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| King Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud with Sir Percy Cox |
The barbaric murder of Jamal Khashogii, medieval in its savagery as befits this western imposed regime, has literally set the cat amongst the imperialist pigeons.
For some time Israel has been building, with the full support of the
Trump administration, an alliance with Saudi Arabia against Iran. When
Obama reached his agreement on nuclear
weapons with Iran and the European states, it was a combined Israeli and Saudi
Arabian campaign which led to the decision of Trump to abrogate the agreement.
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| Jamal Khashogii, murdered Saudi journalist - he was no radical but was on the wrong side of the divide in the Saudi royal family |
Mohammed bin Salman has been
touted in the West as a ‘reformer’ and ‘moderniser’ whereas he is nothing of
the kind. He is as authoritarian and
capricious as any who have proceeded him. His primary goal is to remove any
impediment to an open relationship with Israel and that means ‘solving’ the Palestinian
Question by forcing a Bantustan-style solution in the area. Even
arch-collaborator Mahmoud Abbas has resisted such an open betrayal.
There is nothing ‘modern’
about MBS. The decision to allow women to drive, which is essential if women
are to be integrated into the Saudi economy, was also accompanied by the round
up of women rights activists. To see in the decision any form of liberation for
Saudi women or democratisation in Saudi Arabia is an exercise in self-deception.
As the murder of Khashoggi has demonstrated, the iron rule of the Saud dynasty
continues unchecked. Modernising the state simply means making it more open to
western investment and reducing the dependence on oil revenues.
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| Consulate staff in Istanbul |
The other aspect of his ‘modernisation’
consists of some curbs on the religious police, the "mutawa" and the clerical establishment. This is part of the
attempt to move Saudi Arabia away from the Wahhabist and Salafist tradition in
the light of the way this political current has morphed into ISIS and Al-Qada.
However I wouldn’t advise people to hold their breath, not least because of the
strength of the existing religious and clerical caste in Saudi Arabia.
Only those who see Saudi
Arabia as a place which will do the West’s bidding and who view the state as a
rock of support for imperialism see modernisation and democratisation. MBS
himself, despite all the western propaganda about him being a progressive
moderniser has been impetuous and erratic, an accident waiting to happen.
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| US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meets MBS 16.10.18 |
When it comes to repression
MBS has been no reformer. Whether it has been the arrest of women’s rights
activists or the increased pace of executions, not least of Shi’ites, MBS has
shown that when it comes to repression he is every bit as capable as his predecessors.
Last year he arrested hundreds of princes and held them in a luxury hotel
where, according to some reports, many were tortured to get them to relinquish
their ill-gotten gains.
As Daniel Shapiro, the former
US Ambassador writes in Ha’aretz
the Khashoggi murder is a disaster for Israel above all. In Israel’s attempt to
achieve regional supremacy Saudi Arabia has been Israel’s most important ally
in the region. This not a new relationship. It was first established in the civil war in
Northern Yemen in the early 1960’s between Royalists and Republicans. Israel then
gave covert support.
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| Turkish journalists protest Erdogan's repression |
The grisly murder of
Khashoggi, captured by all accounts by a Turkish monitoring device,
demonstrates the medieval barbarity of the Saudi regime. Anyone who thinks MBS
wasn’t aware of what was happening is indeed naive.
As Shapiro says ‘"It’s worse than a crime. It’s a
mistake." One might add, a strategic mistake.’ To capture and then
dismember a journalist of the Washington Post and not to realise that there
would be a comeback suggests that the regime of MBS lacks any deep decision
making or thought processes. From the blockade of Qatar to the kidnapping of
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri, MBS has demonstrated that he is impetuous
and incapable of strategic thinking.
Despite command of the air,
the war in Yemen has been a public relations disaster. The only thing in MBS’s
favour is there doesn’t appear to be a force in Saudi Arabia capable of
overthrowing him, despite obvious discontent amongst the clerical caste and
large chunks of the royal caste to say
nothing of the Shi’ite minority and the Saudi population itself.
