“Arab peoples want the liberation of Palestine. Their governments want the stability of their thrones. These two ambitions are structurally incompatible. That is the real conflict — and it runs deeper, and older, than anything Israel has ever done to its neighbors.”
The Myth of Unity
There is a persistent fiction in Arab political discourse and in much of Western analysis: the idea of a potentially united Arab world that chooses not to act for Palestine. As though passivity were a reversible decision — a switch that just needs the right hand to flip it.
Arab regimes have not simply chosen not to act for Palestine. Over decades, they have constructed architectures of interest in which any meaningful action on Palestine’s behalf directly threatens their own political survival. Passivity is not a choice made in the moment — it is the output of a system.
Since the Nakba of 1948, three major military confrontations have opposed Arab coalitions to Israel: 1948, 1967, 1973. But the 1967 defeat — by its totality and its speed — produced a lasting political effect that historiography has consistently underestimated: it shattered the Nasserist project of Arab unity as a shared horizon, and left in its place nation-states that have progressively made regime survival their primary foreign policy doctrine.
What exists in its place — a mosaic of regimes with contested legitimacies, dependent economies, and armies frequently bound by defense agreements to external powers — does not constitute a collective actor. It is an archipelago of individual calculations.
The Geography of Interests
Egypt is analytically the most instructive case. The first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel — the Camp David Accords in 1979 — Cairo has since received annual US military aid documented at approximately $1.3 billion per year by the Congressional Research Service. Breaking with Israel would mean breaking with Washington, which underwrites the Egyptian military apparatus — itself the central pillar of regime stability since 2013. This dependence is not a betrayal in any moral sense. It is a systemic constraint.
Jordan faces a structurally comparable situation. The UNHCR estimates that more than two million Palestinian refugees and their descendants hold Jordanian citizenship. The 1994 Wadi Araba peace treaty formalized a security relationship including intelligence cooperation documented by historian Avi Shlaim and multiple journalistic sources. Any large-scale popular mobilization on the Palestinian question carries a destabilization risk the Hashemite monarchy weighs with extreme caution.
The Gulf monarchies present the most paradoxical configuration. The UAE and Bahrain formalized normalization under the Abraham Accords in September 2020. Morocco followed in December 2020, exchanging normalization for US recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara. Saudi Arabia had not formalized normalization, but discussions were well advanced before October 2023, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The suspension since then is characterized by most analysts as a tactical recalibration — not an ideological rupture.
The conclusion is analytical, not moral: the structural interests of these regimes converge, to varying degrees, around a regional status quo in which the Palestinian question remains managed and contained — but never resolved.
Peoples Against Their States
Against this geography of official interests, public opinion data paint a radically different picture.
The Arab Opinion Index (Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, Doha), conducted in 2023 among more than 33,000 respondents in seventeen Arab countries, found that more than 90% oppose their government recognizing Israel — a figure stable across several years of tracking, though polling in authoritarian contexts requires appropriate methodological caution. A Zogby International survey in six Arab countries in 2022 confirms that Palestinian solidarity remains the foreign policy question on which Arab public opinion shows the strongest consensus and the widest gap with government positions.
This gap is not a passing anomaly. In non-democratic regimes, public opinion is a variable to be managed, not a constraint to be answered. Pro-Palestinian rhetoric in official Arab media functions as an emotional pressure valve — permitting symbolic solidarity that never translates into political pressure on governments.
The architecture has one structural limit, identified by Princeton political scientist Amaney Jamal: popular mobilizations around Gaza carry systemic risk for authoritarian regimes, because they can transform into mobilizations against corruption and internal inequality. Several Arab governments have restricted pro-Palestinian demonstrations since October 2023 — not out of sympathy for Israel, but out of fear of their own populations.
The central paradox: the Palestinian cause is the most broadly supported cause in the Arab world at the popular level, and the most comprehensively abandoned at the state level. This gap is not a coincidence. It is a deliberate political construction.
What Israel Understood
Israeli regional policy since the 1970s has rested on a lucid reading of this reality. Strategic doctrine — articulated in Oded Yinon’s 1982 analysis published in the journal Kivunimand documented in the work of historians Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Rashid Khalidi — postulates that Arab fragmentation favors Israeli security, and that moderate Arab regimes bound to Washington constitute de facto partners in managing the Palestinian question.
This doctrine rests on three pillars whose solidity deserves precise evaluation.
