The crisis, and opportunity, of normalization

Discussion and debate of US foreign policy has been notably missing from the presidential race. That’s largely due to the fact that Joe Biden and Donald Trump don’t differ significantly on foreign policy issues. Unfortunately, in the case of Middle East peace, Israel and the Palestinians, the lack of foreign policy differences is working in Trump’s favor. While his administration has been touting its efforts to get the Arabian Gulf monarchies of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain to normalize relations with Israel under the absurd but aptly named Abraham Accords, Biden and the Democrats have had nothing but praise for the deal. 

After the signing of the accords on September 15, Biden’s campaign released a statement saying, “I welcome the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain taking steps to normalize ties with Israel. It is good to see others in the Middle East recognizing Israel and even welcoming it as a partner. A Biden-Harris administration will build on these steps, challenge other nations to keep pace, and work to leverage these growing ties into progress toward a two-state solution and a more stable, peaceful region.”

The truth is that the accords will only quicken the death of a two-state solution that was never a viable solution and, more importantly, make the region less stable and peaceful. Having already stated that his government will annex large parts of the West Bank, Benjamin Netanyahu approved construction of almost 5,000 new settlement housing units a few weeks after the signing of the accords. Even NBC’s Andrea Mitchell pointed out that the accords couldn’t be considered a Middle East peace agreement without the Palestinians. 

So why hasn’t the Biden campaign made a similar criticism–that this is a re-election gift from the Arabian Gulf monarchies and Israel to their close, right-wing ally Trump so that he would have something to show for Jared Kushner’s failure to broker “the deal of the century”? The answer lies in the fact that the accords are fundamentally about strengthening the regional alliance against Iran and furthering the isolation of the Palestinian struggle, policies that Biden and the Democratic Party establishment, as well as their propagandists in the mainstream media, all support. 

An alliance of Gulf monarchies

Democratic and Republican administrations as well as Congress and the media have always portrayed Palestinians and Iranians as rejectionist, bellicose, and hostile to democracy in order to justify embargoes, sanctions, and war on them for opposing US hegemony in the region, a critical component of which is support for Israel, the US’s policeman in the Middle East. 

The US and Israel, with the help of the mainstream media, have always propagated the lie that Israel is the only democracy in a sea of authoritarian regimes in order to justify billions in US aid to Israel, an apartheid state that commits war crimes and human rights abuses against Palestinians on a daily basis. For decades, Israel’s defenders pointed to the Arabian Gulf monarchies to make Israel look good by comparison. Yet now here they were praising and celebrating an agreement with two of the most reactionary, oppressive, and authoritarian regimes in the world.

Even the US government funded human rights organization Freedom House ranks the UAE and Bahrain in the top 20 of least free countries in the world. These are tiny, highly oppressive, theocratic monarchies ruled by oil rich regimes who would’ve ceased to exist long ago if it hadn’t been for the support of the US military. Only 1.1 million of the UAE’s nearly 10 million residents are actually Emirati. The rest are highly exploited migrant workers, mostly from South Asia, who do all the labor in the country for very little money and very few rights, including any form of collective bargaining, let alone forming a union. They could have their wages withheld and be deported by their Emirati sponsor, which every migrant worker has to have, for the slightest infraction. 

The UAE is such a strong supporter of US empire and reaction regionally and internationally that former U.S. Central Command leader Anthony Zinni referred to it as, “the strongest relationship that the United States has in the Arab world today.” This tiny state of 10 million was second only to Saudi Arabia in military spending per capita in 2014. In 2019 it increased military spending by 41% to $16.4 billion which put it in the top 10 with the US, Israel, and Bahrain. This kind of spending has meant billions in profits to US military contractors, which is another reason the US supports the UAE’s military ventures. 

It has not only been a leading supporter of the US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria (all in the name of supposedly fighting ISIS) but it has since 2015, together with Saudi Arabia, been leading one of the most deadly and destructive regional wars in Yemen. The Saudi led coalition is responsible for the majority of the more than 100,000 Yemenis who have been killed so far. Moreover, the UAE has played both a direct and indirect military role in support of rebels in a Libyan civil war that has also claimed thousands of lives and continues to destabilize the country.

Bahrain has a lot in common with its Gulf ally in that Bahrainis make up less than half the country’s total population of 1.5 million (677k), with the rest being migrant workers and merchants, again mostly from South Asia. What’s different about Bahrain is that it’s not just these non-Bahrainis that are treated like second class citizens but the more than half the Bahraini population who are Shi’a Muslim. 

The ruling royal al Khalifa family, which is Sunni, has used sectarianism to maintain its minority rule over the majority Shi’a population, who are mostly poor and working class. When many of the Shi’a citizens and democratic forces rose up against the monarchy during the Arab uprisings in 2011, they were ruthlessly killed and imprisoned with the help of Saudi and UAE military who were invited into the country to save the Bahraini royal family and their allies. The US, whose Naval Central Command (5th fleet) is headquartered in Bahrain, gave all this the go ahead and would’ve surely stepped in to prop up the ruling regime if the Saudis and Emiratis were unable to.

