Yemen Herald News 
The years following Israel’s normalization agreements with Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco — and the public diplomacy with Saudi Arabia that followed — have raised a persistent question: can a durable peace in the Middle East be built around Arab states while bypassing direct, sustained negotiations with the Palestinians themselves?
For more than three decades, the United States, Israel, and Arab governments have pursued political and economic arrangements aimed at regional stability. These initiatives have produced significant diplomatic milestones. They have also, however, increasingly proceeded without an active Palestinian negotiating track, a gap that international mediators, regional analysts, and Palestinian political figures have all flagged as a structural risk to any long-term settlement.
The argument advanced by many Palestinian commentators and a range of regional observers is straightforward: the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is, at its core, between Israelis and Palestinians, and no agreement signed elsewhere can substitute for one signed between those two parties. A settlement that does not address the political rights of the Palestinian people — borders, status of Jerusalem, refugees, and self-determination — leaves the underlying drivers of the conflict in place. Critics of normalization-first frameworks warn that without parallel progress on the Palestinian track, regional agreements remain vulnerable to crises that originate in the unresolved core issue.
A Crisis That Reset the Conversation
The October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas — in which more than 1,200 Israelis, the majority civilians, were killed and roughly 250 people taken hostage — and the subsequent war in Gaza, in which tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed according to the Gaza Health Ministry, have fundamentally reset the regional conversation. By any honest accounting, the human cost on both sides has been devastating, and the events have hardened public opinion across the region.
The attack and the war that followed have also reopened debates that the normalization track had narrowed. Several Arab governments that had moved toward warmer ties with Israel have publicly stepped back. Saudi Arabia, whose normalization with Israel had been widely reported as nearly finalized in the weeks before October 7, has explicitly linked any future agreement to a credible path toward Palestinian statehood. International institutions, including the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, are now actively engaged with both the conduct of the war and the longer-term political question.
Internal Israeli Politics
Inside Israel, the period leading up to and following October 7 has been marked by significant domestic political division. Months of mass protests against the Netanyahu government’s judicial reform agenda, public tensions with senior defense officials, reservist pilots refusing to serve, and ongoing inquiries into the intelligence and operational failures that preceded the attack have all featured prominently in Israeli public life. The Israeli government has itself acknowledged that an official investigation into those failures is needed, with senior security officials publicly accepting responsibility. The full picture will become clearer as that investigation proceeds.
These internal divisions matter regionally because they shape Israel’s capacity to negotiate and the political space available for compromise. A government navigating a coalition crisis, public protests, and an active war faces constraints that differ from those of a government operating from a position of domestic consensus. Observers across the political spectrum have noted that any serious diplomatic initiative will need to take that political reality into account.
A Historical Parallel — and Its Limits
Comparisons have been drawn to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, in which warning signs of the Egyptian and Syrian attacks were available to Israeli intelligence but were not acted on in time. Historians attribute that failure to a combination of analytical assumptions, bureaucratic friction, and political constraints — not to deliberate inaction. The parallel is instructive only to a point: every conflict has its own causes, and the events of October 2023 will be assessed on their own evidence by Israeli, Palestinian, and international investigators in the years to come.
What Comes Next
What the events of the past two years have made clear is that the Israeli-Palestinian question cannot be indefinitely deferred. Any regional peace architecture that omits the Palestinian track is structurally fragile. Any approach that ignores the security concerns of Israelis is politically unviable. Both points have to be true at once.
A durable resolution will require a return to direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, with credible international guarantees, a clear political horizon for both peoples, and serious mechanisms to address security, refugees, settlements, and the status of Jerusalem. Whether that process begins this year or in a decade, the underlying logic does not change: peace between Israelis and Palestinians cannot be outsourced.
Sadek Al-Salemi,
Editorial Manager
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