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| Trump and MBS on a demonstration outside the White House! |
What is remarkable about the
murder of Khashoggi is the complete silence of Netanyahu and the Israeli government
It is as if they are transfixed like a
rabbit in the headlines knowing that anything they say can only do MBS damage.
As Shapiro points out it is
conservative Republican senators Rubio and Lindsey Graham who have been loudest
in their opposition to what is happening.
One gets the feeling that the orientation to Saudi Arabia and the
proposed confrontation with Iran that Trump and John Bolton favours does not
meet with their approval.
As Ron Kampeas and the JTA observed
in Why
Are Some pro-Israel Voices Speaking Out Against Jamal Khashoggi? the Israel
lobby is not at all happy at what is happening.
Khashoggi is being portrayed as an anti-Semitic supporter of the Muslim
Brotherhood, anti-Israel and a supporter of terrorism.
Trump with chart of US military sales to Saudi Arabia
Patrick Poole described
Khashoggi as ‘a democrat reformer
journalist holding a RPG with jihadists.” Frontpage magazine under David
Horowitz joined in the attack. Frontpage
is a virulently Islamaphobic paper.
On Oct. 17, the Simon
Wiesenthal Center’s European office sent out a release titled “Wiesenthal
Centre Exposes Jamal Khashoggi Antisemitic Tweets.” Khashoggi’s support for
‘terrorism’ is a major theme of these
Zionist attacks.
Ha’aretz has been the leading
Zionist paper bemoaning what is happening. Louis Fishman complained that people
were falling for Turkey’s conspiracy. In On
Khashoggi, U.S. Journalists Are Falling for Turkey's Conspiracist, State-run
Media Fishman warns of the machinations by a Turkish state which is itself
hardly a friend of journalists. True but
irrelevant and there is a difference between detaining journalists and cutting
them up and burying them in the grounds of the Saudi Consul’s villa!
Fishman’s main complaint
though is that the wily Erdogan is using the murder of Khashoggi to strike back
at his Saudi rival thus further complicating the Middle East jigsaw.
Israel is the great loser in
this hence why its lobbyists have been playing up Khashoggi’s ‘terrorist’
credentials. MBS is a strong supporter of the Trump ‘peace agreement’ which is
believed to involve the transplantation of much of Gaza’s population into the
Sinai desert.
Thus it is that Tzvia
Greenfield, who is a supporter of the left-Zionist Meretz, argues in Why
We Should Go Easy on the Saudi Crown Prince. She writes that ‘for 50 years we’ve prayed for a key Arab
leader who agrees to sign a significant pact with Israel. Such a leader has
finally arrived’.
A good roundup of the Israel
Lobby’s activity is in Ali Abunimah’s Israel
lobby wants Saudis to get away with Khashoggi murder. As Ali points out,
everytime there has been a new Saudi ruler, he has been greeted as a ‘reformer’
even though the repression has never let up. This is a Western game to
legitimise every new dictator. It is strange that Saudi Arabia is such a
repressive state given the number of reformers there have been!
That is why this article by
Nu'man Abd al Wahid is important. It shows
how British imperialism first created Saudi Arabia by plucking Ibn Saud out of
the desert in order to weaken and overthrow more nationalistically oriented
Arab leaders, in particular Sherif Hussein of Mecca and how it was integrally
linked to the British capture of Palestine and the establishment of the Palestine
Mandate and its support of the Zionist settler colonial project. It is an article which bears reading by those
interested in the background to the savage Wahhabist rulers of this desert
monarchy stuffed with oil.
Tony Greenstein
SHAFAQNA – On January 7, 2016, amid rising tensions in the Middle East –
which tensions have seen Saudi Arabia hardened its narrative against Iran on
account of fabricated, and many have argued non-existent threats, Nu’man
Abd al-Wahid decided to looked in the genesis of Saudi Arabia – its political
history, and the ideology which has supported its absolutist monarchy.
One of the richest countries in the world per capita, Saudi Arabia has
recently pioneered a new foreign policy trend, one which has favored military
intervention over diplomacy and political collaboration.
