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The Arab League's Summit of Illusions

(Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs) Dalia Ziada - The Arab League's emergency summit on Gaza on March 4, 2025, was never about the future of Gaza, but about the Arabs' Gaza dilemma and the interplay between Arabs, the U.S., and Europe. The emergency summit, organized by Egypt in response to President Trump's Gaza plan, was a carefully staged political maneuver designed to whitewash the hands of Arab leaders from their responsibility to shelter Gazans and fool the international community into believing that a viable solution is possible for Gaza without addressing the crux of the problem - Hamas. There is no chance for peace in Gaza or a resolution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without removing Hamas from political power and disarming all the violent militias operating in all the Palestinian-controlled territories. Hamas's welcoming of the summit's concluding statement should have been a red flag to anyone genuinely seeking a peaceful resolution. The Arab League's grand solution is merely a rebranding of the same actors who have enabled Gazans' suffering for decades, whether it is Hamas from behind the curtains running the show of a technocrat administration or the PA extending its corrupt practices from the West Bank to Gaza. Arab Gulf countries - excluding Qatar, a staunch supporter of Hamas - are reluctant to contribute to Gaza reconstruction without ironclad guarantees that their money will not be wasted on yet another cycle of violence between Hamas and Israel in the future. The demilitarization of Gaza is the most - if not the only - credible guarantee in this regard, but it is also the issue least addressed by Arab or international stakeholders. A closer look at the summit's final statement reveals its true purpose: attacking Israel. Article 18 of the summit's Cairo Declaration proposes forming a legal committee to classify Israel's military actions, and the U.S. calls for "displacement of Gazans," as acts of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Moreover, Syria's jihadist president, Ahmed Hussein a-Sharaa, who previously said that Syria "does not want to get into a war with Israel," called for collective Arab aggression against Israel. In an interview with Al-Arabiya, Al-Sharaa mentioned that he has plans to confront "Israel's aggression" but will not declare them in the media. The author is an award-winning Egyptian writer and Senior Fellow for Research and Diplomacy at the Jerusalem Center.
2025-03-16 00:00:00
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