This mortifying dilemma goes to the very soul of the region – and its leaders have brought it on themselves<\/p>\n
Arab states are in a bind. King Abdullah of Jordan squirmed in the Oval Office last week<\/a>, as the press asked him and Donald Trump about the latter\u2019s 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 \u201csecurity sources\u201d<\/a> \u2013 not parties prone to leaking without strategic direction from President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi \u2013 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\u2019s consumption than for Trump\u2019s benefit \u2013 Egypt is in no position to make an enemy of the new administration \u2013 but it nonetheless shows how hard it is for Trump to secure even its closest allies\u2019 acquiescence.<\/p>\n Saudi Arabia also postponed a visit to the US<\/a> 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 (\u201cthey have a lot of territory\u201d, he said), Saudi state media unleashed a storm of invective<\/a> 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<\/a> local time.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This mortifying dilemma goes to the very soul of the region – and its leaders have brought it on themselves 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\u2019s Gaza plan. He is in a tight … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}