This article was first published here by the Friday Times on August 16, 2023.
There have been whispers lately that the Biden Administration is trying to broker a deal to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. In exchange for abandoning the Palestinians, America’s “values-based” President is rumored to be offering his military’s most advanced weapons while the Saudis are reputed to be angling for help building a “civilian” nuclear program and a defense pact. President Biden will surely claim this program is not intended to build nuclear weapons, but it is hard to conceive of any other reason a nation endowed with Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves would covet such technology. These developments provide yet another glimpse into the hypocritical and destructive role America has played in the region while proving its leaders have learned nothing after decades of committing similar blunders.
By trying to expand the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia, America is trying to foster a peace between dictators that ignores the underlying cause of conflict between Israel and the Muslim world, namely, the violent oppression of the Palestinians. The simple fact is these deals will never bring real peace to the region for the same reason Israel’s treaties with Egypt and Jordan failed to do so. Without a political agreement that protects the rights of the Palestinians, most Muslims will justifiably remain hostile towards Israel, preventing the establishment of the sort of deep-rooted ties that can lead to genuine peace. Despite the rhetoric about adequate compensation, there can be no doubt: this deal is meant to further marginalize and isolate the Palestinians, not help them.
At best, these accords may sweep the region’s problems under the rug for a time. But the most likely scenario is they will only make its problems worse by exacerbating its underlying issues. The primary significance of these accords is not that they will achieve a sustainable peace but how they prove once more that America has never been an honest broker between the Israelis and Palestinians. In their desperation to help Israel consolidate its de facto annexation of the West Bank, America’s leaders are willing to arm the Arab world’s despots with their most sophisticated weapons.
Saudi Arabia, for example, is governed by a violent monarchical dictatorship. Its war in Yemen has already killed 377,000 people. The Saudi royal family has built a repressive police state to enforce its rule and frequently murders or imprisons those who do nothing more than criticize it. It is not the sort of country America should be selling weapons to, particularly if those weapons create mushroom clouds. Despite these red flags, America has been Saudi Arabia’s primary arms dealer for decades. This deal, however, would take their relationship to a level reserved only for NATO allies. Strengthening Saudi Arabia’s dictatorship to such a degree not only betrays American values but will have a destabilizing and destructive impact on the region in many ways. It is an excellent example of the short-sighted and hypocritical thinking that has always characterized its approach to the region.
But nothing epitomizes American hypocrisy like its support for Israel. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Israel is an apartheid state, the majority of America’s political establishment refuses to admit it. Instead, they prefer to ignore the conclusions of venerable organizations like Humans Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem that have all condemned Israel as a state in which the political and legal system is explicitly designed to empower Jews while violently disenfranchising and marginalizing Palestinians. Though the exact mechanisms may differ from the South African version, Israel’s political economy is designed with the same ends in mind. It is an apartheid state in every meaningful way, just like America was during the Jim Crow era. One that has established violent military control over millions of Palestinians while dispossessing them of their land and rights.
America has been its unabashed supporter and enabler since nearly the beginning. Its leaders laud Israeli “democracy” and send it almost 4 billion dollars a year to ensure its military superiority while ignoring the fact that being a healthy democracy and violent military occupier are mutually exclusive. Sort of like being progressive and supporting apartheid. These glaring inconsistencies aside, American politicians overwhelmingly declare their affection for Israel while vehemently denying its racist nature.
There will always be people who are incapable of admitting the truth about Israel just like there are still people in America who think it is appropriate to teach children slavery provided valuable job skills for black people. But the truth is obvious to anyone capable of putting their tribal instincts aside. What should be equally obvious is that apartheid in all its manifestations and variations is evil. America’s support for Israeli apartheid is especially repugnant given its own ugly history. One would think both Americans and Israelis would have learned by now that political systems designed to empower one group over another based purely on race, religion, or ethnicity are inherently immoral. Sadly, one would be mistaken.
