While Gaza cries for help, Saudi Arabia ships weapons to Israel

"Your necks are burdened with the blood of tens of thousands of innocents who were betrayed by your silence.”

Battling an enemy hell-bent on their annihilation, Palestinians in Gaza have been eager for the world to speak up for them, educate the uninitiated about their plight, pressure their governments to stop arms shipments to the genocidaires, and halt the genocide. In their appeals, the besieged Palestinians always reserve a special emphasis on the fellow Arabs. “Where are the Arabs?” they often ask when speaking about their suffering. One child cried out, “We just want to ask the Arab countries to intervene in the war.”

The political and military leadership in Gaza had been making the same appeals long before October 7 — appeals that have only intensified in the aftermath of the Al-Aqsa Flood. After two years of radio silence from their brethren, Abu Obeida, the Al-Qassam spokesman, issued a scathing indictment of Islamic and Arab leadership in a recorded speech last month. “O leaders of this Islamic and Arab nation, O its elites and major parties, O its scholars — you are our adversaries before Almighty God,” Abu Obeida stated. “You are the adversaries of every orphaned child, every grieving mother, every displaced, homeless, wounded, devastated, and starving person. Your necks are burdened with the blood of tens of thousands of innocents who were betrayed by your silence.” Later in the same speech, Abu Obeida contrasted their behaviour with that of Yemen’s Ansarallah — the only Arab actor doing anything meaningful for the Palestinians. Abu Obeida said that the Arab regimes have “become fronts for injustice and sedatives for the people and their free youth. Their credibility and grand slogans have been put to the test in the face of their betrayal and failure to support the purest and holiest cause of Arabs and Muslims.”

It is one thing to be a silent observer in the face of injustice, especially against one’s own, but Saudi Arabia — whose leadership refers to itself as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques (in Makkah and Madinah) — has been caught red-handed acting as a conduit for the weapons that are annihilating the Palestinians in Gaza.

On August 7, the Bahri Yanbu — a ship operated by the Saudi shipping giant Bahri, in which the Saudi state holds a 42.5 percent stake — arrived in Genoa, Italy, from Baltimore, Maryland in the USA. It was “scheduled to load military equipment produced by the Italian arms conglomerate Leonardo, including an Oto Melara cannon bound for Abu Dhabi and possibly tanks or other heavy weapons already staged in the terminal yard,” the World Socialist Web Site reported last week. “Refusing to become accomplices in the Gaza genocide, the workers blocked the loading of the cannon and exposed the ship’s cargo — already filled with weapons, ammunition, explosives, armored vehicles and tanks — through on-site inspections at dawn.”

The outlet reported that the dockworkers made their position clear: “We don’t work for war.”

Saudi Arabia publicly pays lip service to the so-called two-state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state, but it has made no significant moves to bring its pronouncements to fruition. On the contrary, the most populous Gulf state was on the cusp of normalising ties with the occupation state in 2023. It has often been cited as one of the reasons for the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, since the normalisation of ties between what is — unfortunately — perceived as the prototypical Muslim state and Israel would have firmly put the Palestinian issue on the backburner and made it even easier for the Zionists to railroad the Palestinians into oblivion without so much as a whimper.

While the Genoa affair has been the first time that the Saudis have been directly implicated in the annihilation of the Palestinians, the Gulf monarchy has been steadily making overtures towards Israel and softening ties with it. In 2015, Time reported that private talks were going on between Israeli and Saudi Arabian officials. “It might be called mushroom diplomacy,” an Israeli told the Time journalist. “It can only grow in the dark.”

As a parting gift to the outgoing Trump administration official and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the Saudi state — through its sovereign Public Investment Fund (PIF) — invested $2 billion in his newly formed private equity firm, Affinity Partners, in 2021. Affinity Partners is the largest shareholder in the Israeli company, Phoenix, which in turn holds shares in companies that build illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. In other words, Saudi Arabia — along with the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, its fellow shareholders in Affinity Partners — is funding the dispossession and displacement of Arabs from their land.

In 2022, Saudi Arabia lifted its ban on Israeli overflights, paving the way for flights from the genocidal state to fly freely over its airspace. That same year, The New York Times reported on Saudi Arabia purchasing a version of the Pegasus spyware from its Israeli developer, NSO Group. As a company tied to the Israeli defence industry, the Israeli state directly oversees the sale of Pegasus, which NSO Group claims is never sold to non-state actors. This implies a direct deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia — something the NYT article affirmed. The Gulf state used Pegasus to surveil The Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi before murdering and dismembering him in an embassy building in Istanbul in 2018.

More recently, a framed photograph of the Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) laughing maniacally with the Israeli intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein was discovered in the convicted child sex offender’s Manhattan mansion, suggesting even deeper ties between the monarchy and the genocidal entity — one which eyes nearly half of Saudi Arabia as part of its Greater Israel plan. The absence of the traditional ghutrah on MBS’s head and his casual demeanour suggest he felt completely at ease in Epstein’s company.

The kompromat-collecting Epstein operation is perhaps the clearest indicator of the Saudi leadership’s complete subservience to Zionist interests — to the extent that they refrain from responding meaningfully even when Netanyahu publicly derides them with statements like, “The Saudis can create a Palestinian state in Saudi Arabia; they have a lot of land over there.”

Since October 7, the Saudis have hosted Trump, as well as Steve Witkoff and Antony Blinken — the leading facilitators of the Palestinian genocide — with the latter two visiting Riyadh multiple times. Yet the Saudi monarchs have not leveraged their influence to alleviate the inhumane suffering in Gaza: there have been no threats to withdraw diplomats, halt oil exports, or publicly pressure the genocidal Israelis to cease their brutal campaign. Despite more than half a million Palestinians killed, Gaza reduced to an uninhabitable, apocalyptic hellscape, and being publicly humiliated by the Israelis, the Saudis have not even taken the normalisation carrot off the table. What was somewhat hidden has now become public after the Genoa affair: that the Saudi monarchy has no consideration for the Palestinians and are fully onboard with their extermination.

Although unstated, perhaps the Saudi leadership also shares an ideological affinity with the Zionists — despite wearing an Islamic mask. Palestinians can keep shouting “Where are the Arabs?” As things stand, their cries will continue to be drowned out by the latest circus act at Riyadh Season.

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