Middle East Press On: UAE War, Muslims, Sudan, Gaza Genocide: New Age Islam's Selection, 31 October 2025
By New Age Islam Edit Desk
31 October 2025
The UAE’s War On Muslims: From Sudan To The Gaza Genocide
Cartographies Of Sumud: Reading Palestine Beyond Occupation
Cease-Fire Betrayed: Israel’s Strike Wave And The Human Catastrophe In Gaza
Republican Jewish Coalition Faces Leadership Test On Israel’s Fate At Las Vegas Summit
‘Failed’ Doha Strike: Israel's Attack On Qatar Rewrote The Middle East Playbook
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The UAE’s War on Muslims: From Sudan to the Gaza Genocide
By Robert Inlakesh
October 30, 2025
The United Arab Emirates has created its image in the world as an innovator, a builder, and a peacemaker, a carefully calibrated illusion as artificial as the buildings that mesmerize onlookers in Dubai. But behind the architecture and lavish outer shell is a rotten core that continues to aid in the erosion of the surrounding region.
While claiming to oppose “radical Islam” and paying talentless influencers to attack groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, they foster extremist ideologies and back ISIS-linked militant groups to carry out their regional ambitions.
For all of the critiques that can be offered of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and of Qatar, they are nothing like the orientalist depictions of them that are spread far and wide through Emirati propaganda.
The reason why the UAE attacks the ideology belonging to groups that are either linked to or part of the Muslim Brotherhood has nothing to do with their religious motivations and everything to do with the Emirati opposition to their political agenda.
For them, they fear any politically engaged Islamic movement that is capable of successfully leading a country and organizing democratic institutions, because they are a dictatorship fully beholden to their Western handlers, including Israel.
The reason why the Islamic element of such movements threatens them the most is that it is popular and the religion that the majority of the region adheres to in some shape or form.
If any Islamic anti-imperialist movement proves successful and leads a democratic process, then this could threaten their rule. So, they seek to undermine, infiltrate, and destroy these movements wherever they rear their heads, including inside the Gaza Strip.
Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, was an outgrowth of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Its origins begin in the 1970s and the formation of the social/civil-society movement known as the Mujamma al-Islamiyya in the Gaza Strip, at the time colloquially referred to as the Muslim Brotherhood, as it represented Palestine’s wing of the movement.
Therefore, the success and popularity of Hamas, as part of what is viewed by the Emiratis as a wider body of Islamic political movements, is interpreted as a threat to its rule in the region.
As a means of dismantling the prospects of Democratic oriented Islamic political leaderships, the UAE has engaged in military confrontations and intense propaganda campaigns. On the propaganda front, they are joined by other Gulf leaderships who have their own agendas, also and not only fund direct anti-Hamas or anti-Muslim Brotherhood propaganda, but also fuel religious division.
One of the most powerful means of divisive propaganda is directly targeting Muslims themselves, in particular the Sunni Muslim majority of the region. While they certainly push sectarian rhetoric against the Shia too, they seek to pacify the Sunni population, deter them from engaging in anti-imperialist and anti-occupation struggles, or redirect their anger at fellow Muslims.
They do this through pushing divisions between mainstream Sunni schools of thought and employing their Madkhali propagandists to deter action against the so-called Muslim rulers. Without going too deep into the Madkhalis, as with each group of Muslims, there is always nuance; they are a group of Salafist Muslims who adhere to the dictates of their rulers and sometimes will even justify actions taken by those rulers that are prohibited in Islam.
The primary goal here is to fund and fuel division across the Muslim world, channeling hatred and creating debates around any issue that can distract from what Israel, the United States, and their allies are doing to the region. Another major tactic employed here is to Takfir (declare a disbeliever) or undermine any Muslim group that sides with the likes of Iran, Hezbollah, Ansarallah, or any other Shia groups.
Again, none of this opposition has anything to do with any substance that may be behind said arguments they make; these are well-funded propaganda campaigns designed for political purposes to undermine resistance to imperialism, occupation, and genocide. This is where we can begin looking at Gaza and then Sudan.
