The Palestinian question had become a marginal issue. For the past 25 years, foreign affairs ministries treated it as a secondary issue. It was the forgotten plight in a region torn apart by other causes. There was no longer any talk of the "centrality" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. The confrontation had lost its systemic dimension: it was thought it could no longer provoke a new war in the region. Those days are over.
The Palestinian question could once again set the Middle East ablaze. The players most concerned are rushing blindly towards a war they don't want, but which they may find hard to contain. The face-off between Israelis and Palestinians had been classed as a frozen conflict: it has just re-emerged in an atrocious fashion, regaining its "centrality."
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Middle East of the 21st century, almost a generation old now, was swept up in a spiral of violence unrelated to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Other fault lines ravaged the region, notably the opposition between the mainstream of Islam, Sunnism, and its minority branch, Shia – the former led by Saudi Arabia, the latter by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
These two powers clashed, by proxy or militia, in Lebanon and, even more so, in Syria and Yemen. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, the destruction of entire cities under indiscriminate bombardment by one side or the other: like a congenital curse, war arrived to engulf the region. But the Palestinian affair had nothing to do with it; it was no longer the main cause of the Arab regimes.
All the more so as the Arab world, busy containing Iranian imperialism in the Middle East, has drawn closer to Israel without the slightest regard for their Palestinian "brothers." The Palestinians are partly to blame for this isolation, owing to their divided national movement in particular. Hamas, the perpetrator of the October 7 massacres, cultivates a discourse of eternal war against the "Zionist entity."
Throughout the Arab world, the ferocity of Israel's retaliation on Gaza has awakened public opinion, which had remained indifferent to the Saudi bombardments of Yemen or the bludgeoning of Syrian cities by the Russian air force and the Damascus regime.
In Cairo, Amman and Riyadh, governments are terrified by this mobilization. Weakened, they refuse to condemn Hamas. They don't even dare meet the president of the United States, Joe Biden.
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