While governments have often disagree, military can only ever be a
matter of last resort, a defense mechanism when all else has been exhausted.
Today Riyadh appears to have abandoned reason in favor of violence,
threatening to drag the region in its wake.
In the following article Nu’man Abd al-Wahid turns to history to retrace
the rise of the kingdom and those alliances which have led to the quagmire
we find ourselves in.
The covert alliance between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Zionist
entity of Israel should be no surprise to any student of British imperialism.
The problem is the study of British imperialism has very few students. Indeed,
one can peruse any undergraduate or post-graduate British university prospectus
and rarely find a module in a Politics degree on the British Empire let alone a
dedicated degree or Masters degree. Of course if the European led imperialist
carnage in the four years between 1914 – 1918 tickles your cerebral cells then
it’s not too difficult to find an
appropriate institution to teach this subject, but if you would like to
delve into how and why the British Empire waged war on mankind for almost four
hundred years you’re practically on your own in this endeavour. One must admit,
that from the British establishment’s perspective, this is a formidable and
remarkable achievement.
In late 2014, according to the American journal, Foreign
Affairs, the Saudi petroleum Minister, Ali al-Naimi is reported to have
said “His Majesty King Abdullah has always been a model for good relations
between Saudi Arabia and other states and the Jewish state is no exception.”
Recently, Abdullah’s successor, King Salman expressed similar concerns to those
of Israel’s to the growing agreement between the United States and Iran over
the latter’s nuclear programme. This led some to report that Israel and KSA
presented a “united
front” in their opposition to the nuclear deal. This was not the first time
the Zionists and Saudis have found themselves in the same corner in dealing
with a perceived common foe. In North Yemen in the 1960’s, the Saudis were
financing a British imperialist led mercenary army campaign against revolutionary
republicans who had assumed authority after overthrowing the authoritarian,
Imam. Gamal Abdul-Nasser’s Egypt militarily backed the republicans, while the
British induced the Saudis to finance and arm the remaining remnants of the
Imam’s supporters. Furthermore, the British organised the Israelis to drop arms
for the British
proxies in North Yemen, 14 times. The British, in effect, militarily but
covertly, brought the Zionists and Saudis together in 1960’s North Yemen
against their common foe.
However, as this author has previously written, one must return to the 1920’s
to fully appreciate the origins of this informal and indirect alliance
between Saudi Arabia and the Zionist entity. An illuminating study by Dr. Askar
H. al-Enazy, titled, The
Creation of Saudi Arabia: Ibn Saud and British Imperial Policy, 1914-1927,
has further and uniquely provided any student of British Imperialism primary
sourced evidence on the origins of this alliance. This study by Dr. Enazy
influences the following piece. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire by
British imperialism in World War One, left three distinct authorities in the
Arabian peninsula: Sharif of Hijaz: Hussain bin Ali of Hijaz (in the west), Ibn
Rashid of Ha’il (in the north) and Emir Ibn Saud of Najd (in the east) and his
religiously fanatical followers, the Wahhabis.
Ibn Saud had entered the war early in January 1915 on the side of the
British, but was quickly defeated and his British handler, William Shakespear
was killed by the Ottoman Empire’s ally Ibn Rashid. This defeat greatly
hampered Ibn Saud’s utility to the Empire and left him militarily hamstrung for
a year.[1] The Sharif contributed the most to the Ottoman Empire’s defeat by
switching allegiances and leading the so-called ‘Arab Revolt’ in June 1916
which removed the Turkish presence from Arabia. He was convinced to totally
alter his position because the British had strongly led him to believe, via
correspondence with Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, that
a unified Arab country from Gaza to the Persian Gulf will be established with
the defeat of the Turks. The letters exchanged between Sharif Hussain and Henry
McMahon are known as the McMahon-Hussain Correspondence.
