On November 11, member countries of the Arab League and those of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation met in Riyadh. This is unprecedented, they don’t really like to mix, the Shiites, the Sunnis, the Muslim Brotherhood and the monarchies; there is neither concord nor homogeneity in the Arab-Muslim world. But they all came, they were all there, King Abdullah II of Jordan, Mahmoud Abbas, Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the essential Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim ben Hamad al-Thani.
They spoke with one voice, for once. They agreed to agree on the common enemy: Israel. They called for a ceasefire in Gaza, condemned “Israeli aggression” and “the war crimes and barbaric and inhumane massacres perpetrated by the occupation government”, and that’s it. Oh no ! They also listened to Sultan Erdogan, Ebrahim Raïssi, nicknamed the “butcher of Tehran” since 1981, and Bashar al-Assad, the butcher of Syria, without flinching.
And yet there was reason to flinch when Iranian President Raïssi asked to break economic and political relations with the “Zionist entity”, then demanded that everyone qualify the Tsahal, the Israeli army, as a “terrorist” organization and to arm the Palestinians, just to be certain that the region will be in fire and blood for many decades. And he also allowed himself a little worse, the butcher of Tehran: “We kiss the hands of Hamas for its resistance to Israel.” No one flinched, and everyone applauded the pogrom of October 7, while everyone would like to get rid of Hamas – except the mullahs of Iran, who are still standing thanks to the blood shed by the terrorists they finance. The Arab-Muslim states were silent and applauded the butcher of Tehran without seeming to remember the massacre of Yemenis, nearly 400,000 in ten years, by the Houthi rebels armed by Iran and Saudi Arabia, nor moreover from the massacre of the Syrians and by the Al-Quds brigades, the Iranian armed force abroad, and by Putin’s Russians and by the isolationist weakness of Barack Obama.
MBS holds the key to the Middle East
Everyone pretended very well to forget the siege and destruction of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp south of Damascus, which had between 120,000 and 200,000 Palestinians. We are not even able to count the number of deaths, but it was a tragedy on a par with Black September (1970), the massacre of Palestinians perpetrated by the father of Abdullah II, King of Jordan, who did not had some pretty harsh words to denounce the Israel-Hamas war. Kamel Daoud was right in his column of Point, Letter to an unknown Israeli : “The Palestinian only interests us dead, wounded, bleeding or buried. Alive, he matters little. His dreamed and hoped-for country maintained reprieve in our countries and his war did not awaken in us the desire to liberate him, but that to kill you. You exempt us from thinking, building, working and questioning ourselves about our actions and our responsibilities. The Jew is the disempowerment of the Arab.”
Since then, we haven’t heard much applause – except for a ceasefire. If it is the Egyptians and especially the Qataris who negotiate in the open, nothing will be done without Saudi Arabia. Perhaps Paul Valéry is right: “Peace! The only treaties that would count are those that are concluded between ulterior motives. Everything that is admissible is as if stripped of all future.” In the game of ulterior motives, MBS wins every time. The equation is simple: the future of Saudi Arabia will be Israeli. In other words, no Vision 2030, MBS’s big project to diversify the economy and get away from fossil fuels, without the United States and its nuclear power, without Israel and its technology – like its proximity. Saudi Arabia is trying to obtain a “process” of recognition of a Palestinian state to sign normalization with Israel, while managing the isolation of Iran with the dismantling of the militias (Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas) remotely controlled by the mullahs. Without peace, there is no prosperity. This shows whether MBS, like it or not, holds the key to the future of the Middle East.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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