By Jeremy Salt
The responsibility also lies, perhaps even more so, with Arab and Muslim governments refusing to intervene to save their fellow Arabs and Muslims, with the heroic exception of Yemen.
While Israel was deliberately starving children and slaughtering 100 Palestinians or more every day at one end of the Middle East, Arab rulers and their American guests were partying at the other.
In his trip to Saudi Arabia, Trump was accompanied by Elon Musk and the CEOs of Google, BlackRock, Blackstone, Amazon, Boeing, Palantir, OpenAI and others, all joining in the festivities and looking out for their share of the cash.
At the airport, Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) waited to greet Trump at the end of a purple carpet stretching from the plane to the terminal. Purple is the true colour of royalty, not red.
“I really believe we like each other a lot,” Trump said in what was only the first of many banal observations. At the palace he swayed in rhythm with the chanting sword dancers and remarked in conversation on the number of camels that had shuffled alongside the motorcade on the way from the airport. “We appreciate those camels,” he said. “We haven’t seen camels like that in a long time.”
In the reception room, the developer in him admired the pure white marble facing on the ceiling and the walls. He must have wondered how much it cost, not even a consideration for people far richer than himself, or would cost for his next Trump Tower.
Thoughtfully, attentive to detail, MBS had arranged a mobile McDonald’s for the duration of Trump’s stay, in case he needed to snack on a Spicy McCrispy and a serving of Famous French Fries in between banquets.
In Qatar, the government marked the occasion by giving him a luxuriously appointed 747-8 airliner, the largest private jet in the world, basic price about $428 million. It was a “really nice gesture,” Trump said. All of us without the gift of an airliner for our personal use would have to suppose it was.
Arriving at the presidential palace in the UAE, he walked between two lines of young women shaking their glossy hair from side to side, apparently an ancient tribal rite of greeting for important visitors.
This was a Hollywood spectacle that topped any of the sword and sandal desert epics Cecil B. DeMille produced in the 1950s. The camels, the sword dancers, the girls with swirling hair and the cast of thousands would have had de Mille thinking of cost overruns, but this extravaganza came for free.
Early on in Riyadh, Trump met and appreciated the manly qualities of Ahmad al Shara’a – “young attractive guy … very strong past …. Fighter.” Not ‘terrorist’ of course, as he is still listed in the US and at the UN.
Then they all got down to business, trillions of dollars pledged by the Saudis and other Gulf rulers to buy American arms and Boeing airliners. It’s not as if the US hadn’t earned it, of course. These kingdoms had much to be thankful for because, Trump said, “we keep them safe – if it wasn’t for us, they probably wouldn’t exist right now.”
Sealing the Syrian part of the multilateral deal, he announced the lifting of sanctions. Understandably, the Syrian people were jubilant. They could live again. They crowded into the centre of Damascus to celebrate the sacrifice of their independence in return for the lifting of sanctions.
The remark of one Syrian that Trump “is a great man, really a great man” no doubt spoke for many, as if they had all forgotten that it was the US that had imposed the sanctions on Syria in the first place, back in 1979.
It tightened them year after with the intention of destroying the Syrian economy, making life as miserable as possible for the Syrian people, and eventually collapsing the government for reasons that had nothing to do with their best interests. This is what they were thanking Trump for.
Naturally, Palestine came up as a conversation piece. It has been a “zone of death and destruction,” Trump said, almost abstractedly, as if he were a hapless onlooker to some terrible tragedy that had nothing to do with him.
October 7, 2023, was “one of the most atrocious attacks anyone has ever seen,” he believed, and Hamas would have to be “dealt with” so the US could “take” Gaza and turn it into a “freedom zone.”
Free of the Palestinian people, of course, as Trump is still committed to removing them to other countries. With no takers so far, the latest plan is to dump a million of them in another wrecked war zone of a country, Libya.
