Opinion | Israel-Gaza war: Western failure to see new realities thwarts peace

This past month, as I travelled through many countries in the Middle East, I was repeatedly reminded of the failure of Western elites and media to understand the Arab world. The conflict in Gaza has revealed their deep ignorance of new realities.

Fifty-seven countries – more than a quarter of the membership of the United Nations – attended the joint Arab-Islamic Extraordinary Summit in Riyadh on November 11. The summit issued statements condemning Israel’s inhumane bombardment of Gaza and supporting the UN General Assembly’s resolution of October 26 for a sustained humanitarian truce leading to cessation of hostilities.

The summit received less coverage in the Western media than the humanitarian conference in Paris on November 9, at which Group of 20 nations and Western NGOs played major roles. Such coverage as the Arab-Islamic summit did receive emphasised the unity of the attendees in sending a strong message to Israel. In fact, summit unity was largely cosmetic and the message was not directed at Israel but at the United States.

Unity in the Islamic world has never been other than performative. The hostility between Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his host at the summit, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, remains the region’s primary geopolitical fact. Many Arab governments – but not Qatar, which is home to a Hamas political office – share a deep distaste for Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, but even this degree of unity fragments over any issue of responsibility for the post-war governance of Gaza.

Only one issue united the summit: no one wants a regional war. Yet the Western media, focusing on Iran’s aggressive pan-Islamic ideology and its allied insurgent movements – Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen – obsesses over this risk.

Ignoring obvious geopolitical facts – such as that neither the United States, China, Iran, nor any Arab government, including Saudi Arabia, wants a wider war – the media hypes the dramatic prospect of conflict on Israel’s northern border.