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The New Arab World: No Longer United Against Israel

(Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies-Bar-Ilan University) Lt.-Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar - It has been commonly accepted that there is an "Arab world" with an agenda centered around the desire to see Israel disappear and a Palestinian state take its place. Yet today this world is divided into two hostile coalitions. On one side is Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Qatar, and Gaza, supported from the outside by Turkey, Russia, and China. Against it stands Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan, and Israel, supported from the outside by the U.S. While there was no Saudi response to the September 2019 Iranian attack on Saudi oil-producing facilities or Iran's attacks on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea, Israel has proven capabable of inflicting severe blows on Iranian forces and pro-Iranian militias in Syria. It turns out that there are things more important to some countries than a resolution of "the Palestinian problem." The Iranian problem has escalated to the level of an existential threat, while the Israeli-Palestinian problem is not an existential threat to anyone. Moreover, after the "Arab Spring," which precipitated the collapse of regimes and economies and the rise of the Islamic State, the fight for the "liberation of Palestine" is not uppermost among Arab concerns. The writer, a senior research associate at the BESA Center, served for 25 years in IDF military intelligence.
2020-10-22 00:00:00
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