The 'moderates ' on Gaza

Arab regimes' alignment with Israel has grown even
more blatant during the ongoing offensive on Gaza .
In 2006 , Saudi Arabia' s leadership broke with
convention in Arab politics by publicly blaming a
self - proclaimed "resistance " force for provoking
Israel to unleash a war. Rather than hold Israel to
account for targeting civilians , ground invasion , air
and sea blockade, Saudi Arabia took aim at
Hezbollah for what it called "irresponsible
adventurism " in kidnapping two Israeli soldiers.
This set the tone for a number of Arab governments
during a month of war throughout which it became
clear they hoped Israel would "finish off" Hezbollah,
a nuisance that inflamed popular passions, leading to
impossible demands on regimes who relied on
western support to survive . Hosni Mubarak couldn 't
even bring himself to call Hezbollah by its name ,
referring to it famously during the Lebanon war as
" thingy". Add to that, especially for Saudi Arabia, the
fact that Hezbollah was an extension of Iranian
power.
It was a risky game , however , since the longer the
war went on , the more those Arab regimes were
exposed as ineffective and collaborationist. A US
diplomatic document published by WikiLeaks shows
a panicked Saud al - Faisal, the perennial Saudi
foreign minister, summoning then US ambassador
James Oberwetter midway through the war to
demand that Washington order a ceasefire , since the
plans to squash resistance had failed and the
resisters were becoming regional heroes .
In 2008 , the same scenario played out: Egypt and
Saudi Arabia blamed Hamas for Israel's month -long
assault on Gaza and hoped that Israel would finish
Hamas off . Egypt 's foreign minister at the time
Ahmed Abu al - Gheit even said that Palestinians had
no need for armed resistance and weapons -
another striking departure in the lexicon of not just
Arab politics but post- colonial struggle generally .
Today we are witness to another episode in this new
turn. Egypt under coup president , Abdel Fattah el -
Sisi , has kept the Gaza border closed and media
have adopted the Israeli line that Hamas is a force of
evil . Saudi Arabia, led by a man whose media
machine has presented him as an Arab nationalist
(" falcon of Arabism") and leader of Islam (champion
of wasatiyya , or religious moderation ), went silent .
Last week former intelligence chief Turki al - Faisal
was the channel for the first confirmation of the
Saudi position in an article in Asharq al -Awsat that
attacked Hamas as "arrogant " and conniving with
Qatar and Turkey to embarrass Sisi 's Egypt by
rejecting a ceasefire proposal that would leave the
crushing and illegal Israeli-Egyptian siege of Gaza
intact .
King Abdullah, whose alleged tears over Palestine
were marketed to media during the last Intifida ,
finally broke his silence on Friday . In an
extraordinary speech which began by attacking
unnamed " traitor terrorists " who sully the name of
Islam , he equated the terrorism of " groups and
states" in Gaza , avoiding direct mention of Israel by
name while leaving the implication that he viewed
Hamas as much of a terrorist group as the Islamic
State .
Hamas members were , of course , feted in Riyadh
and Jeddah in January 2006 after the group's
Palestinian election victory, and the subsequent
Saudi position towards the group is directly
correlated to that of its US patron . The speech was
designed to appease the Arab and Muslim street the
king pretends to lead, while not offending Washington
or Al Saud' s new friend of recent years (at least in
public) , Israel.
What is interesting about the position of the so -
called " Arab moderates" is that they have become
even more blatant in their US -Israeli alignment than
before, to the extent that their policies during Gaza
2014 are a grotesque caricature of what they were
before, particularly in Egypt 's case , with the vulgar
anti - Palestinianism promoted by the state.
The uprisings of 2011 have clearly not by any means
met the hopes of those who engaged in them , to the
degree that it has become fashionable to rue the day
they started. But it would be wrong to imagine that
the political arena has not been fundamentally
altered by those momentous events , when ordinary
people dared to challenge a regional order that had
created what was assumed to be an almost perfect ,
fool - proof system of security , media and ideological
control , with the acquiescence of western powers .
The arrogance of those entrenched regimes in
challenging basic tenets of decades of anti -imperial
struggle was misplaced : Egypt 's dissonant foreign
policy was one more factor that played into the
resentment that brought people onto the streets in
January and February three years ago . Claims that
foreign policy and Palestine specifically had nothing
to do with the protests - which writers like Thomas
Friedman love to bandy around - are absolutely
wrong.
The ancien regime struck back ferociously in Egypt ,
and its policy on Gaza is almost as manically
distorted as the revenge brutality of its security
forces: there is a link between the two . As for Saudi
Arabia, its time has not come : Al Saud have
numerous factors in their favour and tools in their
box to avoid mass dissent . But if and when that day
arrives , foreign policy stances such as these on
Gaza will be one of the many elements moving the
people to reject and defy.
Andrew Hammond is a Middle East policy fellow with
the European Council on Foreign Relations , former
Reuters bureau chief in Riyadh and author of The
Islamic Utopia : The Illusion of Reform in Saudi
Arabia and Popular Culture in the Arab World.