By M.A. Al GHARIB
U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent visit to Middle East astonished many observers in sidelining Israel. Trump agreed to a captive release deal with Hamas, an end to the hostilities with Yemen’s Ansar Allah (often known as the Houthi movement), a restart to nuclear program talks with Iran and a start to talks with the new Syrian leadership, along with massive trade and military deals with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates in the presence of the titans of the U.S. bourgeoisie—all without Israeli involvement.
Does this mean that the U.S. is “abandoning” Israel? No. Zionist colonialism still plays an important role in snuffing out the embers of any progressive challenge to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East. However, with a more assertive Arab Gulf on the back of a rising China and an intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry, the calculations of U.S. and western imperialism must recalibrate important aspects to the “special relationship” with Israel.
This does not by itself mean that Palestinian liberation is any closer. Neither the Gulf nor Europe, and least of all the U.S., care about this. However, almost two years into the Israeli genocide against Gaza and escalating land-grabs in the West Bank, anti-Zionist movements face an Israeli regime that is more vulnerable than ever.
The Houthis bring U.S. imperialism to heel
The first thing to mention is that, as we discussed in a previous article, the Houthis have presented ferocious resistance to the U.S.-Israeli axis. Since then, it has become clear that the U.S. bombing campaign has not become a resounding victory for them. According to Houthi leaders, it was the U.S. who reached to them to end hostilities, with the U.S. side even dispensing with the demand that the Houthis stop their military campaign in support of Gaza.
As reported on Electronic Intifada, the Houthis subjected two U.S. aircraft carriers to daily bombardment and, since Oct. 7, 2023, had downed nearly 30 reaper drones. The defense campaign mounted by the armed group also received support from mass protests in Yemen against the U.S. bombardments, which were targeting civilians for the most part.
Electronic Intifada editor Ali Abu Nima pointed out that Trump ignored Israel on his trip earlier in the month to the Middle East, which shows that the U.S. can pursue its own interests when it sees them at odds with those of Israel. In the background of the Houthi deal are both Iran and Palestine.
Israel has been trying for decades to drag the U.S. into a military confrontation with Iran. However, it seems that even Trump and his retinue recognize that a bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic would set off a war and that, as the right-wing TV commentator Tucker Carlson has put it, would be “America’s war.” Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, admitted last month that there is a pathway to a civil, peaceful nuclear program if Iran wants it. In this, he was echoing Trump, who emphasized that the only thing Iran can’t have is a bomb (implying that Iran doesn’t have to dismantle its entire nuclear program). In short, the U.S. has been signaling to Israel that it will not fight this war for them. Shortly prior to these statements, a Houthi bomb landed near Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.
The U.S. isolation of Netanyahu has been repeated across major Western capitals, from Madrid to Paris to London and even Berlin, all of whom now see Israel as an obstruction to the business deals they want to conclude with the Gulf and the wider Global South. This realization cannot be disconnected from the emerging “multipolar” sphere of international politics in which China and Russia are on the ascendant. Across the West—which it should always be mentioned, has mostly supported the Israeli genocide—a Netanyahu-led Israel increasingly appears to be an irrational actor and a threat to business stability.
Escalating genocide in Palestine
However, none of this means that the U.S. is “abandoning Israel.” There was some speculation that the Houthi success and the desire to avoid war with Iran would incentivize Trump to pressure Netanyahu to end the slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza. There is no evidence of this at the time of writing. Indeed—and it is almost inconceivable to say this, so gargantuan have been the Israeli crimes in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023—the past month we have seen an even more horrific escalation in the Israeli annihilation campaign.
Aside from a brief mention during his Gulf trip of the suffering of Gazans, Trump has proceeded as usual, turning a blind eye to the monstrosity of the Israeli campaign, which has even provoked unusually sharp criticism from Zionism’s most enthusiastic European supporters.
However, this has been a change in tone rather than substance. As Mouin Rabbani recently explained, Europe continues to fully support Israel in terms of weapons, intelligence, and logistics. Adding insult to injury is the pathetic attempt by the U.S. and Israel to (sort of) pretend that they will deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. In reality, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is meant to circumvent (the already problematic but important) UN aid regime. For Zionist-colonialism and its U.S. patron, it fulfills instead two important functions. It is a windfall for contractors, a “human-rights-washing” venture, to subject Gazans to Israeli and mercenary surveillance; and it allows the mass murder and starvation to continue unabated. Even the GHF’s head, Jake Wood, a U.S. Marine veteran, quickly saw through the thin fog of deceit behind this sham and, by May 27, had quit.