Understandably, the Sharif as soon as the war ended wanted to hold the
British to their war time promises, or what he perceived to be their war time
promises, as expressed in the aforementioned correspondence. The British, on
the other hand, wanted the Sharif to accept the Empire’s new reality which was
a division of the Arab world between them and the French (Sykes-Picot
agreement) and the implementation of the Balfour
Declaration, which guaranteed ‘a national for the Jewish people’ in
Palestine by colonisation with European Jews. This new reality was contained in
the British written, Anglo-Hijaz Treaty, which the Sharif was profoundly averse
to signing.[2] After all, the revolt of 1916 against the Turks was dubbed the
‘Arab Revolt’ not the ‘Hijazi Revolt’.
Actually, the Sharif let it be known that he will never sell out
Palestine to the Empire’s Balfour Declaration; he will never acquiescence to
the establishment of Zionism in Palestine or accept the new random borders
drawn across Arabia by British and French imperialists. For their part the
British began referring to him as an ‘obstructionist’, a ‘nuisance’ and of
having a ‘recalcitrant’ attitude.
The British let it be known to the Sharif that they were prepared to
take drastic measures to bring about his approval of the new reality regardless
of the service that he had rendered them during the War. After the Cairo
Conference in March 1921, where the new Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill
met with all the British operatives in the Middle East, T.E. Lawrence (i.e. of
Arabia) was dispatched to meet the Sharif to bribe and bully him to accept
Britain’s Zionist colonial project in Palestine. Initially, Lawrence and the
Empire offered 80,000 rupees.[3] The Sharif rejected it outright. Lawrence then
offered him an annual payment of £100,000.[4] The Sharif refused to compromise
and sell Palestine to British Zionism.
When financial bribery failed to persuade the Sharif, Lawrence
threatened him with an Ibn Saud takeover. Lawrence claimed that “politically
and militarily, the survival of Hijaz as a viable independent Hashemite kingdom
was wholly dependent on the political will of Britain, who had the means to
protect and maintain his rule in the region.” [5] In between negotiating with
the Sharif, Lawrence made the time to visit other leaders in the Arabian
peninsula and informed them that they if they don’t tow the British line and
avoid entering into an alliance with the Sharif, the Empire will unleash Ibn
Saud and his Wahhabis who after all is at Britain’s ‘beck and call’.[6]
Simultaneously, after the Conference, Churchill travelled to Jerusalem
and met with the Sharif’s son, Abdullah, who had been made the ruler, “Emir”,
of a new territory called “Transjordan.” Churchill informed Abdullah that he
should persuade “his father to accept the Palestine mandate and sign a treaty
to such effect,” if not “the British would unleash Ibn Saud against Hijaz.”[7]
In the meantime the British were planning to unleash Ibn Saud on the ruler of
Ha’il, Ibn Rashid.
Ibn Rashid had rejected all overtures from the British Empire made to
him via Ibn Saud, to be another of its puppets.[8] More so, Ibn Rashid expanded
his territory north to the new mandated Palestinian border as well as to the
borders of Iraq in the summer of 1920. The British became concerned that an
alliance maybe brewing between Ibn Rashid who controlled the northern part of
the peninsula and the Sharif who controlled the western part. More so, the
Empire wanted the land routes between the Palestinian ports on the
Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf under the rule of a friendly party. At
the Cairo Conference, Churchill agreed with an imperial officer, Sir Percy Cox
that “Ibn Saud should be ‘given the opportunity to occupy Hail.’”[9] By the end
of 1920, the British were showering Ibn Saud with “a monthly ‘grant’ of £10,000
in gold, on top of his monthly subsidy. He also received abundant arms
supplies, totalling more than 10,000 rifles, in addition to the critical siege
and four field guns” with British-Indian instructors.[10] Finally, in September
1921, the British unleashed Ibn Saud on Ha’il which officially surrendered in
November 1921. It was after this victory the British bestowed a new title on
Ibn Saud. He was no longer to be “Emir of Najd and Chief of its Tribes” but
“Sultan of Najd and its Dependencies”. Ha’il had dissolved into a dependency of
the Empire’s Sultan of Najd.
