Elder of Ziyon has posted an amazing piece by Kuwaiti newspaper owner and journalist, Ahmed Al-Jarallah, in which he advises the Saudi Crown Prince to have nothing more to do with the Palestinians. According to Al-Jarallah, the Palestinians have milked the Gulf states financially for decades, enriching their leaders who, at every turn, betrayed those Gulf states. He offers as a telling example the behavior of Yasser Arafat and other Palestinians, who, when Saddam Hussein invaded and seized Kuwait in 1990, sided with the Iraqi invaders. He urges the Saudi Crown Prince to forget about the Palestinians in his current negotiations with the Americans, and to pursue only the Saudi national interest. More on Al-Jarallah’s piece can be found here: “Senior Kuwaiti journalist and editor tells Saudis that Palestinians have been using them for decades,” Elder of Ziyon, October 2, 2023:
Ahmed Al-Jarallah is the owner and editor-in-chief of Kuwait’s Al Seyassah newspaper as well as a couple of other newspapers. For years he has advocated that the Arab world make peace with Israel. It appears that Palestinians have tried to assassinate him twice, once in 1985 when he was shot six times and also in 2003 when a letter bomb was sent to his office.
Last week he wrote another blistering attack on Palestinians and advised Saudi leader Mohammed bin-Salman to pursue his own interests and ignore those of Palestinians.
The Palestinian issue is no longer an Arab issue after the signing of the Oslo Accords between the PLO and Israel. Rather, it has become an Israeli-Palestinian affair, and therefore necessity requires everyone to look at their reality and their interests, and not cling to slogans, which are mere pipe dreams.
Let us put it bluntly: The peoples of the Gulf Cooperation Council no longer accept putting the interests of the Palestinians before their affairs. The GCC members have suffered from financial and political blackmail, and delayed our own development, for the sake of the slogan “liberating Palestine.”…We are not at all concerned with what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, because it has become a source of political investment for the highest bidder, and an Iranian-Israeli game played by Palestinian hands. This is why the leaders of Gaza kiss the hands of the Iranian guide – he has become their benefactor, in return they take advantage of the aid provided by the Arab Gulf states to build and own palaces in Monaco and other European cities, and they spend huge sums of money on gambling tables. Because they are convinced that “your uncle’s money doesn’t matter to you.”[A Gulf expression that people freely spend money that is not theirs]
Now that the Palestinians, despite being Sunnis, have turned to Iran for military and financial aid, they have betrayed the Gulf Arabs — mainly, the Saudis and Emiratis — who have suffered from attacks on oil installations by both the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen and by Iran itself. Al-Jarallah continues:
Today Israel has become a fait accompli, supported by European countries and the West, with weapons and money, and its leaders had a clear plan, which was to recover the land of their ancestors, as they claimed, while the people of the land were abandoned when they were displaced to the diaspora, and slept for decades on promises to return within a month or two, and today that promise is 75 years old, and generations were born in the diaspora who do not know Palestine except through slogans and songs.
Al Jarallah notes that the Jews wanted “to recover the land of their ancestors” — a recognition of the Jewish claim to the land which directly contradicts the Palestinian narrative, which insists that the Palestinians are the descendants of the Canaanites, and have lived in the land “for thousands of years.” The Palestinians have also taken to claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are not really Jews but the descendants of the Khazars, a Turkic tribe that converted to Judaism, and consequently, they have no business being in the Middle East. He also notes that the Palestinians left the area in 1948 because they had been given “promises” by the Arabs themselves “to return within a month or two.” He obliquely praises the Jews of Israel, who have become ever stronger, and who have fulfilled “a clear plan” to recover the land, which they have done, and won the support, Al-Jarallah says, of the “Europeans and the West.” Israel grows ever more prosperous and military stronger, and cannot be dislodged. The Saudis should not sacrifice their own interests — which include normalizing ties with the Jewish state — to the ungrateful, quarrelsome, altogether unpleasant Palestinians. Al-Jarallah:
On the other hand, the rest of the PLO’s leaders have become wealthy people who live like kings, and their children have become businessmen, and they have their own projects, and their weddings cost millions, all of it from Arab, especially Gulf, donations, while we received nothing but insults and threats in return.
