by PEPE ESCOBAR
Washington needs to win its Gazan war against Iran because it failed to win its Ukrainian war against Russia.
The Global South was expecting the Dawn of a New Arabian Reality.
After all, the Arab street – even while repressed in their home nations – has pulsed with protests expressing ferocious rage against Israel’s wholesale massacre of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Arab leaders were forced to take some sort of action beyond suspending a few ambassadorships with Israel, and called for a special Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit to discuss the ongoing Israeli War Against Palestinian Children.
Representatives of 57 Muslim states convened in Riyadh on 11 November to deliver a serious, practical blow against genocidal practitioners and enablers. But in the end, nothing was offered, not even solace.
The OIC’s final statement will always be enshrined in the Gilded Palace of Cowardice. Highlights of the tawdry rhetorical show: we oppose Israel’s “self-defense;” we condemn the attack on Gaza; we ask (who?) not to sell weapons to Israel; we request the kangaroo ICC to “investigate” war crimes; we request a UN resolution condemning Israel.
For the record, that’s the best 57 Muslim-majority countries could drum up in response to this 21st-century genocide.
History, even if written by victors, tends to be unforgiving towards cowards.
The Top Four Cowards, in this instance, are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morrocco – the latter three having normalized relations with Israel under a heavy US hand in 2020. These are the ones that consistently blocked serious measures from being adopted at the OIC summit, such as the Algerian draft proposal for an oil ban on Israel, plus banning the use of Arab airspace to deliver weapons to the occupation state.
Egypt and Jordan – longtime Arab vassals – were also non-committal, as well as Sudan, which is in the middle of a civil war. Turkiye, under Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once again showed it is all talk and no action; a neo-Ottoman parody of the Texan “all hat, no cattle.”
BRICS or IMEC?
The Top Four Cowards deserve some scrutiny. Bahrain is a lowly vassal hosting a key branch of the US Empire of Bases. Morocco has close relations with Tel Aviv – it sold out quickly after an Israeli promise to recognize Rabat’s claim on Western Sahara. Moreover, Morocco heavily depends on tourism, mainly from the collective west.
Then we have the big dogs, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Both are stacked to the rafters with American weaponry, and, like Bahrain, also host US military bases. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) and his old mentor, Emirati ruler Mohammad bin Zayed (MbZ), do factor in the threat of color revolutions tearing through their regal domains if they deviate too much from the accepted imperial script.
But in a few weeks, starting on 1 January, 2024, under a Russian presidency, both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi will expand their horizons big-time by officially becoming members of the BRICS 11.
Saudi Arabia and UAE were only admitted into the expanded BRICS because of careful geopolitical and geoeconomic calculations by the Russia-China strategic partnership.
Along with Iran – which happens to have its own strategic partnership with both Russia and China – Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are supposed to reinforce the energy clout of the BRICS sphere and be key players, further on down the road, in the de-dollarization drive whose ultimate aim is to bypass the petrodollar.
Yet, at the same time, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi also stand to benefit immensely from the not-so-secret 1963 plan to build the Ben Gurion canal, from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Eastern Mediterranean, arriving – what a coincidence – very close to now devastated northern Gaza.
The canal would allow Israel to become a key energy transit hub, dislodging Egypt’s Suez Canal, and that happens to dovetail nicely with Israel’s role as the de facto key node in the latest chapter of the War of Economic Corridors: the US-concocted India-MidEast Corridor (IMEC).
IMEC is a quite perverse acronym, as is the whole logic behind this fantastical corridor, which is to position international law-breaking Israel as a critical trade hub and even energy provider between Europe, part of the Arab world, and India.
That was also the logic behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s UN charade in September, where he flashed the whole “international community” a map of the “New Middle East” in which Palestine had been totally erased.
All of the above assumes that IMEC and the Ben Gurion Canal will be built – which is not a given by any realistic standards.
Back to the vote at the OIC, US minions Egypt and Jordan – two countries on Israel’s western and eastern borders, respectively – were in the toughest position of them all. The occupation state wished to push approximately 4.5 million Palestinians into their borders for good. But Cairo and Amman, also awash in US weapons and financially bankrupt as they come, would never survive US sanctions if they lean too unacceptably towards Palestine.
So, in the end, too many Muslim states choosing humiliation over righteousness were thinking in very narrow, pragmatic, national interest terms. Geopolitics is pitiless. It is all about natural resources and markets. If you don’t have one, you need the other, and if you have none, a Hegemon dictates what you’re allowed to have.
The Arab and Muslim street – and the Global Majority – may rightfully feel dejected when they see how these “leaders” are not ready to turn the Islamic world into a real power pole within emerging multipolarity.
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