Soumaya Ghannoushi: Cairo summit addresses Gaza ultimatum

On Tuesday, Arab kings and presidents gathered at the Cairo summit, summoned by the weight of history, drawn into a theatre where destinies could be decided – not just for Palestine, but for the very legitimacy of their own rule.

This was not diplomacy as usual. It was not a routine summit lined with hollow statements and tired pledges. It was a reckoning, a moment where the Arab world stood before a mirror and asked itself: do we still possess the power to refuse, or have we been domesticated beyond salvation?

At the heart of the summit lay a scheme so monstrous it almost defies belief: the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, a final act of erasure seeking to transform the territory into a sanitised, tamed “Riviera” where the footprints of its true owners are scrubbed from the sand.

The vision was born in the war rooms of Tel Aviv and blessed in the corridors of Washington, an audacious gambit to mould the ruins of Gaza into a pacified appendage of the Israeli state. But to make this fantasy a reality, one final condition is needed: Arab consent.

Cairo thus became the arena where history would either be betrayed or defied. The question was not simply whether Arab leaders would reject the displacement of Palestinians – some had to, because their own thrones would tremble under the weight of such a catastrophe.

The true test was whether they would also reject the more insidious demand lurking beneath the surface: the so-called “day after” plan, the carefully engineered American-Israeli vision for postwar Gaza, where defiance was not merely subdued but erased – where the very notion of Palestinian sovereignty was permanently extinguished.

 

The counter proposal:

The road to Cairo was marked by tension and fracture. Days earlier, a smaller summit was held in Riyadh – a select gathering of Gulf leaders, along with Jordanand Egypt, cloaked in the rhetoric of “brotherhood”.

Yet behind this veil of camaraderie was a deliberate act of exclusion: Algeria, a state with weight and history, was pushed aside. President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, seeing through the charade, refused to attend the Cairo summit, sending his foreign minister in his place.

Equally conspicuous was the absence of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, though their reasons differed entirely. Their condition for engaging in Gaza’s reconstruction was unequivocal: the complete political and military neutralisation of Hamas.

The UAE went a step further, signalling its alignment with Trump’s vision through its ambassador in Washington – an outright rejection of any Arab alternative to the Israeli-American plan.

And so, before the main summit even began, the divisions were laid bare. The Arab front, fragile and fragmented, was exposed in its impotence.

While Arab rulers waver, hesitate and calculate, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moves with the precision of a man who knows his opponents are too weak to stop him. He did not wait for the summit’s outcome to tighten the noose around Gaza, choking it with an intensified blockade and brandishing the spectre of renewed devastation.

His message to Arab leaders was as direct as it was humiliating: words will not save you. Declarations will not alter the facts on the ground. Either you fall in line with the diktats of Washington and Tel Aviv or you will be made irrelevant.

The Arab summit, under the weight of these pressures, has now adopted a three-phase plan for Gaza’s reconstruction. The first phase spans six months and focuses on clearing rubble and debris.

The second involves constructing infrastructure in Rafah and the southern regions of the Strip. The third extends to rebuilding the central and northern areas.

This is the Arab world’s counter-proposal to the forced displacement agenda – a vision that seeks to stabilise Gaza without uprooting its people.

Yet, beyond the mechanics of reconstruction, lies the far thornier question: who will govern Gaza in the interim? The summit’s answer is a temporary administrative committee, tasked with maintaining order and stability until the Palestinian Authority can assume full control.

 

“Thus, the summit follows the well-worn choreography of duplicity: a thunderous, performative rejection of displacement masking a quiet acquiescence to the broader Israeli-American agenda. A spectacle of defiance concealing the steady erosion of Palestinian sovereignty.”

 

But the real question is not one of governance alone – it is one of sovereignty. Will Arab states be able to withstand the relentless push of the American-Israeli agenda, which seeks to shape not just the geography of Gaza, but its very identity and political direction?

Therein lay the great contradiction of the summit. Officially, the Arab position has been one of rejection. Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have all drawn a line in the sand, refusing the mass displacement of Palestinians.

