After the Sheikhs

by Davidson, Christopher

  More broadly, the apparent nuclearisation of the UAE and other Gulf monarchies can also be interpreted as part of the strengthening anti-Iran front. This began in late 2009 with Abu Dhabi’s awarding of a $20 billion contract to a South Korea-led consortium63 to build four nuclear plants by 2020,64 and has since gathered pace with Kuwait65 and Saudi Arabia66 also in discussion with foreign nuclear companies. Although the UAE programme is strictly civilian and rational in terms of diversifying its energy supplies, given declining hydrocarbon reserves and rising domestic energy consumption, the manner in which the programme was initiated was nonetheless also intended to signal a warning to Iran. There was a keenness to seek approval for the programme not only from the International Atomic Energy Agency, but also from the world’s major nuclear powers. The UAE did not move ahead with its contract until it received approval from the US Congress, even though its intention was likely never to award it to the bidding US-Japan consortium.67 This is in sharp contrast to Iran’s efforts to press ahead with an indigenous programme that has not sought approval from the US or other nuclear powers.

  Qatar, although much more careful with its public statements on Iran since its emergence as the region’s most energetic peace-broker, has also been caught out by leaked cables. Notably, in one from 2009 the Qatari prime minister characterised the emirate’s relationship with Iran as being one in which ‘they lie to us and we lie to them’.68 Nevertheless, Qatar seems to have avoided falling into the front line role now occupied by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE. This is likely due to its particularly precarious situation: hosting major US military facilities while at the same time having to share its largest gas resource—the offshore North Field—with Iran. Similarly Oman has been more cautious in opposing Iran despite the presence of western bases on its soil and its very high spending on western armaments. Speaking in 2008 in a private conversation with a senior US Navy official, Oman’s Sultan came across as more pragmatic than his neighbouring rulers, while his public statements have been similarly realistic. This is unsurprising given that he is by far the longest serving ruler in the region and has had considerable experience of dealing with pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. Moreover, with Oman’s Musandam Peninsula stretching into the strategic Strait of Hormuz, his is the Gulf monarchy closest to Iran, and—perhaps most importantly—as with Qatar, Oman shares a major offshore gas field with the Islamic Republic. Indeed, 80 per cent of the Henjam field lies in Iranian waters, and the National Iranian Oil Company has earmarked $800 million for the field’s development69—an investment Oman is unlikely to be able to match. Tellingly, in his 2008 conversation Qaboos bin Said Al-Said commented to the US official that the ‘Iranians are not fools’ and claimed that ‘Tehran realised there are certain lines it cannot cross [i.e. direct confrontation with the US]’. Most significantly, on the subject of the Gulf monarchies and Iran he stated ‘Iran is a big country with muscles and we must deal with it’ but that ‘as long as the US is on the horizon, we have nothing to fear’.70

  Another interesting stance on Iran, although now having little bearing on the region’s security situation, is that of the Sharjah and Dubai ruling families. As one of the Persian Gulf’s most established ports Sharjah has long been home to a substantial Iranian-origin community and, despite having lost one of its outlying islands to Iran in 1971, relations have remained fairly warm. The Sharjah-based Crescent Petroleum has always maintained an office in Tehran and in 2001 the company signed a $1 billion 25 year agreement with the National Iranian Oil Company to pipe some 500 million cubic feet per day of Iranian natural gas to the emirate.71 Similarly, as the region’s biggest port, with a long history of laissez-faire policies, Dubai has been home to substantial Iranian-origin communities for over a century, and has a well documented track record of supporting, or at least remaining neutral with regards to Iran. Even when Abu Dhabi and most other Gulf monarchies openly backed Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Dubai’s ruler remained famously impartial, with the city’s port facilities remaining open to Iranian vessels and its radio station continuing to broadcast the Iranian version of the news. As the relevance of Dubai’s foreign policies have declined following the integration of its armed forces into the Abu Dhabi-led UAE Armed Forces in the 1990s and—as many have speculated—following the bailouts of its economy by Abu Dhabi in recent years, it had been assumed that the emirate’s stance on Iran would eventually fall into line with that of Abu Dhabi. To some extent this has been true, with Dubai’s ruling family having had little choice but to accede to Abu Dhabi’s desire to make the UAE conform to US-led sanctions on Iranian trade. Since about 2008 it has become much harder for Iranian businessmen to transfer money in and out of Dubai, or in some cases even to open bank accounts. Nevertheless such restrictions are viewed as harmful to Dubai’s livelihood, and the emirate’s ruler has publicly stepped out of line on Iran, arguing in a December 2011 CNN interview that Iran is not trying to acquire nuclear weapons ‘despite Western suspicions that it is trying to develop them’ and asking, rhetorically, ‘What can Iran do with a nuclear weapon?’72

  Israel: the unholy alliance

  Perhaps even more controversial and risky than hawkishness towards Iran has been the discreet strengthening of political and economic relations between some of the Gulf monarchies and Israel. Seemingly a function of reinforcing relations with their Western security guarantors and hardening the anti-Iran front, but also a consequence of building lucrative trade links with one of the region’s most advanced economies, some Gulf rulers appear willing to co-operate and collaborate secretly with Israel. This is an especially dangerous policy, given the Gulf monarchies’ long history of boycotting Israel, their public alignment with the Arab ‘Refusal Front’,73 and—as discussed—their provision of substantial development aid to Palestine. Moreover, their national populations are for the most part anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian, with the topics of Israel and Zionism often stirring strong emotions. Certainly, many Gulf nationals grew up watching the Palestinian Intifada on television74 and the liberation of Palestine definitely remains a shared ideal among the region’s youth. It is likely too that most of the expatriate populations in the Gulf monarchies share similar views. And there are of course substantial, long-serving communities of Palestinians in every Gulf monarchy. In some cases there are even naturalised Palestinian-origin Gulf nationals who were born in refugee camps serving as senior advisors to rulers’ courts and occupying other powerful positions.