Saudi Arabia, the granddaddy of brutal, medieval, misogynist monarchies and source of the puritanical Wahabi interpretation of Islam that inspires jihadis the world over (it’s #7 on Freedom House’s list), will likely follow in Bahrain and UAE’s footsteps, possibly before the US election so that Trump can add it to his list of accomplishments. Some like the Wall Street Journal have reported that while Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) encouraged the UAE and Bahrain to sign onto the accords, he did so without the consent of his father, King Salman, who is supposedly insisting that normalization happen only after the emergence of a Palestinian state. Others have reported that normalization has led to broader divisions within the Saudi royal family and Saudi society in general, implying that MBS would face opposition to normalization. 

However, despite the fact that every new policy MBS has pushed–from war in Yemen to isolation of Qatar to improving the economy–has been a disaster and diminished his domestic support, he is the de facto King and, as we’ve seen from the gruesome murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and attempted murder of dissident Saad Aljabri, anyone who tries to oppose him ends up either dead or imprisoned, including members of his own royal family. 

Nevertheless MBS and his advisers know that because Saudi Arabia is home to a sizeable Saudi population who has grown up on a steady diet of antisemitic sermons that the kingdom’s Wahabi preachers have been spewing for years, at the urging of the royal family, something as significant as normalizing relations with Israel will require more than a public relations campaign. Because the Wahabi religious establishment is so critical to the legitimacy of the monarchy, they are having those same hateful Wahabi imams now preach peace and brotherhood with Jews. In a recent sermon, the imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, Abdulrahman al-Sudais, used a story from the Prophet Mohamed’s life in which he made peace with the Jewish inhabitants of the Khaybar region of Saudi Arabia to encourage “healthy human dialogue” and avoid “violence, exclusion and hatred”. 

Earlier this year, during the holy month of Ramadan when the most popular TV shows are introduced, two of the Middle East’s largest television broadcasters, both owned and controlled by Saudi Arabia, aired two shows that were clearly part of an effort to rewrite the country’s history of antisemitism (“Um Haroun”), and to belittle the idea of boycotting Israel (“Exit 7”). And then at the beginning of October, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, who was Ambassador to the US for nearly 20 years and, until recently, the head of intelligence, had this to say in response to Palestinian condemnation of the normalization accords: “The Palestinian cause is a just cause but its advocates are failures, and the Israeli cause is unjust but its advocates have proven to be successful.”

Focus on Iran

Unfortunately this is only the latest in a long history of betrayals of the Palestinian people by Arab regimes. Because the Palestinian struggle has always galvanized Arabs across the region to rise up against their undemocratic governments, those regimes have always done everything in their power to scapegoat Palestinians and make the struggle for Palestine go away. One component of the counter revolutionary wave that developed in reaction to the 2011 Arab uprisings which, unsurprisingly, was led and funded by these same Gulf monarchies, was to try to further isolate and defund the Palestinian resistance. One way they did this was by associating it with the outlawed and terrorist designated Muslim Brotherhood, which played a major role in the revolutions and uprisings. 

If there is any question about the true intentions of these monarchies, remember that they signed onto these accords after Trump had moved the US embassy to Jerusalem (thereby recognizing it as the capital of Israel), cut off funding to the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that supports Palestinian refugees, recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, and declared that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories would no longer be considered illegal. In other words, they have done this knowing full well that it will ensure what Palestinian leader Mustafa Barghouti describes as “creeping annexation and the liquidation of Palestinian rights”. 

The reason these Muslim monarchies have continued to support one of the most Islamophobic and racist presidents of all time is because Trump is not only able to take care of their “Palestinian problem” but can be relied upon to support their war in Yemen and, most importantly, lead a war on the country they see as the main threat to their power in the region — Iran. Israel, being a nuclear power and having one of the most powerful militaries in the world, would be a critical addition to such an alliance.

What next for Palestine?

While this isn’t the first time the Palestinians have faced this kind of existential threat to their struggle for self determination, they are definitely at a very difficult juncture. If the Democrats win the election, a Biden/Harris administration will probably restore some of the funding but is unlikely to reverse all the policies that Trump has implemented. A Trump victory will likely lead to more Arab and Muslim countries normalizing relations with Israel and the acceleration of annexation of Palestinian land alongside the further erosion of their rights. It will also increase the likelihood of a war on Iran.

On the plus side, normalization has brought the various Palestinian factions together–not only in the West Bank and Gaza but in the refugee camps across the region–for consultations on where to go from here. While there will always be those who believe in a two-state solution, the reality on the ground will hopefully unite these factions and those in the Palestine solidarity movement internationally around the view of Israel as an apartheid state which needs to be boycotted, divested from, and sanctioned (BDS). Together with a renewed resistance on the ground by Palestinians both inside Israel and in the occupied territories could transform the situation very quickly, as intifadas always have in the past. 

Most importantly, as we saw with the Arab revolutions in 2011, the struggle for Palestine is inextricably linked to the struggle for democracy and against the authoritarian regimes in the region. It is the year 2020. Theocratic monarchies and regimes, even with the backing of the US, will not last forever and normalization with Israel will only make their rule more unpopular and illegitimate as the BDS campaign continues to gain steam.