But this was not an act of moral clarity – it was an act of self-preservation. These regimes understand that the forced expulsion of Palestinians is not just a threat to Palestine; it is a direct challenge to their own stability. A new wave of refugees, a fresh wound carved into the heart of the region, could destabilise their own fragile balances of power. Their opposition is not rooted in principle, but in survival.

And beneath this apparent defiance, a deeper betrayal is brewing. For while Arab leaders might refuse displacement, they are far more malleable when it comes to the “day after” plan – the slow, calculated suffocation of Palestinian sovereignty, the destruction of Gaza by imposed reconstruction – not by force, but by the engineered restructuring of its political and economic foundations.

This is the ultimate Israeli-American ambition: to turn Gaza from a place of resilience into a walled-in, pacified, neutralised entity, where the idea of freedom is slowly buried under layers of imposed normalcy.

If the Arab summit’s counter-proposal was intended to assert regional agency over Gaza’s future, the US-Israeli response left little doubt as to who still holds the reins.

Washington was quick to dismiss the plan as unrealistic, with National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes declaring it “out of step with the realities on the ground”.

The White House, in effect, reinforced Netanyahu’s position: Gaza’s reconstruction cannot proceed on Arab terms, and any rebuilding efforts must align with the broader American-Israeli framework.

Israel, for its part, reaffirmed its commitment to Trump’s vision – a plan that, at its core, aims to engineer a Gaza without Palestinians, either through forced displacement or by rendering life in the territory untenable enough to drive its inhabitants elsewhere.

And with both the US and Israel rejecting the Arab plan outright, the space for manoeuvre has shrunk to near non-existent. The message to Arab regimes is stark: their efforts to craft a postwar scenario on their own terms are, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, a nuisance to be brushed aside.

Judgement of history:

For 15 months, Israel waged a war of merciless ferocity in Gaza – and yet, despite the rivers of blood and mountains of rubble, it failed to achieve its central objectives. It could not dismantle Palestinian resistance. It could not impose its will by force.

But if history has proven anything, it is that Israel does not surrender; it adapts. What it cannot take with missiles, it secures with diplomacy. What it cannot enforce with war, it extracts with negotiations. And what it cannot impose alone, it compels Arab regimes to impose on its behalf.

The Arab regimes have been tested, and the verdict is in. They were not asked to wage war, simply to hold the line against a blueprint designed to erase Palestinian sovereignty – yet when the moment came, they faltered.

They rejected displacement in words while leaving the door open for Gaza to be rebuilt under foreign dictates, condemning one form of erasure while conceding to another. They did not openly surrender, but neither did they resist. Instead, they perfected the art of submission, veiled in the rhetoric of defiance.

For these regimes are not sovereign actors. They do not govern; they orbit. Their survival is tethered to foreign patronage, their policies scripted in distant capitals. Some host American military bases, others are sustained by western financial aid, and most rule not by the will of their people, but by the machinery of repression that keeps them in power.

They are not free to act – only to obey.

Thus, the summit follows the well-worn choreography of duplicity: a thunderous, performative rejection of displacement masking a quiet acquiescence to the broader Israeli-American agenda. A spectacle of defiance concealing the steady erosion of Palestinian sovereignty.

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Yet in pursuing this path, Arab regimes do not merely betray Palestine. They betray themselves. They cast themselves into a perilous confrontation, not only with the Palestinian people, but with their own.

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For decades, the Palestinian cause has been the ultimate measure of legitimacy in the Arab world. To forsake it is to unravel whatever remains of their political credibility. And though these rulers may believe that time dulls the memory of betrayal, they forget that anger is patient, and history is merciless.

Time does not absolve. The people do not forget. And the ledger of cowardice is written in ink that never fades.

 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Maghrebi.org. Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British Tunisian writer and expert in Middle East politics. Her journalistic work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, Corriere della Sera, aljazeera.net and Al Quds. A selection of her writings may be found at: soumayaghannoushi.com and she tweets @SMGhannoushi.

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