Even as the devastation wrought by another war overwhelms Gaza and Lebanon, many Arab states have become gripped by paralysis in the face of a rapidly escalating conflict. Not that long ago, any military operation launched by Israel might have elicited intensive diplomacy from Arab states whose rulers faced immense pressure for action from within their own societies. Yet the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East today is defined by the inability of those same states to prevent Israeli and Iranian leaders from wreaking havoc across their region.
While the lack of decisive pressure from Arab states is now taken for granted in much analysis and media commentary of the current conflicts, this is a relatively recent development when it comes to the geopolitics of the Middle East. As recently as November 2012, a brief war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas elicited an active diplomatic response by then-Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi that, together with the U.S., exerted enough pressure on both sides to secure a cease-fire only two weeks after the start of hostilities. Morsi’s allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood, which had longstanding links with Hamas, enabled him to influence powerbrokers in Gaza at a time when Iran’s influence there had waned.
The intensity of the efforts by Egypt and the Gulf states to bring the fighting between Hamas and Israel to a quick resolution in 2012 was partly due to their anxiety over the possibility of mass protests in support of the Palestinians, just a year after popular revolts had toppled rulers in Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Yet the willingness of Arab states to take an active role in mediation and diplomatic pressure to prevent Israel from pursuing maximalist goals was also visible long before the Arab uprisings of 2011. Following the peace accord between Egypt and Israel in 1978, both states fostered crucial channels of communication that could be used to avoid conflicts from spiraling out of control.