GRANT F. SMITH, gsmith@irmep.org, @IRmepBiden on Israeli TV threatened to use force against Iran, allegedly to prevent it from getting a nuclear weapon, as a “last resort.” But Biden has not re-instated the Iran nuclear deal which Trump withdrew from. Smith is director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy. He has written extenstively on Israel’s nuclear weapons which Biden has refused to acknowledge. Smith’s work was cited in the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s last published piece: “Joe Biden should end the U.S. pretence over Israel’s ‘secret’ nuclear weapons.”
RULA JEBREAL, jebreal.rula@gmail.com, @rulajebreal
Jebreal is visiting professor at the University of Miami, an author and noted foreign policy analyst. She just arrived in New York City from the Mideast. She said today: “There are many layers of the Israel-Saudi alliance — and the U.S. government role in forging it. It’s mainly based around militarism and authoritarianism. It’s a bloody legacy of ‘shared values’ — Israel’s ‘unbreakable bond’ with the U.S. means that Biden will ignore international law and commits to unconditional support to Israel’s occupation. The leader of the free world is enabling militarism by working to forge a NATO-like entity for the authoritarian Gulf states, binding Americans to protect the world’s most corrupt despots and apartheid Israel.”
Background: See from last month in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “Thanks to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s Recognition of Israel Is Now Inevitable.”
The New York Times reported in 2021: “Israel secretly authorized a group of cyber-surveillance firms to work for the government of Saudi Arabia despite international condemnation of the kingdom’s abuse of surveillance software to crush dissent, even after the Saudi killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, government officials and others familiar with the contracts said.”
IPA news release from 2020: “Protesting Trump’s Israeli-Gulf ‘Fake Peace’ Deals.”
See “Saudi Arabia’s Unholy Alliance with Israel” — video and transcript — of The Real News interview from 2018 with scholar As’ad AbuKhalil who gives a history of Israel-Saudi collusion going back at least to the first Yemen war of the 1960s.
See from 2015 by Robert Parry “Did Money Seal Israeli-Saudi Alliance?”
In 1955, the U.S. government tried to establish an effective southern flank of NATO called CENTO, also known as the Baghdad Pact. The organization became largely moribund in 1959 following the overthrow of the U.S.-backed monarch in Iraq and collapsed altogether in 1979 when the U.S.-backed Shah was ousted in Iran.
