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The October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, in which more than 700 Israelis have been killed as of Monday, is believed to be the Palestinian militant group’s response to attempts at achieving “normalisation” of relations between Israel and other Muslim countries in West Asia.
Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader, said on Al Jazeera television: “All the agreements of normalisation that you (Arab states) signed with (Israel) will not end this conflict,” referring to the larger Israel-Palestine conflict. The Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah, which has also attacked Israeli forces in the north, said the attack was a “decisive response to Israel’s continued occupation and a message to those seeking normalisation with Israel”.
What does “normalisation” mean? And how does it relate to the region’s past and future? We explain.
The history of the Israel-Palestine conflict is old and complex, but at its heart lies the fact that both Jews and Palestinians regard the ancient and historical land of Palestine (much of which is Israel today) as their own, and will not give up their claim to it. These claims are not just over the land, but also ethnic, cultural and religious, and seen by both sides as being integral to their identity as a people.
At the very core of the dispute lies the city of Jerusalem and the areas surrounding it, which hold importance for three major Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The old city of Jerusalem is home to the Western Wall or Wailing Wall, part of the retaining wall of a hill known as Temple Mount, which is sacred to Judaism (and Christianity). The Wall is the closest that Jews are allowed to get to the Temple Mount platform, and is the most sacred place in the Jewish faith.
The wall also forms a part of the border of the Al Aqsa compound, within which is the mosque that stands at the site from where the Prophet is believed to have ascended to paradise. The Al Aqsa compound, which includes the Qibla mosque and the famed Dome of the Rock, is considered the third holiest site in Islam, after the mosques in Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.
After the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, there was a mass migration of Jews towards the “promised land” of Palestine, the sacred sites from which they had been evicted two millennia previously, and had ever since been subjected to historical persecution of which the Holocaust was only the latest and most catastrophic example. The United Kingdom held much of Palestine as its colonial possession at the time.
In November 1947, the United Nations accepted a partition plan (map below) for the division of the region into Arab and Jewish parts, but the Arab parties rejected it, and fighting — the first war in the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict — broke out immediately. On May 14, 1948, in the middle of the war, the British formally ended their mandate in Palestine, and the Jewish leadership in Palestine, led by David Ben-Gurion, declared the Establishment of the State of Israel.
The very next day, a coalition of Arab armies including the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Syrians, and the Lebanese, invaded Israel from the south, north, and east, and the second phase of the war began. The Israel Defence Forces inflicted defeat on the Arab armies, and by the end of the war in July 1949, had captured almost 80% of the territory of the former Mandatory Palestine. The kingdom of Jordan captured and subsequently annexed what is today’s West Bank, and Egypt captured the Gaza Strip along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
Some 700,000-750,000 Palestinians were uprooted and became homeless and stateless. The bulk of them retreated into Gaza. This event is remembered in Palestinian memory as the Nakba or catastrophe, the destruction of the Palestinian homeland and society, and the beginning of their persecution by Israel.
Over the decades, several attempts have been made for the establishment of two states, Israel and Palestine, by dividing the region into Jewish and Arab territories, but none of these were acceptable to all parties. Both have demanded the right to self-determination: to determine their own political, economic and cultural development. it is also linked to the idea of sovereignty, the supremacy of people’s will as the governing force of a state.
Meanwhile, conflicts broke out between Israel and the Arab states, during which Israel annexed the Golan Heights in Syria, which it still controls, and the Sinai Peninsula, which has since been returned to Egypt.
For long, Muslim countries, both Arab and non-Arab, refused to recognise Israel, and relations were at best only informal. A change came in 1979 after the US negotiated the Camp David Accords between leaders of Egypt and Israel, which led to some mutual concessions and agreements. But that still did not mean the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and most other nations in the region.
In 2002, Saudi Arabia led an Arab Peace Initiative, which proposed the withdrawal of Israel from the territories it had occupied in 1967, including the Golan Heights, the settlement of the Palestinian refugee question, and the recognition of East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestinian state. Only then could there be a normalisation of relations between the Arab world and Israel, it said.
The initiative was subsequently endorsed twice by the Arab League. Over the past dozen-odd years, a series of developments in the region have led to incremental progress in the process of ‘normalisation’.
The Arab Spring: The Arab Spring protests of 2010 saw attempts to overthrow long-reigning monarchies and governments in countries of the Middle East and North Africa and led to rethinking in the region on longstanding fault lines and grievances. Fatigue with the protracted nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the changing economic and strategic needs of individual countries contributed to the need for new outlooks.
Rise of MBS: In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is keen to expand beyond his kingdom’s traditional spheres of economic interests. Israel-Saudi ties have made progress in recent months. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a few weeks ago that an agreement with its historical rival in the region was in the works, and would be brokered by the US.
Abrahamic Accords: The two countries signed a normalisation deal in 2020 that came into effect the following year. Also brokered by the US, the “Abrahamic Accords” led to the UAE becoming the third Arab country, after Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994, to agree to formally normalise its relationship with Israel. The two countries also signed a trade deal in May 2022.
The Abraham Accords initially included the UAE and Bahrain, and later, Sudan and Morocco. As The Indian Express reported then, “The accord was contingent on the suspension of Israel’s plans to annex the West Bank, although it is noteworthy that they chose the word ‘suspend’ instead of ‘end.’”
The Iran factor: Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan is seen as a leader who considers “an expansionist Iran and transnational political Islamists” as the “principal threats” to the UAE and its allies. In this assessment, Israel is seen as a formidable regional power that shares these views, so better ties with it make strategic sense. The promise of being closer to “the US strategic orbit” is an important factor too.
Emergence of China: The rise of China is key, which was behind an attempt at normalisation of ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran this year. While the endurance of these ties over a long period has been questioned, it still points to another lasting, complex political issue in the region seeing some kind of forward movement. It also showed China utilising its economic heft to emerge as a player in regions that were so far mostly seeing US involvement.
And where does the Palestinian issue figure in all of this?
The struggle of the Palestinians has been seen as being put on the back burner, even as conflict and violence have not stopped. There is deep unhappiness among the more militant sections of the Palestinians, and even the moderate West Bank government of Mahmoud Abbas has criticised many of these agreements.
A 2020 article for the think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (‘Without the Palestinians, Israeli Normalization Is Still Beyond Reach’), argued that the normalisation of ties cannot take hold truly unless past annexations and other points of concern are not resolved. This was crucial for the region’s people, and not just governments.
“Normalization is not simply a top-level exchange of officials; rather, it’s a public-to-public engagement. Decades after the Egyptian peace accords, people-to-people normalization does not exist, and relations remain quite cold on a cultural level… announcing partial or full diplomatic relations with Arab states does not result in acceptance by Arab populations, unless accompanied by grassroots buy-in, which is inextricably connected to the question of Palestine,” it said.
