Patrick Wintour
The Guardian / October 3, 2024
The escalating Middle East conflict could create a dangerous vacuum – or an opportunity – for several states.
The coincidental timing of an emergency meeting of Gulf foreign ministers in Doha with a visit to the same city by the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, for talks with Qatar’s emir raises questions about how the Gulf states will react if Israel pushes ahead with its plan to use its recent military success not just to weaken Iran, but reorder the Middle East.
This Sunni coalition of six Gulf monarchs is not naturally well disposed to Iran or its Shia proxies, and only in 2016 labelled Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation. But they also oppose further Israeli escalation, and believe it is ultimately only Washington that has the means to restrain the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
They insist the establishment of an independent Palestinian state is the only path to regional stability, integration and prosperity.
“Palestinian statehood is a prerequisite for peace, rather than its byproduct,” the Saudi foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan wrote in Wednesday’s Financial Times, without making any reference to the Israeli-Iran conflict, or the likelihood that Joe Biden, in the twilight of his presidency and a month out from an election, is going to put the thumbscrews on Israel.
The reality is that Gulf state leaders, despite popular support in their countries for the Palestinian cause, are unlikely to change their own collective year-long strategy of not providing Palestinians anything other than humanitarian aid and political support.
Events can change at speed, but at present they face the prospect of a resurgent Israel determined to break out of the stalemate in Gaza by destroying Hezbollah’s military leadership and rendering Iran so weak that it can never fire at Israel again.
Reports that Israel is considering hitting Iran’s oil installations, let alone its nuclear sites, will unnerve the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). One Arab diplomat, no friend of Iran, said he feared for the moral implications of an Israeli “total victory”. It would bequeath the Middle East with a grim lesson – that “justice” can be obtained through total war.
The argument of the GCC, chaired by Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, Qatar’s prime minister, remains that a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel is the solution to the crisis. But Israel’s killing of Qatar’s key interlocutor, the Hamas political bureau member Ismail Haniyeh, was a severe blow to Doha’s hopes of achieving this.
Equally, on the second front – Lebanon – the GCC states, including Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have already urged Israel to respect the country’s sovereignty and accept a ceasefire. But at the same time none have endorsed Iran’s attack on Israel.
If Israel’s resurgence continues, the Gulf and Arab states may face a dilemma. On the one hand, the long-term weakening of Iranian influence might create an unwelcome and destabilising vacuum, one in which only Israel’s Iron Wall holds sway in the region. On the other hand, it might represent an opportunity for regional states to exploit Iran’s weakness and push back Iranian-backed non-state actors.
Many regional states have reason to want to see Tehran diminished. A weakened Iran could give greater space for Iraq’s president, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, to rein in Iranian-backed factions. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, conspicuously silent about the conflict despite the support Hezbollah has shown him, might recover influence in Lebanon.
Jordan is exercised by the Islamic Action Front, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot that topped the poll in recent parliamentary elections, taking 28% of the vote and becoming the largest single party. Jordan has sporadically blamed Iran for trying to stir up groups hostile to it.
Bahrain, which normalised relations with Israel in 2020 along with the United Arab Emirates, has to fend off regular pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The pro-Iran LuaLua TV claims there have been Shia demonstrations in mourning for the death of Hassan Nasrallah.
Kuwait is locked in a long contest with Iran to extract gas from a contested offshore natural gas field.
But the critical relationship for the region is that between Iran and Saudi Arabia – a relationship that was put on a better footing with the Beijing de-escalation roadmap agreed in 2023 between the two countries.
Saudi Arabia hosted the Iranian president for the first time in 11 years and allowed Iranian pilgrims to travel to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Riyadh has re-established relations with Iranian-backed Syria and hopes it has secured Iranian support to prevent the Houthis in Yemen from lobbing missiles over the border into Saudi.
Riyadh has also reiterated countless times in public to the US that it is simply not interested in normalisation with Israel so long as a credible path to a two-state solution is not included. The speech at the UN by Netanyahu last week urging Saudi Arabia to follow the UAE in normalising relations with Israel simply took no account of this, or the obstacle he personally represents to such an agreement.
In a paper just published by the European Council on Foreign Relations, the authors argue that the Saudi-Iranian relationship is critical to maintaining peace.
“A zero-sum approach that seeks to completely lock Tehran out of the regional security architecture,” they write, “will not enjoy regional support and will ultimately be counterproductive.”
Patrick Wintour is diplomatic editor for The Guardian
