Arab states are in a bind. King Abdullah of Jordan squirmed in the Oval Office last week, as the press asked him and Donald Trump about the latter’s Gaza plan. He is in a tight spot, wanting to keep Trump onside while at the same time not agreeing to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Immediately after, anonymous Egyptian “security sources” – not parties prone to leaking without strategic direction from President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi – said that Sisi would not accept an invitation to visit Washington as long as the Gaza displacement plan was on the agenda. Now, this was probably more for the Egyptian public’s consumption than for Trump’s benefit – Egypt is in no position to make an enemy of the new administration – but it nonetheless shows how hard it is for Trump to secure the acquiescence of even the US’s closest allies.
Saudi Arabia also postponed a visit to the US once Trump announced his intentions for Gaza. And in a remarkable change of tune, Saudi, which before 7 October 2023 was en route to normalisation with Israel and is not usually a country to make heated statements, lost its patience. When Benjamin Netanyahu quipped that maybe it would like to take Palestinians from Gaza (“they have a lot of territory”, he said), Saudi state media unleashed a storm of invective against him. When Trump announced his plan, Saudi Arabian authorities immediately put out a statement rejecting it. So keen was the government to signal that rejection that it released the statement at 4am local time.