The UAE professes to oppose so-called “Islamic radicalism”, yet it now stands accused of providing support to the ISIS-linked gangs operating in the Israeli-occupied portion of the Gaza Strip. Not only has the UAE been accused of directly coordinating with these militia groups – composed of hardline Salafists who have links to ISIS and al-Qaeda, drug traffickers and murderers – but there is even evidence of these death squad members driving around in vehicles with registered UAE license plates.
In opposition to Hamas, the UAE is more than happy to back Israeli proxy collaborator groups that contain ISIS and Al-Qaeda minded elements within them.
Going back to the sorts of divisive propaganda that is encouraged by the Emiratis, a leading member of the Israel-backed so-called “Popular Forces” militia in Gaza, Ghassan Duhine, has openly cited ISIS Fatwas declaring Hamas apostates as a justification for killing them. ISIS officially declared war on Hamas back in 2018.
Meanwhile, the UAE has long been backing the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, the group currently accused of committing genocide, and which has re-entered the headlines after it captured Al-Fasher and other areas in North Darfur, resulting in the murder of around 527 people, including civilians who were butchered while sheltering in refugee camps.
RSF leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), has long collaborated with the Emiratis, and it was even previously pointed out that his official Facebook page was controlled out of the UAE.
Without getting into all of the complexities of the Sudanese civil war, Hemedti is a warlord who has long maintained power over the majority of Sudan’s Gold Mines, slaughtering anyone who dares to get in his way.
His forces have also been accused by the UN and prominent rights groups of committing widespread mass sexual violence, including horrific forms of rape.
Hemedti was additionally supplied with battle-changing technologies through his Israeli Mossad contacts, and despite there being documented rights violations on both the Sudanese Army and RSF sides of the war, there is no doubt that Hemedti’s forces have the most blood on their hands and carry out the most horrific crimes seen in the conflict.
The UAE is not just one of many actors involved in Sudan; it is the primary supporter of the RSF. According to a scoop published by The Guardian this Tuesday, British weapons sold to the United Arab Emirates were even discovered to have been used by the RSF to carry out its genocide.
Despite the United States declaring the horrors in Sudan as a genocide, during the Biden administration, no action has been taken against the UAE for its role in fueling the war. Similarly, the UAE has been involved in countless crimes committed throughout the Horn of Africa and in North Africa too, backing a whole range of extremist militant groups who stand accused of indiscriminately targeting civilians.
Although it is also hidden from the Western corporate media, the UAE even used members of the Sudanese RSF to fight on its behalf as proxy forces against Ansarallah in Yemen, where they were accused of playing a role in what many declared a genocide. Keep in mind that nearly 400,000 people in Yemen were killed due to the inhuman blockade and war of aggression, led by both the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
The Emiratis push propaganda about the Sudanese Military being “Islamists”, accusing them of being part of the Muslim Brotherhood and then linking them to all sorts of other organizations. Ansarallah in Yemen is also branded as “Islamists”, but in their case are accused of being “Iranian proxies”. In essence, this line of propaganda is the typical Israeli-style Hasbara argument for committing egregious war crimes.
Throughout the Gaza genocide, the UAE was one of the only nations that continued its routine flights to Ben Gurion airport and transported materials to aid the Israelis. The Emiratis also turned Dubai into an Israeli safe haven, where soldiers implicated in genocide can go to party, engage in activities like consuming narcotics or hiring escorts, and live in luxury.
The UAE did not lift a finger to force the Israelis to let aid into Gaza, as they blocked all humanitarian aid trucks entering for around three months earlier this year, but will then point to the trickles of aid that they do supply as proof they are helping the people. In their defense, they argue that they were key in achieving a ceasefire, for which there is no evidence, just like there was no evidence that they stopped West Bank annexation when normalized ties with Israel.