President Biden may pretend to be an ally, but he is an apartheid denier who sees no contradiction between his claims to support equality in America and his willingness to ignore Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. To his credit, he is not the worst of the bunch. Politicians like Richie Torres, Ron DeSantis and Niki Haley are not just apartheid deniers, but enthusiastic apartheid lovers who seem to take a perverse joy in the repression meted out to the Palestinians.
America’s support for Israeli apartheid and Arab autocracy vividly highlight why it has been such a destructive force in the region. Instead of supporting democracy and defending human rights, America’s policies strengthen the foundational causes of the region’s instability by supporting its authoritarian rulers. Its attempts to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia together are the culmination of a decades-long effort to “stabilize” the region by trampling on the values it claims to stand for.
The best thing America can do for the Middle East is leave it alone. Its sanctions against Iraq killed 576,000 children. According to Brown University, the War on Terror that followed claimed approximately 4.5 million more innocent souls. America has done enough. But despite its genocidal record, its leaders and people still implicitly believe America is exceptional and justified in its hegemonic pursuits. That George Bush is a war criminal is beyond their ability to comprehend.
Conversely, the best thing Saudi Arabia can do is end its neo-colonial relationship with America and learn to stand on its own. The Sauds are desperate for America’s help because, despite turning their nation into the world’s fifth biggest military spender, their armed forces are incompetent. Without the American mercenaries and arms dealers who run its day-to-day operations and supply its weapons, Saudi Arabia’s military would cease to function. This incompetence is a direct result of its repressive political and social systems. The refusal of Saudi leaders to meaningfully empower their people has prevented them from building a military capable of protecting their nation without the help of a foreign patron.
As Machiavelli noted centuries ago, this is the path to servitude, not power. In their desperation to hold on to power at all costs, Saudi leaders ignore the lessons of history and common sense. But this is a depressingly familiar story in the Muslim world, one that epitomizes the dysfunction that has gripped nearly all of it for too long. Despite centuries of conquest and instability, the Muslim world’s rulers refuse to change their ways or admit the obvious truth that creating democratic political systems is the first step to developing adequate military and technological capabilities in the modern age. As a result, they must sell themselves to the West (or Russia, or China or a combination thereof) to maintain their power.
Nowhere is this more evident than the degree to which Muslim nations have abandoned the Palestinians in exchange for American support for their dictatorships. Collectively using the carrot of normalization could have convinced Israel to make peace with the Palestinians. But the region’s dictators have opted to negotiate individual deals, wasting the only leverage they have left while showing, yet again, how inept they are at doing anything other than cling to power.
Which means the Palestinians will need to stand up for themselves. The best way to do that is to learn from people who have been in similar predicaments. Gandhi, Mandela, and King taught the world how to fight injustice using non-violent, mass civil disobedience. Given their inability to secure their freedom through force of arms, the Palestinians would do well to remember this history. Armed struggle plays directly into the hands of the considerably more powerful IDF whereas adopting non-violent methods of civil disobedience on a massive scale would constitute the sort of indirect approach that would make Liddell Hart proud.
Between Gaza, Israel proper, and the West Bank, the Palestinians constitute a majority of the population between the river and the sea. A one state solution in which they are treated as equals has long been their surest path to freedom. If Israel truly is the democracy its supporters claim it is, they should have no problem fairly sharing power with the Palestinians according to transparent and equitable democratic principles. Of course, these demographic realities are exactly the reason most Israelis refuse to do so, even though their sprawling settlements have made a two-state solution impossible. Instead of creating a truly democratic society, they argue Israel must remain Jewish. In doing so, they are choosing apartheid without having the courage to admit it while simultaneously denying the realities that come with their choice to build their nation in the heart of the Arab world. Nevertheless, as the author already suggested years ago, peacefully forcing Israelis to decide if they would rather live in a Jewish state or a democratic one represents the Palestinians’ last, best option considering the lengths America is willing to go to convince the world to forget about them.