Doha, Qatar – Experts say Israel’s war on Gaza will force the Middle East to “reset” and harm the region’s normalization process with Israel and create a multipolar world away from United States hegemony.

Prominent global experts spoke at the Doha Forum, which ended on Monday in the Qatari capital after two days of deliberations under the heading Israeli attacks on the besieged enclave that has killed more than 18,000 people in just over two months.

The war that several Arab nations are having referred to as genocide of the Palestinian people has sparked global calls for an immediate ceasefire and an investigation into alleged war crimes by Israeli forces.

However, a day before the Doha forum began, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza – a move that led to it considerable outrage at the event in Qatar.

At the final session of the Doha Forum, Galip Dalay, senior fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, said growing dissatisfaction with the US will make it easier for China and Russia to gain a stronger foothold in the Middle East.

“This war was not regionalized because state actors joined the war, but rather this war was regionalized in the form it took [way the region has been] emotionally, politically and socially engaged,” he said.

Israel normalization “off the table”

Omar Rahman, also a member of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, said Israel had reasserted itself as “by far the most hated country in the region,” putting any normalization process “off the table” in the near future.

Normalization refers to a process that the Arab League advocated in 2002 when it offered Israel normal relations with Arab nations in return for a complete withdrawal from territories it captured in a 1967 war to allow the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

In 2020, former US President Donald Trump helped Israel secure formal relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco under agreements known as the Abraham Accords. As part of Trump’s push, Sudan also normalized relations with Israel.

Meanwhile, Trump also angered Palestinians when he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The Palestinians want occupied East Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state.

More recently, the Biden administration has one renewed advance to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But the Gaza war has put Riyadh and other Arab nations that have signed a peace deal with Israel in a difficult position.

Instead, experts at the Doha Forum predicted that the attack on Gaza would push regional rivals in the Middle East to “normalize” their relations – particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran.

“The normalization processes between Arab states and others [nations] “It is likely to continue outside Israel because regional rivalries that emerged during the Arab Spring were self-destructive and economically costly,” Rahman said.

“No one would have emerged from this competition as the dominant force in the region,” he said.

Tehran as a prime example

Sanam Vakil, director of the MENA program at Chatham House, said Iran was “an integral part of these normalization processes in the region.”

Vakil said that China-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran Earlier this year was a significant example of promoting multipolarity in the region.

She said Tehran’s regional ties are characterized by what it calls Axis of resistance – which includes, among others, the Syrian government, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and various Palestinian factions – are helping it “keep balance, apply pressure and protect itself against what it sees as the threat of the sanctions of the United States.” “Looks at the West.”

Europe’s unwillingness to support Iran’s nuclear ambitions due to human rights concerns also causes Tehran to recognize the importance of regional ties, Vakil argued.

But analysts also warned that any regional escalation due to the Gaza war could be dangerous for Iran.

“At the same time, it is very important to keep the pressure on Israel, the United States and the entire region low to prevent further escalation, which they expect to reach Tehran, possibly in 2024,” Vakil said.

Palestinian statehood

Alfredo Conte, a top Italian diplomat who also spoke at the Doha forum, said the Gaza war showed how important the Palestinian issue was to the region.

Conte said that normalizing relations with Israel between Middle Eastern countries need not be an impossibility in the future and that it can be worked on alongside a solution to statehood in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The entire region can be part of shared stability and prosperity by addressing the Palestinian issue [and] by giving the Palestinian people a serious prospect of statehood,” he said.