by Dr Amira Abo el-Fetouh
I did not expect a courageous response from the so-called Arab league regarding the UAE-Israel normalisation agreement, because the dead cannot talk, and the Arab League is basically dead and buried after rejecting the draft Palestinian resolution to condemn the deal. It did so despite the fact that such normalisation is a departure from the resolutions of Arab and Islamic summits and the peace initiative that the organisation itself adopted at the 2002 Beirut summit.
This League of Shame wrote its own obituary in the form of an ambiguous statement in which it tried to save face and claim that it was committed to the Arab Peace Initiative, which links normalisation with Israel to the complete end of the Zionist state’s occupation, a commitment to the two-state solution and the principle of land for peace. It made no mention of those who normalised before the occupation was over, thus spouting nonsense that even a child wouldn’t believe and underestimating the Arab masses who reject normalisation by trying to appease them with a meaningless statement. This encouraged Bahrain to follow in the UAE’s footsteps and announce its own normalisation of relations with Israel, the establishment of complete diplomatic relations and the opening of embassies.
It is idiotic for us to think that the League of Shame would condemn the UAE. How could it do so when the UAE and Saudi Arabia control the organisation and are deeply in love with Israel? Riyadh will, no doubt, make its engagement public soon enough, but in the meantime has opted to sleep in the Israeli bed behind closed curtains to hide its dirty deed. It has already sold Palestine and even the entire Arab nation and its Islamic heritage just to gain kudos in Tel Aviv and Washington.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was right when he said that, “Something very big is happening: the transformation of Israel in the minds of many in the Middle East. It’s no longer being perceived as an enemy. We’ve become an indispensable ally against the enemy of militant Islam.” He noted that the only problem lies with those which we might call the independent Arab nations. The Zionist Arab governments have given the Israelis more than they could ever dream of, but thankfully, the free Arab nations stand as a wall against their forbidden dreams. These will turn into nightmares and haunt them, as the Arab masses still have a beating heart and strong men to resist this usurper occupation and liberate Palestine. Israel fears these strong men, not only in Gaza and Jerusalem, but across the Arab world. This is why it fought the Arab Spring revolutions and used the conspiracy state, the UAE, as its base from which to control the counterrevolution, with funding from the Saudis and the Emiratis themselves.
When the 25 January Revolution broke out in Egypt, and sovereignty was back in the hands of the people, the Israeli Embassy in Cairo was besieged, its flag was lowered and it was forced to close; its staff had to leave the country. A young man climbed to the nineteenth floor of the tower block overlooking the River Nile where the embassy is located, and removed the Israeli flag amid cheering and applause from the crowd that gathered below. This astonished the world and worried the Israelis. The young man was given an apartment to get married and settle in by the governor of his city. Meanwhile, the young man who raised the Palestinian flag in Cairo Stadium during the Egypt-South Africa football match last year was arrested and imprisoned.
Five years after the coup that ended the revolution in Egypt, Israel celebrated its so-called Independence Day — the anniversary of its occupation of Palestine — in a hotel just a few metres away from the Arab League headquarters directly overlooking Tahrir Square, the symbol of the January Revolution. Unfortunately, it was attended by political, diplomatic, cultural and media figures, as well as businessmen.
There is no doubt that there have been great changes in recent years since the aborting of the Arab Spring revolutions, with the emergence of the Arab-Zionist axis with US cover, represented by Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, as well as those following their lead. They are setting the current Arab political agenda in the absence of any real opposition which sticks to the Arab constants. The rest of the Arab governments that were supposed to form an opposition axis are preoccupied with struggles against their own people. As such, we shouldn’t be too surprised when the League of Shame, led by the Emirati axis, tears up the Arab Peace Initiative and announces general normalisation with the Israeli occupation.
We cannot be rule this out. The dominant axis leading the Arab League no longer views Israel as an enemy, as Gamal Abdel Nasser viewed it in the 1950s and 60s when Egypt was leading the organisation and issuing the Three Nos: no reconciliation, no recognition and no negotiation.
