CAIRO — Battling Palestinian militants in Gaza two years ago, Israel found itself pressed from all sides by unfriendly Arab neighbors to end the fighting. Not this time.
After the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states — including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip. That, in turn, may have contributed to the failure of the antagonists to reach a negotiated cease-fire even after more than three weeks of bloodshed.
“The Arab states’ loathing and fear of political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Benjamin Netanyahu,” the prime minister of Israel, said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington and a former Middle East negotiator under several presidents. “I have never seen a situation like it, where you have so many Arab states acquiescing in the death and destruction in Gaza and the pummeling of Hamas. The silence is deafening.”
Egypt is traditionally the key go-between in any talks with Hamas — deemed a terrorist group by the United States and Israel — but this time the government in Cairo surprised Hamas by publicly proposing a cease-fire agreement that met most of Israel’s demands and none by the Palestinian group. Hamas was tarred as intransigent when it immediately rejected it, and Cairo has continued to insist that its proposal remains the starting point.
Commentators sympathetic to the Palestinians slammed the proposal as a ruse to embarrass Hamas. Egypt’s Arab allies praised it. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt the next day to commend it, in a statement that cast no blame on Israel but referred only to “the bloodshed of innocent civilians who are paying the price for a military confrontation for which they are not responsible.”
“There is clearly a convergence of interests of these various regimes with Israel,” said Khaled Elgindy, a former adviser to Palestinian negotiators and a fellow at the Brookings Institution. The Egyptian fight against the forces of political Islam and the Israeli struggle against Palestinian militants are nearly identical, he said.
The dynamic has inverted all expectations of the Arab Spring uprisings. As recently as 18 months ago, most analysts expected the popular uprisings to make the Arab governments more responsive to their citizens, and therefore more sympathetic to the Palestinians and more hostile to Israel. But Israel’s government has emerged for the moment as an unexpected beneficiary of the ensuing tumult.