In conversations with the King of Jordan, Abdullah bin Al-Hussein (Abdullah II), at the end of 2012 during a visit to his country, I asked him about the prospects for achieving lasting peace between Israel and the Arab countries. His response was clear and simple. He told me that there would be no peace in the region if the Palestinian issue—regarding the occupied territories and the exercise of their right to self-determination—was forgotten.
At that time, more than a decade ago, the Palestinian issue had virtually disappeared from the front pages of international newspapers. In its place, other news topics emerged, such as the Arab Spring, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. In reality, what brought the Palestinian issue back to the international agenda was the attack launched on Israel on October 7, 2023, by a group of Palestinian militants led by Hamas.
The attack, from the Gaza Strip and carried out during a festive celebration, caught Israeli intelligence services by surprise, resulting in 1,139 deaths—both civilian and military—as well as 251 hostages.
From then on, hell has rained down on the population of Gaza. In retaliation, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), through the use of tanks and infantry backed by air and sea bombardments, have so far caused the deaths of more than 56,000 Palestinians, including children, women, and the elderly. Through its actions, Hamas succeeded in putting the Palestinian tragedy back on center stage—but at a human cost far greater than it could have anticipated.
Escalation of the Conflict
To tell the truth, there is no single cause that can fully explain Hamas’s gruesome attack. Since 2007, Israel had maintained a blockade on the Gaza Strip, which caused a severe humanitarian crisis and led to a situation of extreme poverty.
Months before the 2023 attack, Israel also carried out several military operations and raids in the West Bank that led to deaths, confrontations, and mass arrests of Palestinian militants. With its attack, Hamas aimed to disrupt a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia—an agreement that would further isolate the Palestinian cause, particularly because it involved one of the Arab countries historically most supportive of the Palestinians.
Although the militant group achieved its goal of bringing the Palestinian issue back into global attention, it came at such a high human cost that many now question whether the attack was a grave tactical and strategic mistake.
In response to the attack, Israeli forces have reacted in a disproportionately severe way, carrying out what many see as a kind of ethnic cleansing to facilitate new Jewish settlements in the occupied territories—an approach that has most severely affected the Palestinian people. Acting in this way, under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu—whose popularity was plummeting before the October 7 attacks—the far right, composed of Orthodox and Israeli supremacist groups, has managed to consolidate itself as the dominant political force in Israel.
Diplomacy for Peace
Since the United Nations resolution of 1948, which established the partition of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel, the conflict has not only been between two peoples, but also between Israel and the Arab states of the Middle East. Countries such as Egypt, Syria, and Jordan had waged wars against Israel over the Palestinian issue; and others—like Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia—had supported the Palestinian cause with arms and funding. For the three decades following the UN resolution, Israel’s conflict with the Arab states had a greater dimension than the one with the Palestinians.
However, this began to change due to bilateral peace agreements between several Arab countries and Israel that overlooked the Palestinian cause.
A turning point in the Arab-Israeli conflict came with the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who made the Palestinian cause a priority of his foreign policy. Iran, a Shiite-majority country, supported, trained, and financed groups like Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon. It sought to position itself as the leader of the Muslim world, in opposition to Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia.
After the Oslo Accords in 1993, more Arab countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan signed normalization agreements with Israel, leaving Palestine increasingly marginalized. The Abraham Accords, promoted by President Donald Trump during his first term in 2020, expanded the number of Arab countries with formal diplomatic relations with Israel.
As the King of Jordan foresaw in our conversation, with Palestine being increasingly forgotten, the chances of achieving lasting peace in the Middle East became more remote. Amid the current war, the Hamas and Hezbollah groups have been decimated by Israeli forces.
Iran, for its part, has become so weakened that it has been directly attacked by Israel and later by the United States, which seeks to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities to prevent the development of nuclear weapons. Following its attacks, the Trump administration has called for a ceasefire.
Russia, for its part, has responded by warning of a potential third world war, while China has called for an end to the escalation of the conflict taking place in the Middle East. Now that the conflict has reached its peak, it is time for diplomacy, dialogue, and negotiation to apply a tourniquet to the hemorrhage threatening world peace. Even more so, it is time for the right of Palestinians to sovereignty and self-determination to find a balance with Israel’s legitimate need for security.
