As Arab Gulf starts opening to Israel, Palestinians face a reckoning

Israel’s rapprochement with Gulf Arab states has left the Palestinians feeling abandoned by traditional allies and clutching an old playbook in a rapidly changing West Asia, analysts and critics say.

As the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain sign normalisation accords with Israel at a White House ceremony, Palestinian leaders face calls to overhaul their strategy to avoid becoming marginalised in a region where Israel and most Sunni Arab regimes share a fear of Iran.

The Palestinian approach to securing freedom from Israeli occupation has for years relied on a longstanding pan-Arab position that called for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank