Shifting Sands

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The new aura emerging from the geopolitically-alterable and ever-changing Middle East points to a return of the Arab states to their previous stance on Israel after a short period of bold and public openings that at a certain moment of transcendence gave an impression of a breakthrough in perspectives and norms, and a deviation from decades-old anti-Jewish policies and rhetorics.

The mounting signs of a potential reconciliation between Qatar and the Saudi-led bloc that has for more than two years imposed an embargo on the gas-rich emirate would only come at the expense of the naturalization of ties with the Hebrew state.

Everything seems starting to fall into place. The rivals’ trolls in Twitter and Facebook are packing their tool bags and getting ready to embark in new missions, although they are keeping footholds until the issue is totally resolved, while the Muslim Brotherhood trolls are on standby. The Football teams of the blockading nations of Saudi Arabia, UAE and Bahrain suddenly decided to participate in the 24^th Arabian Gulf Cup that will be held in Doha on November 26^th; pictures of the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Qatari foreign minister gathering over a dinner table with smiley faces is making the rounds on social media; the old hard-line anti-Semitic fire-and-brimstone stars of Aljazeera like Ahmed Mansour, Jamal Rayyan and Khadija Benguenna who were somehow suspended for quite a while from appearing on the notorious screen are now triumphantly back on track.

One can accurately conclude that the blockade failed to bring Doha to its knees. The shutdown of Aljazeera which was at the top of the 13-point list issued by the Saudi-led bloc to end the Qatar-Gulf crisis now sounds an absolute drivel; the channel is in full swing. Instead, at any rate, the Saudis are bound to an abject surrender to the sword of al-Thani ruling family of Qatar; they are desperate to be in their good graces—although not showing it—to stop their ferocious and effective campaign against the kingdom; the Brotherhood are devouring the religious legitimacy of al-Saud family in every aspect; especially after the creation of the General Authority for Entertainment (GEA) on May 7, 2016 by a royal decree, judging them by their very Wahhabi textbook. And presently some tribes within the kingdom with a higher historical status, started showing signs of disobedience and resentment toward the dominant and corrupted tribe of al-Saud.

On other ground, yet in the same theme-song, the Jordanian king has set the stage for a publicity stunt before, during and after his “speech of Victory” in the parliament concerning the end of lease of borderlands to Israel; it was curiously intriguing—the act of forgery and falsification of information, context and event, the Arab spectators easily swallowed it, partly because they are quite willing to believe any act of  aggression from the part of an Arab ruler towards Israel.
With the help of Aljazeera network and the propaganda machine of its ally—the Brotherhood—and some photographs issued by the Jordanian press showing the “brave king” with a swell of pride saluting soldiers at the borders with posters of his in the background, some as wide as two meters, in full uniform weighed down with shiny medals and brasses and colorful decorations and a green sash over his shoulder— gave him just the impression of a LIBERATOR, passing with flying colors, perhaps lacking only the ceremonial baton of a great brazen marshal, as the one President Sadat used to wave at glorious military parades.

Although Israel, for years, thanks to its dozens if not hundreds of air strikes, is preventing a crushing takeover of Sinai by Islamists militants in front of an amateurish and poorly equipped Egyptian army—a military achievement that is altogether deprived from any kind of coverage by the Egyptian and Arab media—the proles and elites alike are frozen in a hysterical gratuitous state of animosity with an abstract Israeli enemy of 1967.

All the same, Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Azhar Alsharif (the state-run religious institution, acting ever since Gamal Abdel Nasser has nationalized it as the spiritual arm of the authoritarian regime) is inciting in a recent statement the Arabs and Muslims to confront Israel calling the recent killing of an Islamic Jihad leader a “criminal act of terrorism that reveals the bloody face of the brute occupation that targets the human being and scorch the lands.” A word of which the Imam dare not write without the consent, if not the direct ordaining of the generals ruling Egypt with fear and fire. Generals who are supposedly “very friendly” with the Israeli government and who coordinate with it the attacks on the Islamist elements in the Sinai peninsula whom, at any rate, many of them were indoctrinated by the Azhar institution itself.

Should a reconciliation between regional Islamic powers comes into effect that means a strong probability to extend an olive branch to Islamist Iran and Islamist Turkey with whom Qatar hold close ties, and whom Saudis and Emiratis are already trying to placate.

The fact of the matter is that the main objective of the Qatari diplomacy and its dynamics in the region is to see the suffering of the Jews vividly, the beheading of soldiers, the rape of women, the slaughter of children; that would make their sickly souls cheer and their savage instinct grow febrile and excited; there is no exaggeration to that: I follow their ideological workings in their media coverage, their newspaper articles, their cultural publications, on their social media platforms, at their Friday sermons, their literarily awards, their community processions and sport events. All in all, barking the same theme-song.

For the al-Thani clan the only way to drive the jews out of the Middle East and establish an Islamic Nizam is through unifying all the Arabs under a Turkish banner including Iran as a sort of a maverick Shiite vilayet. Islamic Ideology in particular contains, somewhat, the characteristics of water, that is, an ability to yield whenever you touch it, and pour into various shapes.

Now, with America shirking its traditional role of drawing maps of alliances, distribution of types and overseeing trends of policy in the Middle East, the situation could dramatically morph into a pan-Islamic imperial-like alliance between those Islamic anti-Semitic dictatorships, with rulers, intellectuals and proletariat who still long for a medieval caliph-like lifestyle, that, for that matter, will entail the unification of all the gory proxies from Tehran to Aden against one desirable target—the Jews.