OIC holds emergency summit as Islamic nations grapple with Israel-Gaza conflict

In Dubai on a Sunday in May 2021, representatives from fifty-seven Muslim-majority nations gathered for an emergency meeting called by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The occasion was the escalating violence between Israel and Hamas in Gaza—fighting that had grown heavy enough to demand urgent diplomatic attention. Yet the meeting itself revealed something more complicated than unified outrage: the Islamic world was fractured, pulled in different directions by competing interests and recent political realignments that had fundamentally altered how its members approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Palestinian Authority's foreign minister, Riad Malki, opened the proceedings with unsparing language. He called Israel's actions cowardly attacks and framed the core problem as a long-term occupation that had gone unpunished. "We need to tell Allah that we will resist to the last day," he said, invoking both faith and defiance. Turkey's foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, took a similarly hard line, declaring Israel solely responsible for the escalation and noting that Turkish warnings issued the previous week had been ignored. These were the voices of nations with no recent diplomatic accommodation with Israel, speaking as they had for decades.

But the landscape had shifted. In the previous year, during the final months of the Trump administration, both Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates had signed recognition agreements with Israel—a historic break from the traditional Arab consensus. Saudi Arabia, though it had not formally normalized relations, occupied a similar middle ground. These Gulf states continued to voice support for Palestinian statehood in official statements, yet their government-linked media outlets were notably quiet about the current violence, offering none of the wall-to-wall coverage seen on other regional networks. The muted response was telling: these nations faced a calculation their predecessors had not.

Other players in the region moved with different urgency. In Qatar, which hosts both the Al-Jazeera satellite network and Hamas leadership, hundreds gathered late Saturday night to hear from Hamas's top leader, Ismail Haniyeh. He spoke of resistance as the path to Jerusalem and rejected any settlement that did not include Palestinian statehood with the capital as its seat. Qatar's foreign minister had spoken with him, as had Kuwait's parliament speaker and Iran's Quds Forces commander, Esmail Ghaani. The lines of support were clear: Turkey, Qatar, and Iran backed Hamas; the Gulf states that had normalized with Israel maintained a more distant posture.

Turkey's foreign minister did not shy from naming this fracture. He criticized OIC members who had reached deals with Israel, accusing them of losing their moral compass. "If there are half-hearted statements within our own family, how could we criticize others who don't take our words seriously?" he asked. The question hung over the entire gathering—a reminder that the organization's unity was no longer assured.

In Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, cracks appeared at the grassroots level. Civil society groups in Bahrain circulated a letter calling on the kingdom to expel the Israeli ambassador. In the UAE, where political parties and protests are prohibited, Palestinians working in Abu Dhabi and Dubai expressed anger quietly, fearful of losing their residency permits. Some Emiratis themselves voiced concern. One prominent Emirati writer and political analyst, Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, sardonically referred to Israel as "the region's only democracy" while commenting on an Israeli strike that destroyed a Gaza building housing offices of the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera.

A scholar at the Washington-based Arab Gulf States Institute offered perspective on why the Gulf's response differed from past confrontations. Most Gulf Arab leaders viewed Hamas's rocket fire as reckless and dangerous—a provocation that endangered both Israelis and Palestinians. This perception removed pressure on those leaders to respond with the fervor they had shown during previous crises involving the Al-Aqsa mosque or Israeli settlement expansion. While there would be little sympathy for what many in the Gulf saw as Israel's disproportionate retaliation, it would be easier for Gulf leaders and citizens to frame the exchange as a tragic clash between two leaderships over which they had neither control nor responsibility. The emergency summit had convened, but the Islamic world it represented was no longer speaking with one voice.