The Gulf Arabs Weary of Protesting for Palestine - Yaroslav Trofimov
The teenage heroine of “Wadjda,” a hit 2012 Saudi movie, dreams of buying a bicycle and enters a Quran recital competition, lured by the $266 cash prize. But when she wins after weeks of hard study, the school’s principal—appalled by the idea of a girl cycling the streets of Riyadh—announces that the award would instead be donated to the Palestinian cause. “Where is the money?” the heroine’s friend asks after hearing of her big win. “In Palestine,” she wisecracks. The exchange suggests something about the role that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long played in excusing injustices in Arab societies—and helps explain why many young people, especially in the Gulf states, are tired of sacrificing their interests to it.
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The most important Gulf Arab state, Saudi Arabia, hasn’t joined in this normalization yet but has signaled approval. Its former intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, recently recorded a three-part interview-cum-history lecture for the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV channel. Pointedly bringing up past Palestinian leaders’ backing of Hitler in the 1930s and Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, the prince explained why Riyadh was focusing on its own priorities. “The Palestinian cause is a just cause, but its advocates are failures, and the Israeli cause is unjust, but its advocates have proven to be successful,” said Prince Bandar, the father of the current Saudi ambassadors to Washington and London. “There is something that successive Palestinian leadership share in common: They always bet on a losing side, and that has a price.”
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Yet in the decade since the Arab Spring uprisings began in 2010, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been just one conflagration among many in the region, often overshadowed by far bloodier tragedies in Syria, Yemen and Libya. “The Arab world has changed,” Mr. Muasher (Jordan’s former foreign minister) said. “The Arab Spring has meant that the Arab public and the Arab governments are more concerned about their domestic situation than they are with the Palestinian issue.”
The normalization drive with Israel comes as countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the Arab world’s two largest economies, confront the growing ambitions of the region’s non-Arab powerhouses, Turkey and Iran. “Many Arab states, in particular in the Gulf, view Iran and Turkey as representing an existential threat—and certainly a greater threat to their interests than Israel,” said Fawaz Gerges of the London School of Economics. “So they prioritize their national interests over the Palestinian cause.”
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Meanwhile, Israel’s own cultural output, long inaccessible in the Arab world, has found millions of Arab viewers on streaming platforms such as Netflix. “Fauda,” a spy thriller about an Israeli undercover team operating in the West Bank and Gaza that tries to bring nuance and humanity to characters on all sides, has become one of the most-watched shows in the UAE, Lebanon and Jordan.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-gulf-arabs-weary-of-protesting-for-palestine-11602251852 (subscription)