Conventional military superiority. Israel maintains a significant technological advantage over all its neighbors — sustained by a defense budget at 4.5% of GDP in 2023 (World Bank) and unmatched American technology transfers. This advantage remains real. But Gaza has exposed a documented limit: technological superiority does not guarantee strategic victory in high-intensity urban asymmetric warfare. The cost-result ratio of the Gaza operation, analyzed by researchers at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), now fuels internal debates within Israel itself.
Unconditional American support. The United States has provided Israel more than $158 billion in assistance since 1948 — the bulk military aid since 1973 (Congressional Research Service). This relationship remains structurally robust. But the Gallup poll of March 2024 recorded for the first time a majority of American Democrats disapproving of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza — pointing to a generational transformation of the coalitions that have sustained this relationship. The trajectory is documented and its direction is unambiguous.
Impunity in international legal forums. This is the pillar showing the most measurable fracture. The ICJ, in its order of January 26, 2024, found that South Africa’s genocide claims were “plausible” and ordered Israel to take preventive measures — without prejudging the merits. In November 2024, the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. The practical effects on their international mobility are already documented.
Five Real Levers
The solutions conventionally advanced — peace process negotiations, two-state conferences, international summits — have demonstrated their structural limits over decades. They presuppose a balance of parties and a mutual good faith that documented facts do not permit establishing. What follows proposes levers resting not on assumptions of goodwill, but on verifiable mechanisms of constraint and established historical precedent.
Cut off the weapons. SIPRI data establish that between 2019 and 2023, the United States accounted for 69% of Israeli arms imports. Germany ranks second: according to the Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz, German military export licenses to Israel rose from €32.4 million in 2022 to €326.5 million in 2023 — a tenfold increase in twelve months. Italy suspended new arms export licenses in April 2024 under parliamentary pressure. The UK Court of Appeal ruled in July 2024 that the government had failed to properly assess the risk of British weapons being used in violation of international humanitarian law, leading to partial license suspension in September 2024. Arms transfer conditionality is not a theoretical option: it is an operational mechanism already activated under judicial and parliamentary pressure in multiple European democracies. Gulf Cooperation Council states, with a combined GDP of approximately $2.1 trillion (IMF, 2024), hold a substantial complementary lever — untapped for want of coordinated political will.
Prosecute without pause. The ICC arrest warrants of November 2024 impose an immediately operational travel restriction across 124 member states. Any visit by Netanyahu to a member state would trigger an obligation to arrest. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s March 2024 report characterizes Israeli acts in Gaza as genocide within the meaning of the 1948 Convention, contributing to the documentary corpus of ongoing proceedings. The strategy: feed and systematize these procedures through independent fact documentation, additional state interventions, and expert reports mandated by UN bodies.
Suspend the normalizations. The Abraham Accords rest on specific, time-stamped interest calculations: for the UAE, access to the F-35 and security cover against Iran; for Bahrain, an analogous security alignment; for Morocco, recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara. None of these agreements contains a binding clause linked to Israeli conduct in the West Bank or Gaza. Their formal suspension is technically possible at any time. Turkey has traced the path: bilateral trade suspended in May 2024, participation in ICC proceedings, intervention before the ICJ in support of South Africa. This model is replicable.
Rebuild a Palestinian voice. Any external pressure strategy is structurally limited without a credible Palestinian interlocutor. The Palestinian Authority registers approval ratings below 30% in Gaza (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research). Hamas faces military fragility and diplomatic isolation. The emergence of a third pole of representation — rooted in civil society, carried by lawyers, intellectuals, local officials, and figures of unarmed resistance — is a strategic necessity. The global Palestinian diaspora, estimated at more than 14 million people (UNRWA), represents a political, legal, and financial resource still largely unmobilized.
Mobilize Western civil societies. In democratic systems, foreign policy is ultimately constrained by domestic electoral balances. A YouGov poll in March 2024 across six European countries found majorities favoring restrictions on arms sales to Israel. The March 2024 Gallup poll recorded the first plurality of Americans disapproving of Israeli military conduct in Gaza in decades. The BDS campaign, active since 2005, has produced documented results in academic and cultural domains; its targeted extension to the arms industry applies the model to a lever of higher impact.
What Law Permits and Politics Refuses
The disarmament of Israel — including its nuclear arsenal — is the question that international diplomacy systematically refuses to raise. It must be raised, with precision.