If the Empire thought that the Sharif, with Ibn Saud now on his border
and armed to the teeth by the British, would finally become more amenable to
the division of Arabia and the British Zionist colonial project in Palestine
they were short lived. A new round of talks between Abdulla’s son, acting on
behalf of his father in Transjordan and the Empire resulted in a draft treaty
accepting Zionism. When it was delivered to the Sharif with an accompanying
letter from his son requesting that he “accept reality”, he didn’t even bother
to read the treaty and instead composed a draft treaty himself rejecting the
new divisions of Arabia as well as the Balfour Declaration and sent it to
London to be ratified![11]
Ever since 1919 the British had gradually decreased Hussain’s subsidy to
the extent that by the early 1920’s they had suspended it, while at the same
time continued subsidising Ibn Saud right through the early 1920’s.[12] After a
further three rounds of negotiations in Amman and London, it dawned on the
Empire that Hussain will never relinquish Palestine to Great Britain’s Zionist
project or accept the new divisions in Arab lands.[13]In March 1923, the
British informed Ibn Saud that it will cease his subsidy but not without
awarding him an advance ‘grant’ of £50,000 upfront, which amounted to a year’s
subsidy.[14]
In March 1924, a year after the British awarded the ‘grant’ to Ibn Saud,
the Empire announced that it had terminated all discussions with Sharif Hussain
to reach an agreement.[15] Within weeks the forces of Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi
followers began to administer what the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon
called the “final kick” to Sharif Hussain and attacked Hijazi territory.[16] By
September 1924, Ibn Saud had overrun the summer capital of Sharif Hussain,
Ta’if. The Empire then wrote to Sharif’s sons, who had been awarded kingdoms in
Iraq and Transjordan not to provide any assistance to their besieged father or
in diplomatic terms they were informed “to give no countenance to interference
in the Hedjaz”.[17] In Ta’if, Ibn Saud’s Wahhabis committed their customary
massacres, slaughtering women and children as well as going into mosques and
killing traditional Islamic scholars.[18] They captured the holiest place in
Islam, Mecca, in mid-October 1924. Sharif Hussain was forced to abdicate and
went to exile to the Hijazi port of Akaba. He was replaced as monarch by his
son Ali who made Jeddah his governmental base. As Ibn Saud moved to lay siege
to the rest of Hijaz, the British found the time to begin incorporating the
northern Hijazi port of Akaba into Transjordan. Fearing that Sharif Hussain may
use Akaba as a base to rally Arabs against the Empire’s Ibn Saud, the Empire
let it be known that in no uncertain terms that he must leave Akaba or Ibn Saud
will attack the port. For his part, Sharif Hussain responded that he had,
“never acknowledged the mandates on Arab countries and still protest
against the British Government which has made Palestine a national home for the
Jews.”[19]
Sharif Hussain was forced out of Akaba, a port he had liberated from the
Ottoman Empire during the ‘Arab Revolt’, on the 18th June 1925 on HMS
Cornflower.
Ibn Saud had begun his siege of Jeddah in January 1925 and the city
finally surrendered in December 1925 bringing to an end over 1000 years of rule
by the Prophet Muhammad’s descendants. The British officially recognised Ibn
Saud as the new King of Hijaz in February 1926 with other European powers
following suit within weeks. The new unified Wahhabi state was rebranded by the
Empire in 1932 as the “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” (KSA). A certain George Rendel,
an officer working at the Middle East desk at the Foreign Office in London,
claimed credit for the new name.