As for Iran, Trump wants to deal, but if Iran won’t, then we’ll have no choice but to inflict massive maximum pressure.” In other words, an offer you can’t refuse – give us what we want or we’re going to bomb you out of existence.
Anyone actually watching the Middle East would know that it is not October 7, 2023, but the Gaza genocide that is “one of the most atrocious attacks anyone has ever seen, ” certainly compared to the death and destruction delivered by Israel across the Middle East continuously since 1948.
Far more Palestinians have been killed in just one attack by Israel on Gaza than the number of Israelis killed on October 7, many by their own military. Trump has no idea of what he is talking about.
Each of the three men shaking hands in Riyadh to celebrate their new Middle East has an impressive record in the ending of human life. Apart from the Palestinian and Yemeni deaths for which he is directly responsible, Trump ordered the murder of Qasim Suleimani in 2020, when he was on a peace mission in Iraq. US aerial attacks on Yemen just between March and May this year, authorized by Trump, have killed hundreds of civilians.
In 2018, his host, MBS, as mentioned, had ordered the gruesome assassination in Istanbul of Jamal Khashoggi. Three years earlier, he had launched the attack on North Yemen that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and injuries, including mass child deaths from starvation. The US helped out by supplying the planes and bombs, with a bit of extra assistance from the UK.
As for the other honoured guest, Faruq al Shara’a, the number of Syrians tortured or murdered by his organizations, Jabhat al Nusra, HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al Sham), and Al Qaida in Iraq, would run into tens of thousands. No wonder they all get on so well with Israel. They are literally brothers in arms.
The need to stop the genocide by whatever means necessary, including military intervention, is long past urgent. Instead, in their Gulf gallivanting, Trump and the Arab representatives of no one but themselves are encouraging Israel to go still further in wiping out the Palestinians.
The meticulous attention to detail in the eradication of the Palestinians is psychopathic, embracing the bulk of Israeli society. After nearly 20 months, Israel is still bombing what is left of hospitals, murdering journalists (five in one day as of the time of writing), and mass murdering children, as if the 20,000 already killed is not enough. The child survivors expect death at any moment. How can the world allow this? Not only are these children being killed by missiles and starved to death, but their childhood and their schooling have also been stolen from them.
There is no excuse of ‘collateral damage.’ This is the deliberate eradication of a people, the mass murder of civilians in their homes and tents, planned and executed day after day for nearly 20 months.
Israel talks of its ‘right’ to defend itself, when ‘itself’, from the river to the sea, is stolen Palestinian property. It talks of its ‘right’ to exist. There is no such right for any state and never has been, but if there was, wouldn’t genocide cancel out any ‘right’ to exist? Did the Nazi state have a ‘right’ to exist after the genocide of the Jews?
Furthermore, this is not just Israel. It is the ‘western’ governments arming it, refusing to take any practical steps to stop the genocide, refusing even to condemn Israel. No words are sufficient to sum up their cowardice.
Their silence indicates that it is not just Israel that regards genocide as the only solution to the ‘Palestine problem.’ The responsibility also lies, perhaps even more so, with Arab and Muslim governments refusing to intervene to save their fellow Arabs and Muslims, with the heroic exception of Yemen.
The genocide will never be forgotten or forgiven, and neither will the inhumanity of those ‘world leaders’ carousing in the Gulf states and signing their trillion-dollar deals while children were being massacred and starved to death in Gaza.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
Sir, the burden is much more on the leaders of Muslim & Arab world.
We are nothing but just mere unarmed civilians.
It seems the govt of Arab world with enormous arms would rather sword-dance than send it to our brethren that needs it to defend against a brutal onslaught of war criminals.
It seems the leadership would keep investing&laughing with our enemies that starve and kill our brethren.
The burden is on the leadership and the choice is theirs.
But as a civilian, I would have no ties with a genocidal&apartheid entity&her backers and neither would I roll out any carpet nor line up girls, be it moral or immoral, to welcome them while my brethren are still under siege & extermination wars.