Viewing the Emiratis as operating on their own whims, blaming them solely for the actions they commit, is incorrect. These are rulers installed by the West, who work for the West and are simply used as pawns to do the bidding of their masters. If any of their leaders stand up to the crimes that the UAE is inflicting, they will be assassinated and replaced with other members of the ruling bloodline who choose to play ball. They are hostages, posing as rulers and playing their part in the dismantlement of the surrounding region.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-uaes-war-on-muslims-from-sudan-to-the-gaza-genocide/
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Cartographies Of Sumud: Reading Palestine Beyond Occupation
By Tatiana Svorou
October 30, 2025
My thoughts return repeatedly to Palestine. Its contours are mapped through reports, testimonies, and the bureaucratic language of “security coordination.” Each road, wall, and zoning decree is a decision about who may exist with stability and who must live in uncertainty as part of the same design. If we have learned anything so far, it is that what is often described as “instability” is, in fact, highly structured. For decades, Western policy and academic analysis have treated Palestinian life through the lens of “conflict management” as though imbalance were a neutral condition. Yet, this is exactly how “conflict” becomes governance, because, as simple as it can be, normalisation of the occupation here is not an interruption of order; it is the order.
Within two weeks of the US-brokered ceasefire, reports indicated that Israeli operations had already killed around 100 Palestinians despite the truce. According to OCHA, about 1.5 million people remained in urgent need of food, water, and medical care while crossings at Rafah and Kerem Shalom stayed largely sealed. Electricity reportedly reached most neighbourhoods for fewer than six hours a day, sewage treatment plants stayed offline, and roughly 66,000 tons of unexploded ordnance contaminated the ground. As a result, the tools of destruction appeared to shift from bombs to blockades and from explosive power to administrative restriction, suggesting that Gaza’s “pause” revealed how peace processes can reproduce coercion by bureaucratic means. In parallel, the West Bank shows the same architecture rendered territorial. As Gaza entered its so-called cease-fire, the repetition of a well-rehearsed script unfolded elsewhere, with coercion in the West Bank intensifying. By mid-October 2025, OCHA reported the killing of 40 children and the displacement of about 3,000 people since January, and Reuters documented 158 settler assaults during October 2025, coinciding with the olive-harvest season, linking this spike in attacks to a “climate of impunity”.
Between 2018 and 2024, Israeli authorities advanced 28,872 settlement housing units (9,884 in the West Bank and 18,988 in East Jerusalem), marking a 250 per cent increase since 2018, which the European External Action Service interpreted as a deliberate policy of spatial domination. Meanwhile, according to OCHA, Israeli infrastructure expansion has entrenched physical fragmentation across the territory with extensive settler-only roads now carving through Palestinian areas, and a significant share of the West Bank (particularly Area C) being redesignated into military zones, settlement blocs, or so-called “nature reserves” that are off-limits to Palestinians, creating a patchwork of managed enclaves. In total, since January 2025, over 2,787 Palestinians (including 541 children) were injured, and nearly 500 of those injuries were caused by settlers. Meanwhile, OHCHR notes that around 99 per cent of complaints filed by Palestinians against settler violence end without indictment, reflecting a systemic failure of accountability. Impunity, therefore, emerges not as a malfunction of justice but as its operational logic, an organising principle within a broader architecture of domination. Furthermore, according to the World Bank, restrictions on Palestinian access to land and water in Area C drain an estimated 35 per cent of potential GDP each year, underscoring how structural constraints perpetuate economic dependency and underdevelopment. Israeli settlements consume several times more water per capita than nearby Palestinian communities, with some settlers using up to 20 times more. Many Palestinian villages receive fewer than 80 litres per person per day, well below the World Health Organization’s 100-litre standard for minimum daily water access.
