Arab governments that for decades have been fierce advocates for the Palestinian cause are now facing criticism for their timid response to the extreme suffering in Gaza caused by Israel’s war, risking a dangerous rift with their increasingly restive citizens.
As deaths from starvation and Israeli bombardment have mounted, Palestinians, their supporters and some analysts have directed their anger toward Arab rulers in the region whom they perceive as being too passive and quiet. They point to countries outside the Middle East who have publicly criticized Israel and tried to stop it from expanding its military operations in Gaza.
“Where are the Arabs? The Arabs are napping. The Arabs are nowhere to be seen. The Arabs, and I’m talking about the Arab rulers, have buried their heads in the sand,” said Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics.
The situation in Gaza has become even more dire as Palestinians risk their lives to get food. An aid distribution system implemented by the U.S. and the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has led to hundreds more Palestinians being killed, often by Israeli soldiers.
Wafaa Eeed, a Palestinian woman in Gaza, told NBC News last month that she had walked several miles to a GHF aid distribution site on July 24, a day set aside only for women. She and two other witnesses said they were shot at, pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed.
“Arab states, why don’t you help us? We don’t want the Americans,” Eeed said.
Two women were killed on their way to the site, a Gaza health official said. The GHF said at the time that there were “no incidents” at the site itself.
The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to a request to comment on the incident, but at the time it told the BBC that early in the day it had “identified suspects who approached them, posing a threat to the troops” and “fired warning shots.”
It was not aware of casualties, and the shots were fired “hundreds of meters away” from the GHF site before its opening hours, it said.
Israel also denies there is starvation in Gaza, contradicting medics in the Palestinian enclave, global aid groups and even a close ally, President Donald Trump.
Some Arab leaders dependent on American aid and security guarantees are wary of angering the U.S. and Israel and see little strategic advantage in helping Palestinians, whom they may even see as a threat, experts say.
Arab states have participated in airdrops of aid and food convoys into Gaza, but Palestinians and aid groups say it’s nowhere near enough to ward off a looming famine. Egypt and Qatar have also mediated talks among Israel, the U.S. and Hamas, but they have not led to an end to the conflict.
Several Latin American states, along with Spain, Ireland and Norway, have blasted Israel for its conduct in Gaza and threatened sanctions or a downgrade of diplomatic ties.
And in recent weeks, longtime Israeli allies like France and Australia have pledged to officially recognize Palestine — a move decried by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. In late 2023, South Africa filed a case with the United Nations’ top court alleging that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Arab states have been much less vocal, with Egypt and Jordan even cracking down on pro-Palestinian protests and activism, fearing they could turn against the country’s leaders, experts say.
“Palestine resonates deeply in the Arab imagination,” Gerges said. “Palestine reminds Arabs of the subservience of their governments. Palestine reminds Arabs of the hegemony and domination and the continuing colonialism and imperialism of the West.”
He added, “I would say that Gaza, the tragedy of Gaza, the destruction of Gaza, could really serve as a time bomb that implodes the Arab political order from within.”
Polling before Oct. 7, 2023, showed that most Arab citizens rejected normalizing ties with Israel, a sentiment subsequent surveys show has only deepened since.
A survey published in June by pollster Arab Barometer found that support for such a move has collapsed, not exceeding 13 percent in the seven countries surveyed.
The Egyptian and Jordanian embassies in the U.S., along with the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this story.
Egypt and Jordan, even with the crackdown, have allowed limited protests, though hundreds of activists have also been arrested, according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The Gulf states rarely allow protests, but they have largely maintained diplomatic and trade links with Israel throughout its devastating offensive in the Gaza strip that began after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, in which some 1,200 were killed and 250 taken hostage.
Health officials in Gaza say that more than 61,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed in the ensuing war.
Many academics, including Israeli scholars, have in recent months joined rights groups in condemning Israel’s operations in Gaza as genocide, a charge Israel vehemently denies.
“Despite the genocide, in the middle of the genocide, this extraordinary depravity that we see in Gaza, not a single Arab state that has relations with Israel has cut relations with Israel, although other states in other parts of the world have,” said Ussama Makdisi, professor of history and chancellor’s chair at the University of California, Berkeley.
The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were among the Arab states that signed the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020, paving the way for economic and diplomatic ties with Israel. Saudi Arabia had been set to follow, but the Gaza conflict put those plans on hold.
For Gulf Arab states, better ties with Israel have little to do with public attitudes and more to do with realpolitik, experts say. The Gulf states host several U.S. military bases that analysts say help shield them from regional rival Iran and also help maintain Western access to the region’s vast energy supplies.
Access to Israel’s vibrant tech sector has also been a draw for some Arab states, who have used its surveillance technology to stifle dissent, experts and rights groups say.
“Those regimes in the Arab world that depend on the U.S. for their security, they don’t depend on their legitimacy vis a vis their own people. They depend on U.S. protection, U.S. military bases,” Makdisi said.
Houthi rebels, who control large parts of Yemen, have fired missiles and drones at Israel and ships in the region in what they say is an attempt to end Israel’s offensive in Gaza, but Yemen is alone among Arab states in pressuring Israel militarily. Arab countries could apply economic pressure through oil embargoes or restricting access to the Suez Canal and Arab airspace, but experts say such moves are unlikely.
Arab countries once supplied Palestinian militant groups with weapons, funding and bases from which to attack Israel, but such solidarity proved costly and dangerous.
In Jordan, tensions between Palestinian militant groups and the ruling monarchy exploded into the “Black September” civil war in 1970, leading to the militants’ eventual expulsion and relocation to Lebanon.
The presence of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon in the 1970s exacerbated the country’s civil war and triggered an Israeli invasion in 1982 to target “Palestinian terrorists.”
More recently, Israel invaded Lebanon last year, heavily bombing southern Beirut in an offensive against the Hezbollah militant group, which had been firing rockets at Israel in solidarity with Hamas.
Hezbollah and Hamas are backed by Iran, which has led some Arab states to distance themselves from both groups.
For Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Lebanon and Kuwait, lukewarm Arab support for the Palestinian cause is less about U.S. and Israeli pressure and more about self-preservation.
“The Palestinians, both the cause, the PLO and the population, in the Jordanian and Lebanese examples, have both been seen as a threat to the rule of these Arab regimes,” Crocker told NBC News.
The U.S. and Israel had floated plans for Arab countries to accept tens of thousands of Gaza refugees, but the idea was flatly rejected, with those Arab countries fearing both renewed Palestinian militancy and accusations of aiding ethnic cleansing, experts say.
Crocker compared Palestinians to the Kurds, another stateless group in the Middle East.
“There’s a saying among the Kurds, who are scattered between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, that they have no friends but the mountains,” he said. “Well, the Palestinians don’t even have the mountains.”
