The Contact Group for Gaza: Arab-Muslim hypocrisy at its finest

Early last November, barely a month after the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza had started, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia convened an extraordinary joint summit that brought together heads of states and government of both the League of Arab States (LAS) and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) aiming to end the Israeli war and reaffirming support to the Palestinians.

In total 57 countries, including the 22 LAS members, came together in Riyadh at the highest level of political representation and, after one day of deliberations, they issued a rather long classically worded resolution that, as usual, lacks any real mechanism of implementation.

The resolution assigned the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, Turkiye, Indonesia, Nigeria and Palestine, along with the Secretary-Generals of both LAS and OIC to, “initiate immediate international action” to halt the war on Gaza—the group of officials became known as the Contact Group for Gaza. Nearly a year later, and the war has killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians, injured over 95,000, displaced the entire population of the Gaza Strip, some 2.3 million people, at least twice, starved nearly another million people and destroyed over 80 per cent of buildings in the besieged Gaza Strip. The war is still going on and more Palestinians are being killed and injured. Not only that, but it is spreading to the entire region, including to Lebanon where Israeli fighter jets killed some 500 mostly civilians on the first day of intense bombing on Monday, 23 September.

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Did the Contact Group do anything of substance to “implement” their governments’ decision to end the war? Nothing, really, other than the usual family photo opportunity, a couple of meetings and more talk, while Israel continues its genocide of Gaza children, women and the elderly.

They also attended the Madrid conference, organised by the Spanish government on 13 September, to emphasize the two-state solution as the only path forward to end the conflict, once and for all. Last May, Spain took the courageous step of recognising Palestine as an independent state and organised the meeting to show the world that it is determined to act to help end the conflict. How successful that will be is another matter.

However, a deeper look into the records of both OIC and LAS member states’ collective and individual positions on the Palestinian issue reveals scandalously shameful and embarrassing contradiction, with the very principles both organisations were founded on and cherished in their own separate founding charters. Their individual and group positions are no more than lip service for propaganda purposes, more than principled in their beliefs and those of their respective public opinion, which is overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian. They are grossly hypocritical, too, and disconnected from the realities on the ground, even now as they attempt, through the Contact Group for Gaza, to end the war. This is not strange to those countries, but has been pattern built on hypocrisy and disrespect for their own peoples ever since apartheid Israel was founded. Both OIC and LAS have always cherished Palestine, both religiously and historically, but always failed to do what is really expected of them.

For example, among the Contact Group for Gaza only Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar do not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. The others have long since normalised relations with the apartheid state, with Egypt leading the way as early as 1979 when it signed a peace deal with Israel that, literally, gave away the Palestinian issue as being the “central cause” in the Arab world as usually claimed by almost all LAS members. Did they review their policies as a way to pressure Israel to end the war? Hardly.

If OIC and LAS are serious about Palestine and ending the genocide in Gaza, they could have taken more articulate positions that go beyond nicely worded statements of condemnations. Those who have any kind of relations with Tel Aviv could leverage that relationship to the satisfaction of their own peoples and their Palestinian brothers, as they prefer to refer to them. Both organisations represent a third of the United Nations membership and over 1.8 billion Muslims, which is a powerful force when effectively deployed; instead, they are begging the Western countries to convince rogue Israel to stop the hell it has unleashed on Gaza and the West Bank.

The combined 57 countries that make OIC membership, including the 22 that are LAS members, have the potential to harm Israel in the short- and long-term and make her pay a price for its aggression, crimes against humanity and crimes of war it is committing in Gaza and now in Lebanon.

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They still could, for instance, launch a worldwide campaign of boycotting the apartheid state in conjunction with the overwhelming anti-Israeli civil society movement going on around the world for the last 12 months, in which millions of people have been expressing outrage against Israeli. Diplomatically LAS-OIC countries should have expelled Israeli diplomats from their capitals, shut down Israeli embassies in those countries and banned any kind of contact with Israel until, at least, it stops its genocide in Gaza, let alone accepts the two-state solution which they all advocate.

Economically, both groups have huge economic power when combined together. The two organisations include some of the world’s biggest oil producers and they have every reason to make it harder for Israel to get oil to make its killing machine turn, grinding more children in Gaza. They might not be able to use oil as some of them did back in 1973, but they still can hurt Israel.

Yet, and in the most scandalous of ways, the fact is that almost all OIC member states and almost one third of LAS members still maintain economic relations with Tel Aviv which is equivalent to, indirectly, financing the genocide in Gaza and the war in Lebanon. If Israel’s Western allies can be blamed for supplying it with weapons, OIC-LAS groups are also to blame for being complicit by not doing what is in their power.

The annual combined trade exchange between LAS-OIC countries and Israel runs into billions of dollars. The trade volume between Egypt and Israel is estimated to be more than $2 billion, while that of the United Arab Emirates’ has  jumped by 16 per cent from 2022, in contrast with Israeli economic exchange with the rest of the world, which declined by an overall 18 per cent since the war on Gaza started last year.

OIC-LAS countries have the financial capacity to fully finance UNRWA, the UN agency caring for Palestinian refugees, instead of waiting for others, particularly the US, to do so. The entire budget of UNRWA is around $1.6 billion which is peanuts when shared by the 57-countries that make up OIC.

The Contact Group for Gaza will do more visits and meetings while Israel does what it is best at: murdering more Gazans, prioritising children as usual.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.