Critics often describe Palestinian institutions as weak or fragmented. Nevertheless, per cent of the West Bank (Area C) remains under direct Israeli control, prohibiting Palestinian development and economic expansion. Moreover, between January and July 2025, 113 Palestinian structures were demolished in East Jerusalem for lacking Israeli-issued permits, displacing 321 people, including 168 children. Each demolition, nevertheless, signifies more than the loss of property, interpreted as the erasure of continuity through the quiet revocation of belonging; the kitchen was rebuilt three times, the olive tree planted again in defiance of policy. Therefore, every act of building requires the authorisation of an occupying authority, making construction itself a negotiation of existence. In such a system, governance becomes a performance within confinement rather than an exercise of genuine agency. The Palestinian Authority’s apparent ineffectiveness, therefore, is the predictable condition of authority stripped of autonomy. In 2025, the Israeli army requisitioned over 23,100 dunums (roughly 5,700 acres) in Qalqiliya and Nablus and the E1 settlement plan, approved in August, authorised 3,400 housing units east of Jerusalem, effectively bisecting the territory. Each of these measures deepens fragmentation, converting land into leverage and verifies that annexation appears as incremental administration.
Yet, beneath these material structures lies a legal one. Two systems operate simultaneously in the same territory: civil law for Israeli settlers and military law for Palestinians, a dual framework documented by B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch, which both describe it as a form of institutionalised discrimination or apartheid. Administrative detention, house demolitions, and the blockade of Gaza together constitute a regime of permanent exception, one that suspends basic legal protections under the pretext of security and like this, the ongoing erosion of humanitarian law in Palestine has become a normalized global precedent, revealing how the principle of universality can be quietly suspended when the victims are colonised. And still, at the global level, humanitarian responses reveal the same asymmetry. Violence by non-state actors provokes immediate mobilisation – sanctions, emergency sessions, counter-terror campaigns. Conversely, state violence that flattens entire neighbourhoods is met with “deep concern”. Accordingly, this selectivity sustains the illusion of an impartial world order while preserving existing hierarchies of power.
If the international community continues to frame Palestine as a regional dispute rather than a test of universality, the ideal of human rights will remain hollow. Because domination in Palestine operates through law, space, and economy, any pursuit of justice must be equally multidimensional. Linking Gaza and the West Bank as one integrated regime of governance reveals the unity of control across geography. Historicising the present situates current policies within the continuum of dispossession since 1948 and enforcing accountability through legal and economic conditionality transforms solidarity from sentiment into structure. Only through an interconnected approach can global analysis move beyond the colonial grammar of “conflict” and toward a politics of equality grounded in justice rather than management.
Even so, amid the architectures of restriction and ethnic erosion, Palestinian life insists. Cultivation resumes where bulldozers have passed, and homes rise again from ground declared off-limits, acts of sumud, everyday steadiness that rebuilds even under rubble. These gestures, seemingly ordinary, unsettle the very logic of erasure: they transform presence into a spatial politics that contests displacement as destiny, and immobility here is not paralysis. It is an embodied claim to continuity, a refusal to translate dispossession into exile. Each replanted olive tree and reopened market is not only a return to routine but an act of re-mapping- inscribing history back onto a terrain repeatedly redrawn to exclude it.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251030-cartographies-of-sumud-reading-palestine-beyond-occupation/
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Cease-Fire Betrayed: Israel’s Strike Wave And The Human Catastrophe In Gaza
by Ranjan Solomon
October 30, 2025
On 10 October 2025, a U.S.-brokered cease-fire between Israel and Gaza took effect. The world was told violence would pause, civilians would breathe, reconstruction would begin. Instead, Israel has turned the cease-fire into a mask for continued aggression. Overnight on 28–29 October, Israeli airstrikes killed more than one hundred Palestinians, including forty-six children. Entire families vanished beneath rubble as jets tore through residential neighbourhoods in central Gaza. Civilians once again paid the price for a truce violated with impunity.
“If this is a cease-fire, then what does war look like?” a father in Deir el-Balah cried over the body of his ten-year-old daughter. His anguish is not poetic metaphor; it is Gaza’s daily reality, carved into the faces of parents who send their children to sleep not knowing if the dawn will return them alive.