Meanwhile, the situation in the West Bank continues to worsen after months of ongoing IDF bombings and raids along with settler pogroms. As the journalist Ben Ehrenreich recently reported in a devastating article, the situation all across the West Bank is so bleak that even activists with years of experience in the nonviolent movement are now either giving up hope or seeing armed resistance as their only option. The latter seems especially true of the youth. This is not out of any hope that armed resistance will bring liberation but more as a means of survival. Others, young men especially, seem resigned to a fate in which they will inevitably die under IDF-settler attacks. If they’re going to die anyway, the logic goes, they might as well go down fighting. Moreover, with IDF and settler violence the worst that it’s ever been (see Tulkarem and Jenin refugee camps, now in ruins), West Bank Palestinians see Gaza as their future too.
Role of the Arab Gulf monarchies
Liberal-bourgeois commentators have framed the recent meetings between Trump and the leaders of the Gulf states—particularly Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—through the idea of “corruption.” Indeed, corporate heads who prostrate themselves to Trump will undeniably reap massive profits from the Trump-GCC axis. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for example, agreed a deal for Starlink to provide internet to Saudi-based companies and is on the verge of doing so for Emirates Airlines, while Musk’s Neuralink, which manufactures implantable brain chips, is in discussions with the Abu Dhabi health service. VY Capital, a Dubai-based firm, backs at least five of Musk’s projects. Musk is only one of dozens of executives from the largest U.S. companies, prominently featuring tech and banking, who accompanied Trump to the Gulf. This is on top of the $600 billion arms deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, one of the largest in history.
However, to focus on the personalities of the principals—the “corrupt” Trump and the princes, etc.—is misleading. It is to miss the role of the Gulf monarchies, particularly Saudi Arabia, in propping up U.S. imperialism. As the Marxist geographer Adam Hanieh has shown, Gulf petrodollars have played two all-important roles since the period of oil nationalization in the early 1970s: giving the U.S. access to cheap foreign capital and reinforcing dollar dominance. In return, the U.S. folded the Gulf states into their Cold War security architecture, and the monarchies have generally played the role of reliable clients. Indeed, they have been as important as Israel has been to the U.S. agenda of ensuring regional stability, smashing progressive movements along with potential challengers to U.S. hegemony in Western Asia and the Indian Ocean.
With China now consolidating its position as the main US antagonist, the Gulf states represent a far more important arena of inter-imperialist rivalry. The Gulf states, as Hanieh discusses, control around $800 billion in foreign reserves, higher than those of India, and their sovereign wealth funds are valued at almost $5 trillion. Indeed, according to a very solid analysis in Jacobin, to the U.S., the economic and political benefits of the alliance with the Gulf offer far more advantages than those with Israel.
As the inter-imperialist rivalry heats up, the Gulf region becomes even more central to imperialist calculations, and with this, “Israel is going to wield less strategic utility for the United States, who have no vital interests in the volatility intertwined with the Netanyahu era, such as a war with Iran. … The United States also prefers a reconfiguration that can protect its financial and long-term strategic interests, having accepted that endless military interventions in the Middle East prove deleterious.”
Conclusion
The U.S. and the wider West’s tensions with Netanyahu do not mean that they, or their Gulf counterparts, care about Palestine and Palestinians. Indeed, the role of the Gulf monarchies vis-a-vis Palestinian liberation has been similar to their approach to other Arab popular and progressive movements—at best, a managerial role, at worst a bulwark of reaction. This might explain why the devastation in Gaza and the West Bank goes on with mind-boggling monstrosity. The Gulf regimes, like their U.S. patrons and their European counterparts, care about business, not human rights, and least of all proletarian liberation.
This means, more than ever, that disrupting and dismantling the Zionist colonial state will come from Palestinian steadfastness combined with external pressure. This has been the BDS strategy since its emerged in the mid-aughts. It has meant local Palestinian actors’ deploying the moral justness of Palestinian liberation to give confidence to international solidarity movements. These movements maintained their principled stand against their governments’ complicity and silence on the genocide. External pressure carried by a democratically organized, bottom-up mass movement, led by the working class, and not the misguided adventurism of individual terrorism, is more than ever the path forward.
• For a free, secular, and socialist Palestine!
• For a proletarian mass movement to dismantle Zionism and colonialism!
Photo: Trump meets with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Royal Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on May 13. (Alex Brandon / AP)
