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Alameen Templeton
The UAE is fully on board King Donald Trump’s (KDT) real estate agent’s plan to bulldoze the whole of Gaza and to turn it into a holiday resort and damn the consequences and the Palestinians.
The Emirates, a collection of oil fields ringfenced by World War I borders into an archipelago of fossil fuel privilege, has put up its hand on several occasions to take over security in Gaza, but has always muttered backhanded mantras about its participation being conditioned on the establishment of a Palestinian state.
All that’s forgotten now and the UAE this week underlined its determination to remain one of the US’s two main military partners (the other is India) when its ambassador to the US, Yousef al-Otaiba, announced there was “no alternative” to KDT’s bulldozer détente.
The little engine that could
The UAE was fully prepared to implement it, he said, when asked if the UAE could find “common ground” with the US monarch’s business plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
“We’re gonna try,” Al-Otaiba said. “I think the current approach is gonna be difficult, but at the end of the day, we’re all in the solution-seeking business. We just don’t know where we gonna land yet.”
It seems they “gonna land” on the Palestinians.
But killing Muslims and anyone else, really, on behalf of the US has been de rigueur for the UAE ever since it was brought on board the US’s transmogrified “war against terror” in 2011, helping fund and train ISIS and launching two-pronged attacks against Libya and Syria.
Since then, the UAE has been the main backer of warlord Khalifa Haftar who has carved out a principate in eastern Syria and it is also the money, guns and power behind the RSF attempt to take over Sudan. Both those conflicts are metastasizing into potential hot war fronts between Russia and the US and are drawing the UAE ever-closer into the US fold as it finds itself enmeshed in skullduggery and, “wet ops” that have unleashed misery and death where ever the Emirates shadow falls.
Now, it seems it is Gaza’s turn.
Another home, another war
It’s the Palestinians who don’t know where they’re “gonna land yet”, but KDT has mentioned a choice of three brewing civil wars as alternatives if Jordan and Egypt refuse to take in about four million refugees.
KDT has singled out the Western Sahara, which is claimed by the Polisario Front; or Puntland and Somaliland, two regions of present-day Somalia that are seeking to wrest control away from Mogadishu, as potential new homes for the Palestinians.
KDT hasn’t spelt it out loud, but it’s clear he and Israeli fuhrer Benjamin Netanyahu intend extending his bulldozer democracy into the West Bank as well.
The UAE seems to be ignoring – or, at the very least, not considering – a last-minute flurry among Arabia’s leaders as they suggest another meeting.
None of their meetings in the last 100 years or so have produced anything meaningful for Gaza, but they’re hoping the latest pantomime will be different. After all, they need to be seen by the Arab street to at least be trying.
Business as usual
When asked whether the UAE had an alternative plan to KDT’s ethnic cleansing, Al-Otaiba said: “Not yet. I don’t see an alternative to what’s being proposed, I really don’t. And so, if someone has one, we’re happy to discuss it, we’re happy to explore it. But it hasn’t surfaced yet.”
Egypt has said that it plans to formulate a reconstruction plan that does not involve the international crime of ethnic cleansing.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II said before a meeting with King Donald I earlier this week, “the unified Arab position” was opposed to KDT’s plan.
Until the UAE blew that out of the water.
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said in an interview on Tuesday, the day of the two monarchs’ meeting in the White House, any attempt by Israel to deport Palestinians to Jordanian territory would be regarded as a “declaration of war.”
The UAE will be participating in the Saudi-led plan to hold a meeting. Egypt and Jordan will also be there to discuss a plan to launch an Arabia-led reconstruction fund and “a deal to sideline Hamas”, five sources have told The Cradle.
Rearranging the deck chairs
Arab ideas are coalescing around an Egyptian plan to govern Gaza without Hamas, bulldozing the deep support the organisation enjoys in Gaza where it is the elected government, and pulling in international support to reconstruct the enclave before moving towards establishing an independent Palestinian state.
The plan enjoys muted support from the EU that is currently discussing Gaza at the Munich Security Conference.
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