The UAE axis has changed the Arab League’s compass. It is no longer pointing at the nation’s historical enemy, which has become a friend and ally, but at Turkey, which has become the enemy that must be fought everywhere. While the Arab League rejected the draft Palestinian resolution, it decided to form a permanent sub-committee to monitor Turkish “aggression”. It was tasked with presenting a report about this in each subsequent meeting. Meanwhile, the foreign ministers of this axis compete to attack Turkey and exaggerate its threat to so-called Arab national security. The first act in the “Turkish scarecrow festival” was performed by the Emirati Foreign Minister, Anwar Gargash, who accused Turkey of threatening the security and safety of maritime traffic in the Mediterranean by flagrantly violating the laws and charters of concerned states and violating their sovereignty. He also accused Turkey of interfering in the internal affairs of Arab countries.
Next up was Egyptian Foreign Minister, Sameh Shoukry, who said: “Turkey’s practices and interference in multiple Arab countries’ internal affairs shape threats against Arab national security… Egypt will not stand idly by in the face of Turkish ambitions that are manifesting in northern Iraq, Syria and Libya in particular.”
This confirms what I have said before: the UAE-Israel normalisation is nothing but a strategic alliance, and the nucleus of a larger alliance that includes many Arab countries, to form a “Zionist Arab NATO” with US-EU cover, directed against Turkey.
In effect, it is an unspoken declaration of war on Turkey, which found itself in mandatory opposition to all of them; its only fault is that it is an independent sovereign state which owns its decisions, unlike the Arab states, who bow down to Zionist powers. Turkey has a strong army that is self-sufficient in arms and munitions; has been able to build a strong economy; and is self-reliant in modern technology to maximise the benefits of the discovery of natural gas in the Black Sea. The Arab countries, meanwhile, depend on US, British, Canadian and Italian companies, and only get the crumbs from their masters as they exploit Arab gas fields.
Turkey’s greatest “crime” can be laid firmly at the door of President Recep Tayyeb Erdogan personally: the simple fact is that the Arab masses look up to Turkey as their hope for the restoration of the Muslim Ummah, and as a model to be adopted. The people love Erdogan almost as much as they hate their own leaders, because they see a strong leader who has restored some of the Ummah’s dignity. As far as the UAE Ambassador in Washington is concerned, this is an unforgivable sin. Yousef Al-Otaiba expressed as much in his recent article in in Israel’s Hebrew-language Yedioth Ahranoth, in which he noted the need to stand against what he called “Islamic expansion”.
The rejection of the Palestinian draft resolution by the Arab League was not a self-inflicted coup de grâce, but rather the last nail in its coffin; the league has been clinically dead for many years. It is revived whenever ordered by its master in the White House, as happened during the term of US President George Bush Snr after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The Arab countries gathered overnight and agreed, as never before and never since, to do what was asked of them immediately. They didn’t gather when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, or whenever it has repeatedly attacked the Gaza Strip and bombed it; Israel even bombed Gaza on the night that the League held its shameful recent meeting.
Nor did the Arab League bat an eyelid at the brutal massacres committed by Israel against the Palestinians. It has turned a blind eye to the ongoing construction of illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land, as well as Israel’s unjust siege on the Gaza Strip and the deliberate deprivation of its people. Moreover, it has done nothing about the Judaisation of Jerusalem and was unmoved by Israel building tunnels under Al-Aqsa Mosque, which endangered its foundations. It has also sat and watched as Israeli aircraft have penetrated Syrian airspace since 2011 causing death and destruction; flown over Lebanon likewise; and even targeted sites on the Iraqi border.
The Arab League was unable to prevent the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq or even challenge it, and Iraq was lost before its eyes. The League was also absent from Sudan and did not make any serious effort to stop the Sudanese crisis from escalating and the ultimate division of an Arab country into two rival states.
The list of the League’s absenteeism from crisis points affecting its members is long: the brutal massacres by Russian forces in Syria, for example, and Moscow’s scorched earth policy; the coalition invasion of Yemen which is destroying the country and creating the world’s “worst humanitarian catastrophe” is led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE which both drive the Arab League (so no surprise there); and the blockade of Qatar by League member states, again led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
What is happening in Yemen and Qatar makes a mockery of the League’s claim to exist for the purpose of “improving coordination among its members on matters of common interest” and its founders’ renunciation of violence as the means to settle disputes between members. While the Arab League is happy to allow the UAE and Bahrain to normalise relations with Israel without sanction or even condemnation, it ignores the fact that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have invaded one member state and is besieging another.