Israel is not a signatory to the NPT. It has concluded no comprehensive safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Its nuclear installations — notably the Dimona complex — have never been subjected to binding international inspection. These facts are uncontested and appear in annual IAEA reports and in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which estimates Israel’s operational stockpile at approximately 90 warheads as of 2023.
This situation was formalized during Nixon-Meir discussions in 1969 — partially declassified and documented by Avner Cohen in Israel and the Bomb (Columbia University Press, 1998). The Neither Confirm Nor Deny (NCND) doctrine allowed Israel to develop nuclear capabilities without facing the diplomatic pressure or sanctions applied to other states in comparable situations.
The asymmetry is stark: Israel benefits from de facto nuclear immunity; Iran has been subjected to some of the most severe sanctions in recent diplomatic history for a program whose military dimensions remain unestablished by IAEA inspectors. International law scholars John Quigley (Ohio State University) and Richard Falk (Princeton University) have characterized this asymmetry as incompatible with the sovereign equality principle of Article 2 of the UN Charter.
A legally grounded disarmament strategy requires three simultaneous tracks: universalization of the NPT as a condition of any commercial or security agreement with Israel; formal reopening of the Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone (WMDFZ) dossier — adopted at the 1995 NPT Review Conference, reaffirmed in 2000 and 2010, systematically blocked by the US-Israeli veto; and application of Article 51 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions as conditionality on conventional weapons transfers. None of these mechanisms requires new law. What they lack is not a legal foundation. It is the political will to apply them without exception.
The Global South Rises
The most geopolitically significant development of 2023–2026 is neither military nor diplomatic in the classical sense. It is a mutation in the structure of international legitimacy — of which Gaza is simultaneously the trigger and the symptom.
South Africa’s ICJ referral in December 2023 marks a qualitative rupture. For the first time, it was not an Arab country but a Southern African nation — carrying its own experience of apartheid — that brought the world’s highest court into a genocide case. Thirteen states have since filed declarations of intervention, including Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Ireland, Nicaragua, Turkey, and Malaysia — a geography that transcends religious and regional dividing lines.
This requalification of the Palestinian cause — from an Arab or Islamic cause to a universal cause of international law — is strategically decisive. When Ireland, Bolivia, and South Africa jointly carry a proceeding before the ICJ, the interpretive frame of the “Israeli-Arab conflict” or “clash of civilizations” becomes analytically inoperative.
This reflects a broader recomposition: the emergence of a Global South that no longer recognizes itself in an international order built on power relations inherited from incomplete decolonization, and that mobilizes the legal instruments of that order against its own contradictions. Palestine is the most visible case of a dynamic equally touching the regime of unilateral sanctions, IMF and World Bank voting structures, trade rules, and UN Security Council reform.
A World Order on Trial
There is no quick solution to what decades of occupation, colonial expansion, and mass violence have produced in Palestine, Gaza, and Lebanon. Any promise of rapid resolution would be analytically dishonest.
But a coherent strategy exists — arms transfer conditionality, systematic judicialization, suspension of normalizations, rebuilding of legitimate Palestinian representation, civil society mobilization — each component resting on existing international law mechanisms and documented historical precedent. This strategy promises no rapid peace. It aims at a progressive rebalancing of costs that renders the indefinite continuation of Israeli policy untenable — legally, economically, politically.
The real stakes extend beyond Gaza. What has been unfolding since 2023 in the corridors of the ICJ, in UN General Assembly votes, in European courts ruling on arms export licenses, on American campuses, and in Global South capitals is a question of far wider reach: Is international law universal, or is it selective? Is sovereign equality of states an operational principle or a situational slogan? Can the legitimacy of an international order durably rest on exemptions granted to certain states by the power that underwrites its architecture?
These questions transcend Palestine. They structure the relationship between North and South, between power and law, between legitimacy and force. South African apartheid lasted forty-six years. It yielded not under the weight of a war, but under growing diplomatic isolation, economic sanctions, internal mobilizations, and a shift in international legitimacy. The mechanism is not mysterious. It is historically documented. What it requires, in the Israeli-Palestinian case, is the same accumulation of constraints — and the same collective will to apply them without exception of state or power.
That moment will come. The question is how many lives it will cost to wait for it.
Laala Bechetoula is a historian, Journalist and Geopolitical Analyst. Research Associate, Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal. Author of The Book of Gaza Hashem .