| Saudi Israeli normalization | MR Online

The U.S. continues to lose Middle East power and ‘Tel Aviv’ makes things worse

Originally published: Al Mayadeen on May 23, 2023 by Robert Inlakesh (more by Al Mayadeen)  | (Posted May 24, 2023)

As Middle East nations continue to ignore the demands of Washington, looking to China and focusing on mending ties in their own backyards, the United States refuses to acknowledge the new reality on the ground. For long, the West’s refusal to rein in the Israeli regime has been without consequence, however, things are now beginning to get out of hand and the Zionist entity has become a liability.

The Syrian government, after a 12-year hiatus, has resumed its position in the Arab League, after a consensus was reached between the group’s members to normalize ties with Damascus. Syria was then invited to attend not only the Jeddah Summit of the League, but also an invitation was handed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to participate in the COP28 meeting, hosted in Dubai later this year. Even the government in Doha, which had mounted the staunchest Arab opposition to the Damascus government, has agreed to go along with the region’s decision to revive ties with Syria, despite its own noted reservations and position not having changed yet.

This dramatic regional shift on the question of Syria came after Iraqi, Jordanian, Saudi, and Egyptian officials held talks with their Syrian counterparts in Amman earlier this month. All of this going on in direct defiance of the U.S.’s policy of isolating the government of Bashar al-Assad. It also fits into a growing tide of anti-U.S. pivots regionally, including the recent Chinese brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement that led to the reopening of embassies, which was followed by the restoration of ties between Qatar and Bahrain also.

In the emerging multipolar world order, the United States government has been whipped into disarray, it behaves in a manner that demonstrates little seriousness and the blind belief that if it continues along its current trajectory, everyone will simply bow before it. The refusal to amend its policy of divide and conquer, based around fomenting conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, is leading to a massive strategic failure. In the era when Washington ran a one world government of sorts, which is to say it was the single nation that ruled the planet and there were no other options, many states put up with its tired old virtue signaling and followed its agendas. What seems to now be the issue, is that policy makers in Washington truly believe their own propaganda and that the world will follow their alleged superior value system, but this is flatly false. No one else believes the U.S.’s platitudes and that it constituted the leader of the free world fighting for freedom and democracy. The rest of the world saw America’s ugly face, the one after the mask fell.

This is why the options on the table with China, in addition to lesser powers like India, Russia, and others, are seeming much more attractive right now. This does not mean that the United States no longer has influence, it most certainly does, but specifically in the Middle East, many of its agendas that were set in place prior to the outbreak of war in Ukraine have come to an end.

The prize of Saudi-Israeli normalization that the Biden administration was clearly hoping to achieve as a milestone for the Democratic Party-led government, disintegrated with the Saudi-Iran peace deal. In his first visit to the Middle East, which consisted of a trip to Occupied Palestine and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, U.S. President Joe Biden was chasing the establishment of an Arab-Israeli alliance against Tehran and its allies. The premise for normalizing ties between Saudi and the Zionist Entity was supposed to be their shared interests in opposing the Iranian government. This excuse is now off the table.

While the Arab-Israeli normalization, beginning in 2020 under the Trump administration, was premised in the context of a synthetically created Iranian-Arab conflict, the current regional mood is now based around a joint concern over Israeli fanaticism. Even the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which emerged as the most keen of normalizers, have repeatedly condemned Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people and the holy sites in Al-Quds this year. Jordan, which has long been a stable ally of the Israelis and Americans alike, has also grown cold towards the Zionist entity over its extremist practices, especially towards al-Aqsa Mosque.

Repeated Zionist provocations, stemming from extremists from the Religious Zionism alliance parties that are part of the ruling coalition, have fanned the flames of regional tension time and time again. This has been coupled with the extreme measures allowed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, including the massacres visited upon Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

In reality, the reason why the Israelis have become so extreme and ill-calculated, resulting in unnecessary escalations, is because the U.S. has repeatedly refused to punish “Tel Aviv” for its violations of America’s own red-lines. This is especially the case when it comes to illegal settlement expansion. At this point, the illegal settlers are the single biggest threat to the Zionist regime’s stability, something that even the staunchest of anti-Netanyahu Zionists refuse to admit. Some 800,000 illegal Israeli settlers, in the West Bank and Eastern part of occupied Al-Quds, constitute a large chunk of the roughly 7 million Jewish Israelis that live between the river and the sea.

While many Zionist officials in the military establishment are calculated and strategic in imposing their will on the region, the fanatics that control the Israeli coalition are driven by emotion based in dogmatism. Who are the hardliners inside Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime you may ask? The two most prominent and provocative are security minister Itamar Ben Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who both live in illegal Israeli settlements located in the West Bank. If the United States actually acted to hold the Zionist regime accountable for its insatiable lust for Palestinian land, it could have actually prevented the outgrowth of such an extremist movement from taking hold, however, its refusal to condition its support for the Israelis has led them to a point of no return.

Fanatic Jewish extremists, who speak and act like the takfiri terrorists that occupied Syria and Iraq, are embarrassing the U.S. Biden administration in front of the region. When Benjamin Netanyahu launched unprovoked assassination strikes against the Gaza Strip earlier this month, killing Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) senior officials with their wives and children while they slept, it quickly emerged that the U.S. was aware of the operation beforehand. U.S. Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, also “underscored his continued support for Israel’s right to defend its people,” during the acts of unprovoked Zionist aggression, which again implicated the American regime in the miscalculated decisions taken by Netanyahu. Unlike was the case in the past, the Zionist regime continually inflicts self-defeats, stirs unnecessary regional ire on itself and even provoking tensions between its own supporters.

In Bahrain, one of the Arab states to have normalized ties with the Zionist Entity, its school system was just directly ordered to remove all content that portrays the Zionist regime favorably, as per a direct order from King Salman Al-Khalifa. This move came in response to mounting pressure from religious scholars in the country. There was nothing special or transformative that came as a result of Israeli normalization, in the case of Morocco for that matter it has only dragged them to the brink of war with neighboring Algeria. For onlookers, it would seem as if normalization was a mistake and is serving as an embarrassment to the Arab regimes who complied with the Trump initiative.

Instead of waking up to the new reality in the Middle East, the U.S. continues on with its typical immature behavior, but this is at a time when nations no longer have to tow their line. The U.S. response to Arab-Syrian normalization, came in the form of a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers drafting a bill that could prevent the White House from recognising Bashar al-Assad as Syrian President. This falls into the category of the failed attempts by the West to recognise the unelected Juan Guaido as Venezuelan President, which continues to create laughter in Caracas, where the legitimate President Nicolas Maduro remains unrecognized by the U.S. The Israelis recently also attempted this tactic by welcoming the former disgraced Iranian dictator’s son, Reza Pahlavi, to “Tel Aviv”, declaring him the “Crown Prince” of Iran, and discussing his imaginary return to Tehran as King of an Iranian democracy.

If it wasn’t so serious, the above examples of Western policy—this includes the Zionist occupation as they are a Western colony—are so ridiculous they could be turned into satirical cartoons. Although the West takes itself very seriously, the whole world knows their game, they don’t fool anyone and at this point it wouldn’t be a surprise for them to recognise Bugs Bunny as the Crown Prince of Narnia’s liberal democracy inside the gates of DisneyLand. If the U.S. wishes to navigate its way in a world where it no longer rules, but shares power with China, it must reconnect with reality. Despite the somewhat comical nature of U.S. policy at times, its real world impact is devastating and is no laughing matter. The game is up and there’s no need for more innocents to suffer as the result of the maniacal narcissism of these liberal Western supremacists.

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