The colossal corruption and the fantastic sums appropriated by Palestinian leaders from foreign aid received — much of it provided in the past by Gulf Arabs — infuriate Al-Jarallah. He knows that Mahmoud Abbas and his two sons Yasser and Tariq have amassed a business empire worth $400 million. Even more astounding, two Hamas leaders, Khaled Meshaal and Mousa abu Marzouk, have each acquired fortunes of $2.5 billion apiece. And below that level there are many second-echelon Hamas and PA officials who have acquired a few million dollars, while the people they claim to represent remain mired in misery, save for those who manage to acquire permits to work in Israel, where they receive decent wages from three to ten times what they could earn at home. Al-Jarallah goes on:
The late (Kuwaiti leader) Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad, may God have mercy on him, was also the top supporter of Arafat and the Palestinians, and they were employed in Kuwaiti departments, as if they were Kuwaitis. So what was Arafat’s reaction when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait?
On that day, he demanded that Emir Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad be arrested and forced to sign a confession to relinquish rule of Kuwait. He incited that “the road to Jerusalem passes through Kuwait,” and his organizations wreaked havoc on earth, including murder and heinous crimes against Kuwaitis.
Arafat’s betrayal of the Kuwaiti ruler Jaber al-Ahmad, in trying to force him, the Emir, who had treated the Palestinians so well — to relinquish his sheikdom to Saddam Hussein, is something that Al-Jarallah can neither forget nor forgive. And he remembers as well how hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Kuwait joined with the Iraqi invaders to wreak havoc on the Kuwaitis, even killing some of those who had previously had welcomed them to settle. Al-Jarallah continues:
Since 1967, Palestinian organizations have devoted themselves to terrorizing Arabs, killing many of them, hijacking planes, and practicing terrorism under the slogan of “reminding the world of the issue.” Some Arab leaders also exploited it for their own ends…In Iraq, the young King Faisal and the leaders of the state were also brandished [sic] with the same slogan. Instead of pointing the gun at the Israelis, it turned to Jordan and Lebanon, and they killed tens of thousands of people.
The Palestinians of Black September killed many Jordanians, beginning with Prime Minister Wasfi el-Tal in 1970, until finally crushed by King Hussein’s Bedouin soldiers.In Lebanon’s civil war between Muslims and Christians, the Palestinians fought on the side of the Muslims; most notably, PLO and As-Saiqa, both Palestinian terror groups, committed massacres of Maronite Christians at Damour and at other sites. The Palestinians also hijacked three Western airplanes that they forced to land at Dawson’s Field in Jordan, which King Hussein took as a direct challenge to his rule.
What have we gotten from the “cause” other than the calamities? Iran has come to rule four Arab capitals, and it has been helped in this by those investing in Arab blood under the slogan of the “Palestinian Cause,” who shed blood in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, and practiced terrorism against the Gulf states, starting with the assassination of UAE Foreign Minister Saif Ghobash to the Beirut port bombing.
The Palestinian terror groups Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP, are now supported by Iran with weapons and money. Despite that ballyhooed diplomatic rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, engineered by China, the Iranian regime remains the enemy of the Sunni Arabs, especially of the rich Arabs of the Gulf. Iran now controls, through its proxies and allies, most of Yemen (through the Shi’a Houthi), much of Iraq (through several of the Shi’a militias, including Kataeb Hezbollah), Syria (through the Alawite-led army of Bashar Assad), and Lebanon (through the strongest force in the country, the Shi’ite terror group Hezbollah). Al-Jarallah, however, has reminded the Saudi Crown Prince of how much the Palestinians have taken, and how little — that is, nothing — they have given in return.
Lenny Leaps In says
Well done Ahmed of Kuwait. This says it all:
“On the other hand, the rest of the PLO’s leaders have become wealthy people who live like kings, and their children have become businessmen, and they have their own projects, and their weddings cost millions, all of it from Arab, especially Gulf, donations, while we received nothing but insults and threats in return”.
Transmaster says
This is extraordinary, When Saudi Arabia joins the Abraham Accords it will truly be over for the Palestinians. Their endless claims to lands that were never theirs will be ignored,