Arab, Western diplomats talk past each other on Gaza

CAIRO—Cairo’s “Summit for Peace” was meant to be a diplomatic breakthrough towards a ceasefire in Gaza, but its failure revealed what one analyst called the “fault lines” between Arab and Western states in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In their opening addresses Saturday, Arab leaders and Western delegates agreed on the need for aid to reach Palestinians in Gaza, besieged and under Israeli bombardment.

But after hours of discussion, they found common ground on little else, with the meeting ending without a concluding statement.

“The disagreement was over condemning Israel, which Western states refused to do,” an Arab official told Agence France-Presse (AFP), requesting anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.

Instead, they sought a statement that placed “responsibility for the escalation on Hamas,” which Arab states refused, according to a different Arab diplomat.

Relentless bombing

On Oct. 7, Hamas militants launched a multipronged assault in Israel, killing at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and taking more than 200 hostages, according to Israeli officials.

Israel has hit back with a relentless bombing campaign that has killed more than 4,600 people in Gaza, mainly civilians, according to Palestinian officials, and cut off supplies of water, electricity, fuel and food.

Though a number of Arab leaders condemned the loss of Israeli civilian life, they refused to place the onus on Hamas for the bloodshed.

Arab states—some involved in the hostage negotiations with Hamas—would have been “in uncomfortable positions with their people” if they had signed on to the condemnation, the Arab official said.

Another point of contention, diplomats said, was Western diplomats wanting to call for the release of hostages abducted by Hamas.

Arab countries, with Qatar in the lead, have been negotiating their release in talks which could have been jeopardized if they signed alongside countries who have supported “Israel’s right to defend itself,” diplomats said.

‘Dialogue of the deaf’

With nothing left on the table, the meeting amounted to little more than a “dialogue of the deaf,” according to regional expert Karim Bitar, and ended quietly.

The sole statement released was one from the Egyptian presidency—drafted with the approval of Arab attendees, diplomats said—that said decades of band-aid diplomacy had failed to find “a just and lasting solution to the Palestinian issue”.

The summit, Bitar told the AFP, “perfectly illustrates the deepening fault lines between the West and the Arab world, and the Global South more broadly,” as decades have not dulled “the persistence of the Palestinian question.”

Though the list of Arab states with ties to Israel has grown in recent years, popular antiIsrael sentiment has remained strong.

Mass protests in support of the Palestinians have erupted in the region and beyond, with Egyptians taking to Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square on Friday for the first time in years after protests in the country were banned. —AFP