coalitions of Arab states, oil embargoes shaking the global economy, broad solidarity across the Arab world. After the Camp David accords, Israel divided its adversaries, freeing itself to entrench its occupation of the Palestinians and to launch wars that were far more wars of choice than existential necessity. The 1982 Lebanon War was a prime example. Israel went from a David fighting Goliath to Goliath itself.

On the Road to Normalization

The intifadas of 1987 and 2000 narrowed the lens further. The conflict was increasingly seen as Israeli–Palestinian. Arab leaders quietly concluded Israel could not be beaten. Jordan normalised, Egypt kept the peace, and Gulf monarchs came to terms with the fact that two states for two people was the only way forward. The Oslo process promised, at least briefly, that a two-state solution was within reach. For many Arabs the battle shifted from defeating Israel to securing Palestinian rights.

9/11 and the war on terror further aligned Arab and Israeli regional security agendas. In face of jihadist terror across the region and the rise of Iranian influence in what Jordan’s King Abdullah II described as the ‘Shia Crescent’, Arab leaders saw Israel far less of a threat to regional peace and security than they had previously done. More so, counterterrorism and containing Iran’s regional ambitions were suddenly shared interests. Quiet ties deepened culminating in the Abraham Accords of 2020. Israelis shopped in Dubai, Israeli private jets landed in Saudi Arabia scoping for normalization, and commentators spoke of a new Middle East. For a short while, the Arab–Israeli conflict seemed consigned to history.

7th October and Regional Conflagration

But 7 October 2023 changed everything. Hamas’s atrocious attack exploited Israel’s grand strategic drift when it came to addressing the Palestinian question, and it triggered deep-seated fears and a sense of victimhood in Israel that would set off a chain reaction. Netanyahu, desperate to survive politically, unleashed devastation on Gaza. Israel then fought Hezbollah to a bloody standstill, deepened its entrenchment in Lebanon and Syria, struck Iran directly and desperately tried to degrade the Houthis in Yemen. What had been a localised fight became a regional campaign. Israel was no longer mowing the lawn. It was ploughing the ground, leaving behind destruction and fragility.

The strike on Qatar crossed another red line. Israel, the US ally with whom Gulf militaries have sat around the US CENTCOM table, launched standoff missiles onto Doha without prior warning. Gulf monarchs did not see this as just an attack on Qatar or Hamas. They saw it for what it was: an attack on the sovereignty of all Gulf states. Since last week there is a profound sense of betrayal across the Gulf – betrayal not just by Israel but the by Washington. US-underwritten normalization was primarily an avenue to security and stability in the region. As it turns out normalization emboldened Israel to not only disregard international laws and norms in the Levant in pursuit of its war of vengeance, it appears ready to leave the region in flames for minor tactical Israeli gains – if that. As a consequence, in Arab capitals, the vocabulary has been changing. Israel is once again a regional threat. And once more, this is the Arab-Israel conflict.

Return to a Dangerous Regional Conflict

The concentric circles that revolve around the Israel-Palestinian conflict are now manifesting themselves again. At its core this remains a conflict over Palestinians self-determination. But the second circle, which has always been about Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbours and had somewhat vanished in recent decades, now reappears most tangibly. Even the outer circle is expanding outward again, involving great powers such as Russia and China who are trying to exploit Israel’s newly-found rogue state status to lure regional players away from a crumbling US-centric regional framework.

To call this an Israeli–Palestinian conflict today is to mislead. It obscures the anger building in Cairo, Amman, Riyadh and Doha. It misses the fact that Arab publics, already inflamed by Gaza, now see Israel as a concrete threat to Arabs collectively. And it hides the uncomfortable truth that Israel’s unchecked aggression has pushed it back into pariah status, feared for its power but trusted by almost no one.

Arab leaders cannot ignore this shift forever. They face publics that are up in arms, enraged at images of bombed cities, killed and mutilated women and children. Under the surface Arab civil society is boiling including in the Gulf where civil-societal activism is usually carefully managed. Talks of a new 1948 Nakba moment – where volunteers from the Gulf joined the call to arms in Palestine – can be heard in majilises across the region again. Already the Abraham Accords look brittle. What was meant to be an experiment in coexistence has become a source of regret. Israel was delusional to think it had bought real acceptance. The Qatar strike reveals that normalization was just a thin rhetoric veneer covering up a deep-seated sense of resentment.

To call this the Arab–Israeli conflict again is not nostalgia. It is recognizing that while the Palestinian struggle remains the core of this conflict, the second circle of this conflict between Arab states and the Jewish state has been pulled back in. If Israel continues down this path, Arabs and Muslims will not stand by idly forever. Public rage will eventually force the hand of leaders in Egypt and Jordan to do something to retain legitimacy and thereby survival. The return of the Arab–Israeli conflict is not just about framing discourse. It is about a dangerous new reality that will likely spark a period of confrontation where wars over narratives can easily spill into the military domain.