Michael Robbins and Amaney A. Jamal
When Israel began to normalize relations with some of its neighbors in 2020, as part of the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords, many analysts began to wonder whether the Palestinian cause still mattered to the Arab world. Doubts about the salience of the issue for Arabs grew in late 2023, when it appeared that Saudi Arabia might also join the accords, normalizing relations with Israel without demanding, in exchange, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
The Israeli military campaign in Gaza that followed Hamas’s attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, provoked international outrage at the scale of violence used against Palestinian civilians and Israel’s blockade of humanitarian assistance to Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel have long endured violence and deprivation, but Arab opposition to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has rarely been a decisive factor in the conflict. Considering the unprecedented level of devastation this round of fighting has wreaked, many observers anticipated that anger among ordinary citizens in Arab states might lead to significant shifts in their governments’ rhetoric and policy.
Instead, some scholars have argued that the October 7 attacks and the events that followed have in fact weakened the Palestinian cause, noting that the issue has largely fallen off the international agenda. Some cite, for example, the fact that none of the Arab countries that signed peace treaties with Israel have broken those relations. Similarly, during U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent trip to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, the issue took a back seat, at least publicly, overshadowed by the parties’ economic interests. To some observers, popular outrage in the Arab world over the war seemed like a proverbial “dog that did not bark.”
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