Doha, Qatar – Experts say Israel’s war on Gaza will force the Middle East into a “reset” and impact the region’s normalization process with Israel, creating a multipolar world far from US hegemony.
Leading global experts spoke at the Doha Forum, which concluded Monday in the Qatari capital, following two days of deliberations marked by Israeli attacks on the besieged enclave, which killed more than 18,000 people in one little more than two months.
The war, which several Arab countries have called a genocide of the Palestinian people, has sparked global calls for an immediate ceasefire and an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by Israeli forces.
However, a day before the start of the Doha Forum, the United States vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza – a decision that caused widespread outrage during of the event in Qatar.
At the closing session of the Doha Forum, Galip Dalay, senior fellow at the Middle East World Affairs Council, said growing discontent with the United States would make it easier for China and the Russia to gain a greater foothold in the Middle East.
“This war was not regionalized in the form of state actors joining the war, but it was regionalized to the extent that the region was involved emotionally, politically and socially,” he said.
Israel’s normalization ‘off the table’
Omar Rahman, also a member of the Middle East World Affairs Council, said Israel has reaffirmed itself as “the most hated country in the region by far,” making any normalization process “irrelevant.” with him in the near future.
Normalization refers to a process approved by the Arab League in 2002 when it offered Israel normal relations with Arab nations in exchange for a complete withdrawal from the lands it had conquered in the 1967 war to allow the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
In 2020, former US President Donald Trump helped Israel establish formal relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco in agreements known as the Abraham Accords. Sudan also normalized relations with Israel as part of Trump’s efforts.
Meanwhile, Trump also angered the Palestinians when he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The Palestinians want occupied East Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state.
More recently, the Biden administration has increased efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But the war in Gaza has put Riyadh and other Arab countries that have signed a peace deal with Israel in a delicate position.
Instead, experts at the Doha Forum predicted that the assault on Gaza would push regional rivals in the Middle East to “normalize” their relations – primarily Saudi Arabia and Iran.
“Normalization processes between Arab states and other (nations) outside of Israel are likely to continue because the regional rivalries that emerged during the Arab Spring were self-defeating and economically costly,” Rahman said.
“No one would have emerged from this competition as the dominant force in the region,” he said.
Tehran as an example
Sanam Vakil, director of the MENA program at Chatham House, said Iran is “an integral part of these normalization processes in the region”.
Vakil said the China-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran earlier this year was a momentous example of the multipolarity fomented in the region.
She said Tehran’s regional relationships through what it calls the Axis of Resistance – which includes the Syrian government, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and various Palestinian factions, among others – are helping it to “balancing, putting pressure on and guarding against what it sees as threats”. Western sanctions.
Europe’s reluctance to support Iran’s nuclear ambitions due to human rights concerns also prompts Tehran to recognize the importance of regional ties, Vakil argued.
But analysts also warned that any regional escalation due to the war in Gaza could be dangerous for Iran.
“At the same time, it is very important to maintain low pressure on Israel, the United States and the region as a whole to avoid further escalation which they believe will happen in Tehran, perhaps in 2024,” Vakil said.
Palestinian state
Alfredo Conte, a senior Italian diplomat who also spoke at the Doha Forum, said the war in Gaza demonstrated how critical the Palestinian issue is to the region.
Conte said normalization of Middle Eastern countries with Israel should not necessarily be an impossibility in the future and could be worked alongside a statehood solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The entire region can contribute to shared stability and prosperity by addressing the Palestinian question (and) giving the Palestinian people a serious prospect of statehood,” he said.