Qatar’s Prime Minister warned bluntly, “The cease-fire must not be a cover for continued aggression. Violations erode all trust and the path to peace.” The world heard him, nodded diplomatically, and returned to silence. Gaza heard him, and kept burying its children.
The cease-fire that never was
Diplomats celebrated a “pause.” Gaza saw a continuation of war by another name. Aid convoys struggled to enter. Hospitals struggled to function. Trauma had no intermission. Homes remained mounds of concrete and dust. People who tried to rebuild saw their efforts smashed again within days.
A thirteen-year-old survivor in Nuseirat whispered, “They promised quiet. But the bombs came again. My brother was asleep.” Her voice trembled not from fear alone, but from the dawning knowledge that the world promises Palestinians survival as a favour, never as a right.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres captured the horror plainly: “Gaza has become a graveyard for children. The world cannot look away.” But powerful capitals do look away — and when they cannot, they excuse, minimise, and rationalise.
Israel’s narrative vs. truth on the ground
Israel claims its offensive was retaliation for the killing of one Israeli soldier. This justification, even if accurate, does not legitimise mass killing under a declared truce. Gaza was not firing rockets; its people were trying to breathe. Israel acted not out of necessity, but out of doctrine — a belief that Palestinian life is transactional and that cease-fires are conveniences, not commitments.
“Israel bombs first, justifies later,” a Palestinian aid worker said. “They always find a reason, and the world always accepts it.”
Legal experts have long warned against this pattern. Former ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda once said, “When the powerful claim exemption from law, the result is always mass suffering.” Her warning today reads as prophecy written in the blood of Palestinian children.
The moral geography of the world is shifting
Israel’s leaders insist these assaults ensure security. But a nation cannot secure its future on the corpses of children. It cannot bomb its way to legitimacy. It cannot erase a people and expect peace to emerge from the smouldering ruins.
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “Israel has created an apartheid reality.” He did not speak carelessly. He spoke as a man who knew the stench of apartheid personally and recognised it on Palestinian soil.
Today’s generation sees through official statements and military briefings. They witness genocide in real time, not through selective geopolitical lenses. Their outrage is reshaping the world’s conscience. This is why Israel fears not only resistance fighters, but young voices, student protests, global solidarity networks, and the moral clarity of ordinary people.
Human suffering, not abstract geopolitics
Hospitals have become morgues. Schools are rubble. Parents recognise their children by clothing scraps. Trauma has become the air Gaza breathes. No language can fully contain this grief, yet Palestinians persist in describing what the world prefers not to hear.
“Every time we rebuild, they destroy again,” a nurse in Khan Younis said softly. “Even the cease-fire was a lie. We live in permanent ruin.” A child should not speak like an old soul. A nurse should not speak as though hope is foreign. Yet they do, because their reality leaves no room for illusions.
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish asked: “Where should we go after the last border? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?” Gaza today lives that question, unanswered, abandoned by those who claim guardianship of human rights.
Justice delayed, but not denied
Israel’s cease-fire violations are not isolated incidents. They are expressions of a political theology that places one people’s rights above another’s existence. They are enabled by Western complicity, material support, and diplomatic protection. But as Martin Luther King Jr. reminded humanity, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
It bends slowly unbearably slowly for Gaza’s dead, but bend it must. History is watching. So are the survivors. Their memory will outlast military briefings and propaganda. The rubble of Gaza is testimony. The tears of its children are testimony. The names of the dead, even when unrecorded — are testimony.
The cease-fire is broken. Trust is shattered. But truth stands unshaken. Gaza bleeds, but Gaza speaks. And the world has run out of excuses for not listening.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251030-cease-fire-betrayed-israels-strike-wave-and-the-human-catastrophe-in-gaza/
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Republican Jewish Coalition Faces Leadership Test On Israel’s Fate At Las Vegas Summit
By Jpost Editorial
October 31, 2025
This weekend, the Republican Jewish Coalition will gather at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas for a sold-out summit that has become a must-attend event for party leaders. The setting is fitting for an organization that now sits near the center of the GOP’s policy-making on Israel.
