Middle Finger to the US: Saudis Hold Joint Military Excercises With Iran

Once again, the Saudis show that they are not a serious ally of the US. As Israel, with American approval, pounds the whole of Iran with strikes against military installations and bases, the Saudis who are always branded as the allies of the US in the region are hodling joint military exercises with Iran. 

This could mean several things:

- The Saudis do not trust the Americans who have shown absolute disdain for civilian life in Gaza and continue supplying Israel with deadly weapons with which it is completing the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

- The Saudis, who we were told are weary of Iranian domination, now see that Israel, not Iran, is the regional power they should fear.

- Israel's objective of seizing the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, demolishing it and building a new Jewish temple on its site, is a huge problem for the Saudis who claim to be the leaders of the Muslim world and the custodians of Islam's religious sites.

- The presumed nearly completed normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel prior to the war on Gaza is for all practical purposes dead. The Zionists have proven they are more interested in stealing land and ethnic cleansing in Palestine than improving relations with their neighbors. Israel may have encouraged the rise of Hamas to divide the Palestinians, then use Hamas as a pretext to steal land, expel the Palestinians and expand its borders from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. 

- In holding joint military exercises with Saudi Arabia, Iran tells the US and Israel that it is not alone in the region and could sustain Israeli attacks without much damage to its influence.

- The disappointing posture of the US and Europe on the carnage in Gaza has created cracks in the "values" portfolio that the West keeps brandishing to non-democratic regimes. The double standard with which Israel's savagery is allowed to continue unchecked, while many countries, including Saudi Arabia, are admonished for their abuses of human rights, is now highly exposed and no longer tolerated. 

Israel has in effect, contrary to war criminal Netanyahu's pretensions at the UN that his war is defending western values, dismantled the values-based system established by the West after WWII. The UN has become in the least a risible institution because of the monopoly by veto power of the five nuclear bullies. Every one of the UN resolutions is a watered toothless expression of vague sentiments without any enforcement mechanism. None of its resolutions on Palestine has ever been implemented, the UN relief agencies and peacekeeping forces are under attack by Israel, the bastard child of the value-laden West, while the West that created the UN watches with indifference and paralysis.

One year ago, Saudi Arabia and Israel were on the verge of sealing a normalization deal that would have isolated Iran. The only pending issue was the Saudis' insistence on addressing the creation of a Palestinian state. But Israel rejects the creation of a Palestinian state because it wants to absorb the remaining parts of Palestine into Israeli territory, keep terrorizing the indigenous Palestinian population and ultimately culling it by forced and "voluntary" expulsions. For the Saudis, the Gaza War between Hamas and Israel has exposed the real objectives of the Zionists, and they probably feel relief at being liberated from the US-coerced process of normalization with Israel.

And to demonstrate their divorce from the American deception, Saudi Arabia held its first-ever joint military drills with Iran in the Gulf of Oman, knowing that an Israeli attack on Iran was imminent. It is as if the Saudis are brandishing an oil-dripping middle finger at the US. Lest it be forgotten, the Palestinian issue was the top reason for which the Saudis initiated and led the oil embargo in 1973 that caused a major economic crisis in the West. It wouldn't be far-fetched to believe that Saudi Arabia and Iran might together put pressure on the West to rein in Israel by undermining the world's economic stability with a similar move, especially since Israel continues to violate all UN resolutions on Palestine.

"The Royal Saudi Naval Forces had recently concluded a joint naval exercise with the Iranian Naval Forces alongside other countries in the Sea of Oman," Saudi armed forces spokesperson Turki al-Malki confirmed. After a diplomatic spat in 2016, the two countries resumed relations last year in a China-brokered deal, giving another middle finger to the US that claims to be the only "impartial" mediator in the Palestine-Israel conflict and was hoping that an Abraham Accords-like deal between Riyadh and Tel-Aviv that would isolate Tehran. 

In fact, the Iranians say that it was Saudi Arabia that asked Iran to join it in joint naval drills. The initiative by the Saudis is very revealing of their state of mind vis-a-vis Israel and the US.

"Hard not to exaggerate the significance of this. It's as if the U.S. and Russia were to hold a joint military exercise," Iranian-born commentator Hooman Majd wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

This week's drills came after Iran conducted naval drills with Russia and Oman in the Indian Ocean last week, with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Thailand participating as observers to the drills.

The original outline of a Saudi normalization deal with Israel paid little heed to the Palestinian cause. Now, as Saudi Arabia has demanded a ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas, the kingdom insists that it will not normalize relations with Israel without a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.

President Joe Biden's team had been working on a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal when the Gaza Genocide war was launched by Israel in October 2023. Many believe the attack was intended primarily to thwart efforts to secure such a deal, and many believe the Saudis and the Israelis might have had an interest in killing the deal for different motives. For the Saudis, a normalization with Israel would mean abandoning Palestine to its fate, a move with potentially devastating consequences on the internal stability of the kingdom itself. For the Israelis, a normalization would mean abandoning their Zionist expansionist plans of demolishing Al-Aqsa to build a Jewish temple on its site and their ambitions to annex more Palestinian lands. The Israeli might have had to agree to the worst-case scenario of allowing an independent sovereign Palestinian state to exist right next to it.

But not all the clouds between Riyadh and Tehran have disappeared. The military drills came after Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, was in Riyadh where he reportedly threatened the Saudi oil facilities if Israel were to attack Iran’s oil. Ali Shihabi, a Saudi analyst says: "The Iranians have stated: 'If the Gulf states open up their airspace to Israel, that would be an act of war.'"