On the propaganda level, the British served the Wahhabi takeover of
Hijaz on three fronts. Firstly, they portrayed and argued that Ibn Saud’s
invasion of Hijaz was motivated by religious fanaticism rather than by British
imperialism’s geo-political considerations.[20] This deception is propounded to
this day, most recently in Adam Curtis’s acclaimed BBC “Bitter
Lake” documentary, whereby he states that the “fierce intolerant vision of
wahhabism” drove the “beduins” to create Saudi Arabia.[21] Secondly, the
British portrayed Ibn Saud’s Wahhabi fanatics as a benign and misunderstood
force who only wanted to bring Islam back to its purest form.[22] To this day,
these Islamist jihadis are portrayed in the most benign manner when their armed
insurrections is supported by Britain and the West such as 1980’s Afghanistan
or in today’s Syria, where they are referred to in the western media as “moderate
rebels.” Thirdly, British historians portray Ibn Saud as an independent
force and not as a British instrument used to horn away anyone perceived to be
surplus to imperial requirements. For example, Professor Eugene Rogan’s recent
study on the history on Arabs claims that “Ibn Saud had no interest in
fighting” the Ottoman Empire. This is far from accurate as Ibn Saud joined the
war in 1915. He further disingenuously claims that Ibn Saud was only interested
in advancing “his own objectives” which fortuitously always dovetailed with
those of the British Empire.[23]
In conclusion, one of the most overlooked aspects of the Balfour
Declaration is the British Empire’s commitment to “use their best endeavours to
facilitate” the creation of “a national home for the Jewish people”. Obviously,
many nations in the world today were created by the Empire but what makes Saudi
Arabia’s borders distinctive is that its northern and north-eastern borders are
the product of the Empire facilitating the creation of Israel. At the very
least the dissolution of the two Arab sheikhdoms of Ha’il and Hijaz by Ibn
Saud’s Wahhabis is based in their leaders’ rejection to facilitate the British
Empire’s Zionist project in Palestine.
Therefore, it is very clear that the British Empire’s drive to impose
Zionism in Palestine is embedded in the geographical DNA of contemporary Saudi
Arabia. There is further irony in the fact that the two holiest sites in Islam
are today governed by the Saudi clan and Wahhabi teachings because the Empire
was laying the foundations for Zionism in Palestine in the 1920s.
Contemporaneously, it is no surprise that both Israel
and Saudi
Arabia are keen in militarily intervening on the side of “moderate rebels”
i.e. jihadis, in the current war on Syria, a country which covertly and overtly
rejects the Zionist colonisation of Palestine.
As the United States, the ‘successor’ to the British Empire in defending
western interests in the Middle East, is perceived to be growing more hesitant
in engaging militarily in the Middle East, there is an inevitability that the
two nations rooted in the Empire’s Balfour Declaration, Israel and Saudi
Arabia, would develop a more overt alliance to defend their common interests.
Notes
[1] Gary Troeller, “The Birth of Saudi Arabia” (London: Frank Cass,
1976) pg.91.
[2] Askar H. al-Enazy, “ The Creation of Saudi Arabia: Ibn Saud and
British Imperial Policy, 1914-1927” (London: Routledge, 2010), pg. 105-106.
[3] ibid., pg. 109.
[4] ibid., pg.111.
[5] ibid.
[6] ibid.
[7] ibid., pg 107.
[8] ibid., pg. 45-46 and pg.101-102.
[9] ibid., pg.104.
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid., pg. 113.
[12] ibid., pg.110 and Troeller, op. cit., pg.166.
[13] al-Enazy op cit., pg.112-125.
[14] al-Enazy, op. cit., pg.120.
[15] ibid., pg.129.
[16] ibid., pg. 106 and Troeller op. cit., 152.
[17] al-Enazy, op. cit., pg. 136 and Troeller op. cit., pg.219.
[18] David Howarth, “The Desert King: The Life of Ibn Saud” (London:
Quartet Books, 1980), pg. 133 and Randall Baker, “King Husain and the Kingdom
of Hejaz” (Cambridge: The Oleander Press, 1979), pg.201-202.
[19] Quoted in al-Enazy op. cit., pg. 144.
[20] ibid., pg. 138 and Troeller op. cit., pg. 216.
[21]In the original full length BBC iPlayer version this segment begins
towards the end at 2 hrs 12 minutes 24 seconds.
[22] al-Enazy op. cit., pg. 153.
[23] Eugene Rogan, “The Arabs: A History”, (London: Penguin Books,
2009), pg.220.
About Nu'man Abd al-Wahid
Nu’man Abd al-Wahid is a Yemeni-English independent
researcher specialising in the political relationship between the British state
and the Arab World. His main focus is on how the United Kingdom has
historically maintained its political interests in the Arab World. A full
collection of essays can be accessed at http://www.churchills-karma.com/.
Twitter handle: @churchillskarma.