The Venetian hosts the event, and, while Las Vegas Sands sold the property in 2022, Miriam Adelson remains one of the most consequential philanthropists in the RJC.
The arc of American Jewish voting is well known. For generations, a clear majority of Jewish voters identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party. Pew’s most recent comprehensive study still found roughly seven out of ten Jews identifying or leaning Democratic.
A larger Republican minority
Yet there is a visible Republican uptick at the margins. The RJC says Donald Trump received about 35% of the Jewish vote in 2024, the best GOP showing since the 1980s, while independent polling showed Democrats still winning a solid majority.
Both trends can be true at once, and together, they describe a community that remains largely Democratic, with a larger Republican minority than before.
What changed inside the Republican Party is clearer still. During the past decade, the GOP moved from being reliably pro-Israel to staking out signature policies that reset the regional map.
The embassy move to Jerusalem, promised for years by both parties and finally implemented in 2018, and the Abraham Accords, which opened formal ties with the UAE, Bahrain, and later Morocco and Sudan, were consequential acts that reshaped expectations. They anchored a worldview in which US-Israel alignment is explicit, and Arab-Israeli normalization is a practical project rather than a slogan.
The RJC’s role has grown in parallel with it. It is no longer a boutique voice; it has become an organizing machine with a national reach and substantial funding.
In 2024, it raised and spent more than $15 million to mobilize Jewish voters in key states, pairing micro-targeting with a relentless ground game. That capacity means the RJC does not just cheer from the sidelines; it shapes candidate incentives and legislative priorities.
The Jerusalem Post sees opportunity and responsibility. After Trump’s historic moves on Jerusalem and on normalization, we would like to see the RJC use its rising influence to help rebuild what matters most now: Israel’s security and resilience, the fabric of the Israel-US relationship, and the widening of the Abraham Accords to additional countries.
This is not only about who sits in the Oval Office; it is about turning policy wins into long-term architecture that endures political cycles and serves the interests of both nations. Independent assessments show the Abraham Accords have already created tangible economic and people-to-people dividends. There is more runway ahead if the next phase is managed with discipline and patience.
Another concern is that public opinion on Israel has grown more polarized in the US, and support among younger Americans has softened. The RJC can meet this moment by investing in the next generation of Republican leaders.
That means educating rising politicians about Israel’s defense needs, Iran’s regional project, the costs of isolationism, and the redlines on antisemitism, while also equipping them to speak credibly about Palestinian dignity and the pursuit of realistic diplomacy.
The goal is simple and ambitious: We hope the next generation in the GOP will be as pro-Israel as today’s leaders, if not more, because they will be better briefed, not merely louder on social media.
Three practical priorities follow for the RJC in Las Vegas. First, help restore a bipartisan floor for Israel funding and security cooperation, even while leaning into Republican strength. Second, deepen the Abraham Accords’ economic foundation so that normalization becomes irreversible through shared interests in energy, water, healthcare, and technology. Third, expand the pipeline from campus to Congress, recruiting young Jewish and non-Jewish conservatives who understand both the moral case for Israel and the strategic case for regional integration.
The RJC has the venue, the audience, and the momentum. If it leverages this summit to align resources with a long-term plan, it can help rebuild Israel in a challenging year, strengthen the US-Israel alliance for the long term, and bring more capitals into the circle of peace. That would be a service not to one party but to the shared future we are all trying to secure.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-872257
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‘Failed’ Doha Strike: Israel's Attack On Qatar Rewrote The Middle East Playbook
By Liron Rose, Amit Shabi
October 30, 2025
In geopolitics, a single month can feel like an eternity. What we are witnessing now can only be described as a dramatic, almost unimaginable reversal in Israel’s regional standing.
