Freaks and Sheikhs

Accord and Discord in the Middle East

Like all journalists who have spent time in both Israel and the Palestinian territories, I have seen both sides. One is Israel, an amazing and vibrant little country, built by survivors of industrial-scale modern genocide and their descendants. Israel absolutely deserves to survive and thrive. The other side is the occupied territories with descendants of people ejected from ancestral homes, now herded into ever smaller slices of barely arable land.

I spent two years in and out of Israel working on a book about a Biblical archaeology forgery case. Titled Unholy Business, it turned out to be about something larger than the case: the curious desire of people of faith for material proof of that faith, and the equally strong desire by religious-nationalist Israelis to justify land claims, including using dubious artifacts, to prove that two millennia ago, their ancestors occupied lands that exceed the current borders of the country.

I lived and worked out of an American archaeological institute on the very edge of the east side - the nominally Arab side - of Jerusalem. As an American, I was able to walk back and forth across barriers, guarded by Israeli soldiers and marked by riot fences, with ease. Not so the inhabitants. Palestinian employees of the institute were often unable to come to work without waiting in hours-long lines, women would sometimes arrive crying after being humiliated and searched. From the Israeli side, many of the secular Jews with whom I became friendly had never set foot across the lines, and didn’t have any idea what was happening to the people living less than a mile away. Among some, the ignorance seemed like willful blindness.

It’s heartbreaking to witness, because the two peoples live cheek by jowl with each other. One of the startling things one realizes on a first visit Israel, is how small it is: you can drive across it in a day: it’s about the size of Vermont. And yet it has the cultural geopolitical weight and importance of a much bigger nation.

I later did reporting for Time Magazine in some of the Israeli settlements that rim Jerusalem, which are, by international law, illegal. The settlers were bellicose and extremely religious: I will never forget meeting one family of Americans who had made aliyah - become Israeli citizens - and move into the hills surrounded by Arab villages. The father, the patriarch, refused to shake my female hand. Bitter and violent clashes between settlers, protected by the Israeli army, and Arabs whose homes and olive groves were being wrecked or seized, were and are ongoing.

I have also spent time in Iraq and Egypt. My maternal ancestors are Assyrian Christians from the north of Iraq, and I’ve written about them and their refugee pilgrimage to America, and my outrage at the folly of the Iraq War.

I don’t watch much cable news or click on video on social media. I don’t have the time for it on the best days, when it’s just cats and elephants doing amazing things. Yesterday, the Muskrat X platform feed was filled with war game videos presented as scenes from Israel and Gaza. I didn’t watch.

But last night I dipped into the Freakshow that is primetime Fox. I’m tuning in for a half hour every night as part of a project that will be published later this year.

Not until I flicked on Fox did I see the actual horror show video from Israel: Palestinian men dragging a screaming young Israeli woman onto a motorcycle while her boyfriend was tied up and frog-marched. Another Palestinian dragging another bound Israeli woman out of a hatchback and shoving her into the front seat. The two clips rolled in rotation over and over on one third of the Fox screen. Another third of the screen was trained on the nighttime Gaza skyline, flashing with missiles, occasionally exploding. On the last third of the screen, Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters nattered with Newt Gingrich and former Trump official John Ratcliffe.

All blamed Iran and Biden for the scenes on the other two screens. The Fox line of the night, being repeated over and over, was “Biden was focused on the weather, not Hamas.” It took me a while to understand that by “weather” they meant climate change and the green, sustainable energy projects in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Watching the Foxbots and their guests once again confirmed my overall impression of American policy toward the Middle East: that it is rooted in a combination of profit-making and naïveté. We give or sell weapons to almost all sides - although mostly to Israel. Our presidents hold peace meetings, administration after administration. We have blasted away at the secular dictators - Ghaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and the horrid Assad, leaving the oil monarchs standing.

Since its inception, the United States has been an unflagging friend of Israel. Our leaders have also stuck by the gulf oil nations, even going to war to protect Kuwait’s oil fields and tightening ties with Saudi Arabia after the undeniable involvement of some of its factions in 9/11. We’ve not really done much more friend-making over there. The Trump administration’s signature accomplishment in the Middle East was to end the pretense that anyone besides Israel and the sheiks matter much.

Trump decided that Kushner’s religion and connections qualified him to run Middle Eastern policy. Bibi Netanyahu was a long time friend of the orthodox Jewish Kushner family, he slept over at the Kushner’s New Jersey home when Jared was a teen. Given a position of enormous influence with little real experience in the region, the young nepo-billionaire quickly befriended the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who would shortly order the torture-murder of an American journalist - Jamal Khashoggi - carried out with utter impunity.

Kushner first moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the ancient holy city critical to the three Abrahamic religions and technically still contested turf between Palestinians and Israelis. The embassy move was made in flagrant defiance of a UN resolution asking the US not to do it, passed by 128 countries. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called it a “slap in the face” and said Washington could no longer be regarded as an honest broker in any peace talks with Israel.

Next, the administration arranged the “Abraham Accords” which amounted to getting the UAE and Bahrain to agree to normalize relations with Israel. Crucially, they excluded the Palestinians, and as initially conceived, the accords would even have allowed Israel to annex another thirty percent of the West Bank.

After the signing, Trump announced that Saudi Arabia would likely join soon. That has not happened. However, anyone familiar with the region understood that the anti-Iran Sunni oil sheiks already worked with Israelis behind closed doors.

Now, the Accords have proven, like other words flung around by the American right - freedom and liberty for example - exactly the opposite of their dictionary meaning. There has been no accord. On the contrary, cutting the Palestinian people out of the discussion, left the situation to fester under the extreme right wing government of Bibi Netanyahu, and emboldened anti-Israel militants like Hamas.

The Gulf monarchies codify the abuse of women and commit grotesque human rights abuses including classifying dissidents as terrorists and locking them up in dungeons or worse. The signatory of the Accords from the UAE is part of a clan of men who have openly kidnapped their women. They are only one or two generations away from an illiterate desert society.

The leaders of the post-Enlightenment West are supposed to know better. Yet, we have enabled the Gulf monarchies’ dramatic wealth and then welcomed them into the halls of power with weapons and investments that facilitated the entwining of medieval mores into modern society. The grotesque concentrated wealth of the oil monarchies sovereign funds - trillions of dollars - capture the allegiance of engineers, architects, hedge funds, private equity managers, weapons-makers. The spires and technology and now, entertainment industry and art, are a symbol of their limitless power.

Accords get signed. Trade goes on. Glass towers rise. Air conditioned malls and fake ski mountains get built. Great Western art gets moved in. Shiny new museums rise near new satellite campuses of prominent universities. Institutions that are bastions of sexual enlightenment and tolerance send their finest thinkers to lecture at gleaming compounds etched with the names of western institutions, built with the modern equivalent of slave labor.

The Abraham Accords left the Palestinians invisible. The idea seems to have been - if it was a consideration at all - that the Palestinians would evaporate in the climate-changing heat of Gaza or move to one of the monarchies and become guest workers in construction, and eventually disappear through attrition.

So far, and so tragically, it hasn’t worked out that way.

RELATED READING

Mis- and Disinformation about the war

Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land

Israeli Settlers Versus the Palestinians for Time

Three Years On, The Abraham Accords

SOUNDING THE DEPTHS

“Just because I tweet something does not mean people believe it or will act accordingly,” Elon Musk said, on a witness stand in January 2023.