Two Kinds of Pressure, One objective

The same week produced two very different responses to Netanyahu’s rejection of the Board of Peace’s Gaza roadmap. One was loud, public and diplomatic. The other was quiet, personal and conducted largely out of view.

Read together, they reveal something important about the current standoff. The issue is no longer simply whether Hamas will disarm. The real dispute is over how disarmament and Israeli withdrawal are sequenced — and whether the commitments in the roadmap are reciprocal.

On August 16, the foreign ministers of Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s rejection of the roadmap. They called on the Board of Peace, with the active support of the United States, to take immediate and concrete measures to prevent further obstruction of the plan. The statement was unusually pointed because it did not treat Netanyahu’s position as simply another negotiating position. It characterized it as an obstacle to implementation.

The significance is less in the rhetoric than in who signed it. These are not eight governments that happen to dislike Israel. They are governments that have aligned themselves with the framework being used to implement the Trump plan and the ceasefire architecture endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2803. All eight have joined the Board of Peace framework.

And the UAE’s signature matters.

The UAE normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords in 2020. It therefore has a relationship with Israel that Egypt, Qatar and Turkey do not have in the same form, and it has more at stake in preserving that relationship. Yet Abu Dhabi joined a statement publicly accusing Israel of obstructing the implementation of a plan it supports. That does not mean the Abraham Accords are unraveling. There is no indication that the UAE intends to abandon normalization. But the signature is still an indicator of how far Netanyahu’s Gaza position has moved from being a dispute between Israel and Hamas to becoming a problem for the broader coalition assembled to implement the agreement.

The regional message is becoming harder to miss: the problem is no longer simply getting Hamas to accept disarmament. It is getting both sides to honor the reciprocal commitments of the roadmap.

What Netanyahu Is Actually Rejecting

There is an important distinction here that can easily get lost in the argument over “the plan.” Ten months ago, Netanyahu welcomed the Trump framework that became the basis........

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