Just a month ago, Israel appeared to be under diplomatic siege. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu coined the “super-Sparta” doctrine, while much of the world seemed to turn against Jerusalem. European leaders expressed outrage, parts of the US administration voiced unease, and even key Gulf states joined the chorus of condemnation. Israel stood isolated, attacked, accused, and alone.
Yet today, the situation has flipped completely. Because of a strike that ostensibly “failed” but, in fact, embodied strategic audacity, the US and Israel achieved the unthinkable: They managed to isolate Hamas entirely and reach a hostage-release deal under entirely new terms. This article explains how a deeply complex international problem was solved and makes one point unmistakably clear: None of it was accidental.
The notion that this outcome was the result of “blind luck” is fundamentally mistaken. What unfolded was a meticulously orchestrated chess game, multidimensional in design, beginning with a single, precise Israeli strike that set in motion a sequence of moves leading, almost magically, to the current result.
The Mideast’s double game
Who conceived the idea? We may never know for sure. Perhaps it was Jared Kushner, operating quietly behind the scenes; perhaps it was a joint initiative between Netanyahu and Trump; or possibly a hybrid effort combining the instincts of both Kushner and Ron Dermer.
One thing, however, is certain: Ron Dermer, Israel’s strategic affairs minister and a close confidant of Kushner, was among the central architects behind the scenes.
For months, he led quiet, almost surgical diplomatic talks with the Americans, Saudis, and Emiratis, an intense, painstaking effort that helped shape the framework of the new arrangement. Many within Israel’s diplomatic establishment credit him for his persistence, strategic grasp, and ability to weave disparate threads into a single coherent plan.
The manoeuvre’s brilliance
To grasp the brilliance of the manoeuvre, one must take a step back. The regional board was crowded with players engaged in a double game. Saudi Arabia, for instance, walked a fine and dangerous line: aligning with Israel against shared adversaries – Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and the Muslim Brotherhood – while simultaneously insisting on the establishment of a “Palestinian state,” effectively providing ideological oxygen to Hamas, the living embodiment of the Brotherhood’s movement.
Then came the critical misstep. When the Saudis chose to side with French President Emmanuel Macron and support his initiative to bypass Washington, positioning Europe as mediator, they received what can only be described as a “diplomatic slap in the face.” As they pulled back, the Qataris and Turks moved swiftly into the vacuum and replaced them. The Saudis suddenly found themselves off the board, stripped of meaningful influence.
Macron himself was motivated by narrow political considerations. He advanced a plan that, intentionally or not, benefited Hamas, without even rhetorically conditioning recognition of a Palestinian state on the release of Israeli hostages. In doing so, he exposed his true objective: a desperate bid to return Europe to the center of the diplomatic stage, even at the expense of Israel’s security.
The Mideast as a chessboard
Meanwhile, Riyadh began to grasp the magnitude of its miscalculation. Fearing the growing Turkey-Qatar axis and the erosion of its regional clout, Saudi Arabia started signaling a willingness to return to the table, not necessarily in name but unmistakably in spirit, with a renewed openness reminiscent of the Abraham Accords. The goal: to reassert its strategic position against the tightening Islamist bloc.
The strike in Doha upended the game. It forced every double-playing actor to choose a side. It exposed Qatar’s facade of neutrality, put it on the defensive, and made it clear to the Saudis that one cannot have it both ways. It derailed Macron’s initiative, neutralized Qatar’s maneuvering, and restored a regional order in which the US and Israel once again set the rules.
If the 20th century was a game of checkers – fast, flat, and predictable – the 21st century is chess. Every move is calculated several steps ahead, and a single mistake can topple kings. The Israeli strike in Doha was not merely a show of force; it was a game-changing move, a strategic gambit that redefined the region’s rules. Israel did not strike Doha to eliminate Hamas leaders but to rewrite the Middle East’s playbook.
Liron Rose is a major (res.) in the IDF Intelligence Directorate, a tech entrepreneur and investor, creator and host of the podcast HaYanshuf (The Owl), author of Entrepreneurship and Investments at Eye Level, and a competitive chess player.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-872022
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