Israel, GCC and the US — An alliance of convenience

This recent article talks about the “alliances of convenience” in the Middle East between the Gulf Arab states and Israel. All alliances are “alliances of convenience,” but what the author of the article does not understand is that the Gulf Arab States would be relatively happy to normalize with Israel. That was one of the points of the 2002 Arab Peace Initative. Normalization with Israel would mean the end of primary, secondary, and tertiary boycotts – which are not necessarily observed these days anyway – and since Saudi Arabia and its Gulf satellites are the major holders of capital in the region, with far larger holdings than Israel, normalization would mean sales of petrochemical products and also metal to Israel, and less chicanery needed to circumvent the various boycotts. In the Middle East, Israel would take on the role of a high-tech manufacturing platform. The “resolution” of the Palestinian issue would allow these things to take place openly, without, they hope, stirring up a sense of Gulf betrayal of the most potent symbolic grievance against Western colonialism.

And of course none of them like Iran, because Iran is stubbornly independent, runs its own foreign policy, has a highly politicized, educated population, and still has something of a socially embedded state which its population, by and large, considers legitimate, even if a substantial chunk are bridling under some of its repressive features. Of course the Gulf states which garishly buy off their populations – an attempt to avert social confrontation rather than a response to social revolution, as is the post-1979 Iranian welfare state – hate Iran. It’s one of the region’s major population centers. The Israeli saber-rattling likewise reflects this same hatred of Iran: Israel relies on weak, fragmented, or totalitarian states in the Middle East to maintain its security, the same weak, fragmented states that can organize around neoliberalism internally and arms purchases from the West externally.

Israel and the GCC discreetly work hand in hand: “I would be surprised if there is no knowledge about the Saudi positions (in Israel) or knowledge in Saudi of the Israeli positions,” said David Menashri, director of the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University. “I would put it this way: The Gulf states, some of them, would like Israel to be more active against Iran, though they would never say it publicly,” said Meir Litvak, a regional expert at the Dayan Center think tank at Tel Aviv University. All this takes place under the umbrella of regional “defense strategy,” meaning the military exercises which keep Iraq and the Gulf under various kinds of Western political dominance so as to constrict oil supplies and justify ongoing arms purchases by the $700 billion dollar in annual spending US defense complex.

As the NYT reported last week, “With an eye on the threat of a belligerent Iran, the administration is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new ‘security architecture’ for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense.  The size of the standby American combat force to be based in Kuwait remains the subject of negotiations, with an answer expected in coming days. Officers at the Central Command headquarters here declined to discuss specifics of the proposals, but it was clear that successful deployment plans from past decades could be incorporated into plans for a post-Iraq footprint in the region.”

The ongoing threat of Iran justifies the ongoing military purchases off which the ruling families in each of the sheikhdoms take a massive cut, sometimes up to 30 percent, conspicuous wastage while the poor in those countries – who are increasingly a globalized poor, since most of them rely on Bangladeshi and Indian foreign workers – live in penury. All of this must be kept in mind when the Gulf States make their ritual gestures at peace with Israel, especially as in 2002 when they knew it would be rejected, allowing them to pose as paladins for the Palestinian cause while, of course, doing precisely nothing for the Palestinians, a huffing-and-puffing act that Ahmadinejad and Erdogan have also lately adopted. There are forces within each Gulf country pushing for “peace” with Israel, nowadays in the context of a demilitarized Palestinian state, and who will profit off of it, but for the time being, the looting is also going well.

Max Ajl’s website Jewbonics can be found here.