Indeed, the Arab League has never been known for being effective in any Arab issue. It has never resolved any conflicts between Arab countries, tending instead to aggravate matters; the blockade of Qatar since 2017 is a blatant example. It has adopted the policies of the axis that controls it, notably the counterrevolutionary axis headed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE; they have the wealth to control the organisation and its decision-making process. Standards have changed and the focus has deviated from the Arab League’s historical constants and principles. The term “Zionist enemy” has been removed from its lexicon, so there is no condemnation of Israeli attacks.
Despite such ineffectiveness and inefficiency, theoretically-speaking the League remains a place of unity for the Arab countries and a live expression of the Arab conscience. The Palestinian cause was once its strongest pillar and the reason it remained alive for so many years, before it was assassinated by the Arab Zionists who have seized control. Today, it is a symbol of Arab degradation, and should be renamed the Israeli League.
The Arab League has never been for the Arab people, but the regimes that govern them. It was established a couple of years after British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the House of Commons in February 1943 that the government “shows sympathetic consideration to all action between the Arabs that aims to achieve their economic, cultural and political unity.” An earlier speech had sought to keep the Arab governments on Britain’s side during the Second World War by offering support to strengthen their cultural, economic and political ties.
As has been Britain’s tactic for centuries, divide and rule was applied with an appeal to the ethnic rather than the religious instincts of the Arabs, thus fragmenting the Muslim Ummah. Promises of complete independence and the right to self-determination evaporated once the war was won.
Such “sympathy” from Eden differed to his predecessor Arthur Balfour’s but they served the same goal. Balfour helped to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, while Eden helped to separate the Arabs from their Muslim identity. Thus, the Palestinian cause was lost almost straight away because it is not just an Arab cause due to the Islamic sanctities in occupied Palestine, mainly Al-Aqsa Mosque with its huge significance for Muslims all over the world.
Underlying all of this, of course, is the fact that Israel was created to serve Western interests. The rancid state was a wedge driven into the body of the Muslim world to be protected by the Arab states ripped from their Muslim background and also created and developed to serve the Crusader West. In exchange, the latter promised to preserve the thrones of the ruling families.
US President Donald Trump is benefitting from the seeds sown by Britain all those years ago. The UAE and Bahrain have been seen following his orders and normalising with the Zionist occupation at the time determined by him, before the presidential election, so that he will get the votes of the right-wing Evangelical Zionists who form the bulk of the pro-Israel lobby in America.
Looking at how the British work, and comparing them with Trump, we see that he is more transparent in what he says and does, and that this exposes the Arab Zionist states for what they are. Britain, meanwhile, continues to operate more insidiously behind diplomatic words so that its agents are not exposed quite so blatantly. Trump lacks such diplomatic skills, which sets him apart from the other US presidents and exposes friends and foes alike. What you see is what you get, and Trump makes sure that we see everything. With their fig leaves removed, these Arab Zionists now realise that protection for their thrones does not come without a price to pay; Trump has told this to Saudi Arabia’s King Salman several times. When Trump told Bahrain’s foreign minister (and getting his name wrong twice in the process) to say hello to the King and royal family without mentioning the people, this was his way of sending a message that the US is protecting them from their people. And that the bill has to be paid.
One thing that the British and American governments have in common, is the deep contempt in which they really hold the Arab rulers. The latter are supported in order to serve a purpose, and will be dropped the minute that they are no longer useful. The shameful regimes that have overseen the last rites of the Arab League will be doing the same to themselves when the West dumps them, and the Arab people regain their revolutionary zeal and liberate themselves from the two occupations which are oppressing them: the tyrannical regimes occupying their governments, and the Zionist occupation stealing Palestinian Arab land.
Part 1 and 2 of this content was published in Middle East Monitor on September 14 and 21, 2020.
*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of UMMnews.
