Hamas-Israel war: Why Arab frustrations with US are spiking
AMMAN, JORDAN- A peace summit in Jordan canceled at the last minute, a public lecture from the Egyptian president, ghosting the U.S. secretary of state for an entire night in Saudi Arabia.
Arab leaders’ rebuffing of U.S. officials this week underscored a deepening frustration with an administration seen as unable or unwilling to rein in the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, which they say is destabilizing the region and, amid a devastating blast at a Gaza hospital, their regimes at home.
Protests shook Amman and the West Bank for the second day Wednesday over the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip, which has uprooted more than 1 million Gazans and killed nearly 3,500 people in response to a Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis.
Cairo was also the scene of mass protests, and the U.S. Embassy in Amman was forced to close.
The main diplomatic casualty was a peace summit set to have taken place in Amman Wednesday between President Joe Biden and the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority.
It was canceled within hours of an explosion at a Baptist hospital in Gaza City that local officials say killed 500 civilians Tuesday evening, less than 12 hours before President Biden was set to arrive in the region and as protesters marched in Amman. One reason for its cancellation, analysts say, was Mr. Biden’s refusal to put talk of a cease-fire on the table after the hospital blast.
“There is no point in doing anything at this time other than stopping this war,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told Al Jazeera Wednesday. “There is no benefit to anyone holding a summit at this time.”
The tensions laid bare unprecedented frustration for America’s Arab allies, who face a difficult balancing act. They rely on U.S. aid, support peace with Israel, and have supported American foreign policy over the past two decades, even as their stance has enraged their own people.
They accuse the Biden administration of being out of touch and “dismissive” of both the impact of the war at home – including the perils of a new refugee crisis – and the risk of regional conflagration.
Washington, say Arab officials and analysts, fails to understand how the mass displacement of Gazans evokes for Arab states and societies the multigenerational Palestinian refugee trauma created by the 1948 and 1967 wars, which transformed the region and echo to this day.
They say the lack of understanding held up humanitarian efforts in Gaza while leaving moderate Arab governments weakened at home and unable to contain a war threatening to spill across the region.
“We are in for long weeks ahead,” says one Arab official not authorized to speak to the press. “And it seems there is nothing we can do to avert a wider catastrophe.”
Mr. Biden said Wednesday that Israel had agreed to allow “lifesaving” humanitarian aid into Gaza from Egypt – an Israeli statement specified “food, water, and medicine” to southern Gaza – and that the United States would provide $100 million to help civilians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Canceled summit
Wednesday’s summit was designed to ease humanitarian suffering and “avert a regional war,” officials said.
For the Arab allies, its immediate goal was to solve the impasse over the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza and to stress to President Biden their refusal to facilitate a mass exodus of Gazans into Egypt, according to Jordanian official sources.
It was hoped that face-to-face diplomacy would drive home the seriousness of the regional fallout of the war and encourage President Biden to pass along the message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and obtain a humanitarian cease-fire in the besieged strip.
Yet the de-escalation efforts were shattered before the summit could be held when a blast Tuesday evening shook the Al Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, which was doubling as a makeshift refugee shelter. Gaza health officials say 500 people were killed, making it the single deadliest wartime calamity in the strip in two decades.
Hamas immediately blamed Israel, calling it a missile strike. Israel attributed the blast to a failed rocket launched nearby by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Wednesday presented video and a phone intercept as evidence. In Israel, President Biden noted there are “a lot of people who are not sure,” but that initial intelligence from the Department of Defense indicated it was “the other team,” Palestinian groups.
Yet video evidence provided by residents near the hospital and distrust of Israeli military statements – including its monthslong denial of responsibility for the killing last year of American Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank – led Arab governments and publics to conclude that Israel was to blame and had committed a war crime…..CONTINUE READING AT THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR.