Ryan Fink
Staff Writer
Currently, Israel has relations with a small but decent portion of Arab nations including Jordan, Egypt, the U.A.E, and Morocco. As the leader of the Arab world, Saudi Arabia has yet to officially recognize Israel as a legitimate state; however, leading up to the October 7th attack in Israel, talks were in place to normalize relations between the two countries, which is a leading contributor to Hamas’s attack. Hamas took advantage of the fact there was political division in Israel and that they did not want Saudi Arabia to normalize ties with Israel. This accumulated with Hamas’s horrific attack on Israeli and non-Israeli civilians, killing over 1200 people and taking around 240 hostages, one of whom is thought to have been born in captivity. Immediately, NATO alliance members such as The United States, The United Kingdom, and France condemned the attacks on Israeli civilians and expressed unwavering support for Israel; however, other countries did not play to the same tune. Qatar, a country that has been accused of backing terrorism and not being tough on Iran,immediately said that it was Israel’s fault for the attack that took place. Iran argued the same thing while the rest of the Arab world backed Hamas and the Palestinians.
The attacks that took place on October 7th may not be comparable to anything except the Holocaust, but a place where one could look back and see Israel’s diplomatic relationships with other countries is the Yom Kippur War. During that time many countries closed their diplomatic missions with Israel, similar to what is seen today with eight countries having closed their embassies in Tel Aviv at the time of writing. One of those countries is Jordan, which completed its peace negotiations with Israel in 1994, along with South Africa, which has long stood with the Palestinian people because they think closely of themselves considering South Africa's long history of conflict.
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