Some Arab countries that are usually friendly to the United States were not very receptive to President Joe Biden and his diplomats when they traveled to the Middle East to try and stop the conflict between Israel and Hamas from spreading to other countries.
Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority decided not to meet with Biden just a day before they were supposed to have a meeting together in the city of Amman, Jordan. The cancellation happened after a big explosion at a hospital in Gaza called Al-Ahli Baptist. It was said that this explosion caused the death of many Palestinians. Palestinian officials said Israel caused the explosion in the hospital, but Israeli officials said it happened because an Islamic Jihad rocket went off accidentally.
“The meeting cannot end the war, which is our goal,” said Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi in an interview with Al Jazeera on Wednesday. He referred to the explosion at the hospital as a war crime. “So, we chose not to have it,” he said.
Biden came to Tel Aviv on Wednesday. He met with Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the Prime Minister of Israel, and also with some people from the Israeli war cabinet. The president promised to support Israel and told Netanyahu that the explosion at the hospital seems like it was caused by someone else, not Israel. The National Security Council said on Wednesday that the government currently thinks that Israel is not responsible for the blast.
CNN is unable to confirm on its own what caused the explosion and how many people were hurt.
Arab leaders are worried and upset because the United States is heavily supporting Israel in the war. They are now trying to distance themselves from the Biden administration because people in the Arab countries are getting angrier at Israel. More than 3,478 people have died in Gaza since the attack on Israel by Hamas. The attack in Israel caused the deaths of at least 1,400 people.
After the explosion in the hospital was reported on Tuesday, people in Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Iran, and Turkey, as well as in Ramallah in the West Bank, started protesting against Israel.
Arab leaders might be cautious about protests happening in their own countries as they see constant coverage of the Gaza war on Arabic news channels, including distressing images of Palestinians who have died. Protests in Jordan are more likely to happen because many of its people have Palestinian roots.
Egypt announced that it will mourn the victims of the Gaza hospital for three days.
Abdul Khaleq Abdulla, a commentator from the United Arab Emirates, who knows about official opinions, said that Biden has shown a unique emotional connection to Israel, unlike any past US president. Arab countries are very surprised and unhappy that Biden is not criticizing Israel or stopping the violence.
“He told CNN that people now believe he is equally responsible for the crime against Palestinians. Arab countries are now avoiding him and not giving him attention. ”
Egypt and Jordan, countries next to Israel and the Palestinian territories, are against a plan by the US to create a safe path for Palestinians escaping Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, which is next to Gaza.
Jordan’s King Abdullah said on Tuesday that it is not acceptable for Palestinians to be forced to leave their homes and move to Jordan or Egypt. He also made it clear that neither Jordan nor Egypt will allow refugees from Gaza to come into their countries. He said that suggesting that the two countries should accept Gazan refugees is a plan “by some people who always do this to cause problems on the ground. ” This suggests that the refugees may not be allowed to go back to their homes.
The proposal from the US has made people in the Arab world very angry. The media in the Arab world believes that the suggestion would benefit Israel by removing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, and possibly even taking control of it again. This would leave the Palestinians without homes and with no chance of returning. Israel controlled Gaza from 1967 to 2005 and moved Jewish people to live there during that time.
Egyptian newspapers have strongly criticized the idea of forcing Palestinians to leave their homes. They believe that this would be a devastating event similar to the 1948 Nakba, which resulted in around 700,000 Palestinians being forced to flee or leave their homes during the Arab-Israeli war that led to the establishment of Israel. Many people living in Gaza were forced to leave their homes and became refugees because their families originally came from parts of Israel.
During a press conference, the Egyptian President strongly expressed his opinion that Israel, not Egypt, should be responsible for accepting Palestinian refugees.
Sisi said that if Israel has a plan to force out Gazans, they can move them to the Naqab desert in Israel until Israel finishes their operation to destroy the resistance groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza.
He said that if people from Gaza go to Sinai, it could become a place for people trying to harm Israel. This could make Israel attack Egypt.
Timothy Kaldas, who works at a policy institute in Washington, DC, said that Arab leaders don’t want to appear like they are helping in removing people from Gaza.
Sisi is trying very hard to put some distance between himself and his Western partners on this matter. He wants to protect himself from the possibility of facing a lot of public criticism and anger.
Sisi said this after his foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, talked about how Europe and the US worry about many refugees coming in, and Egypt feels the same way.
Egypt is already home to nine million refugees. Should we expect them to welcome another one or two million people. That’s what Shoukry, an Egyptian official, asked during an interview with CNN on Tuesday. He said he didn’t know why the Palestinians were being moved, and he thought it might be on purpose.
Kaldas said that Western governments, who have become friends with Arab rulers, often see it as an advantage to ignore what the general public thinks. He said it might not be true, especially at this time.
Kaldas said that even in autocracies, the people living there still have their own thoughts, feelings, and limits which should be recognized. “And this is definitely something that has made everyone in Egypt very angry. ”