  Since their independence and the drafting of constitutions or, in Saudi Arabia’s case, the promulgation of its Basic Law, there have been legal articles and clauses in the Gulf monarchies which have required government personnel, businesses, and even individual residents to boycott all connections with Israel. In the UAE’s case for example there has always been an Israel Boycott Office squirreled away somewhere in the federal government, and since 1971 federal law number 15 has stipulated that ‘…any natural or legal person shall be prohibited from directly or indirectly concluding an agreement with organisations or persons either resident in Israel, connected therewith by virtue of their nationality or working on its behalf’.75 For many years, however, the boycott office’s work has extended far beyond a straightforward embargo on trade between UAE-based companies and Israel. Notably, telephone calls to Israel have been barred, websites with an Israeli suffix have been blocked by the state-owned telecommunications company,76 and Israeli nationals have not been permitted to enter the UAE, nor—in theory—have any visitors been allowed to enter the UAE that possessed Israeli visa stamps in their passports.77

  Up until 2003 Abu Dhabi’s Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-up was frequently publishing anti-Semitic material and hosting internationally condemned anti-Semitic speakers.78 According to the US Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the UAE authorities also reportedly fail to prevent anti-Semitic cartoons from being published in the two bestselling state-backed Arabic newspapers—Al-Ittihad and Al-Bayan.79 The c
artoons often depict Israeli leaders being compared to Hitler, and Jews being portrayed as demons. In January 2009, at the height of the Gaza conflict, the UAE’s bestselling English language newspaper, Gulf News, not only featured such a cartoon (featuring an Israeli soldier with a forked red tongue),80 but also published a Holocaust revisionist piece which claimed ‘…it is evident that the Holocaust was a conspiracy hatched by the Zionists and the Nazis, and many innocent people gave their lives as a result of this inhuman plot… the Holocaust was a major crime in history and the Israeli culprit is at it again today’.81

  After joining the World Trade Organisation in 1996, the UAE authorities were clearly under pressure to drop or at least relax their boycott of Israel. When Dubai agreed to host the 2003 annual general meeting of the WTO, delegations from all member states had to be invited, and there was no way to prevent the arrival of an Israeli delegation and the flying of an Israeli flag on top of the Dubai World Trade Centre tower.82 The UAE’s newfound leadership role in renewable energies has had similar results: after winning the bid to host the headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency, in early 2010 the Abu Dhabi immigration services had little choice but to allow an Israeli delegation—including a minister—to arrive in the emirate for IRENA meetings. Explaining that ‘…although Israel and the UAE have no diplomatic ties’ an IRENA spokesperson confirmed that ‘Israel was accommodated in accordance with specific UAE agreements’.83 In addition to international organisations, there has also been increasing pressure directly from the US, with the US Department of Commerce’s Office of Anti-boycott Compliance dutifully recording all examples of the UAE’s boycott requests. These are normally clauses inserted into contracts issued by UAE companies, most often with the following wording: ‘the seller shall not supply goods or materials which have been manufactured or processed in Israel nor shall the services of any Israeli organisation be used in handling or transporting the goods or materials’.84

  Meanwhile, it was reported in late 2009 by the Toronto-Harvard OpenNet Initiative that—as something of an exception to the country’s massive increase in internet censorship—the UAE had quietly unblocked internet access to web sites based in Israel with the ‘.IL’ suffix. All such sites were suddenly found to be ‘consistently accessible via the country’s two ISPs’ and it was stated that ‘…it is not clear why the UAE authorities have decided to remove the ban on .IL Web sites and whether this unblocking will continue’.90 Even more curiously, in late 2010 it was reported by a Kuwaiti newspaper that a female member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family had been flown to Israel to undergo ‘complex heart surgery’. The entry procedures were reportedly facilitated by a member of the Knesset, after the sheikha’s doctor had recommended a specific hospital in Haifa. Interestingly, the sheikha’s picture was featured in a report on Israel’s Channel Two which emphasised the way in which ‘medicine does not differentiate between patients and should be a means of rapprochement between the peoples of the region’.91 And in February 2011 Amnesty International highlighted the disappearance of a UAE national teacher who had previously been detained in late 2008 for ‘demonstrating in solidarity with the people of the Gaza Strip, then under Israeli military attack’.92 In years past it is likely that a Gulf national taking such a stance would have had the tacit approval of the authorities, rather than face any difficulties.

  In some ways Bahrain has gone even further than the UAE in improving its relations with Israel, at least on an official level. For the past few years government personnel have been instructed not to refer to Israel as the ‘Zionist Entity’ or ‘The Enemy’ and in 2005 the kingdom closed down its equivalent boycott office.93 Moreover, according to leaked US diplomatic cables from the same year, the king confided to US diplomats that ‘He [the king] already has contacts with Israel at the intelligence/security level (i.e. with Mossad) and indicated that Bahrain will be willing to move forward in other areas’. When pressed on trade ties with Israel, however, the king did admit that it was ‘too early, and that the matter would have to wait until after a Palestinian state’.94 Indeed there are signs in Bahrain, as with the other Gulf monarchies, that revelations of any formal ties with Israel would be met with strong condemnation from the national population. In summer 2010, for example, large demonstrations were staged in Bahrain’s principal mosques—both Sunni and Shia—to denounce the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Flotilla. Worryingly for a king nurturing security and trade links with Israel, the crowd’s main slogan described the US president as being a liar for ‘not exposing Israel as being a terrorist state’.95

  There is some evidence that the governments of both Qatar and Saudi Arabia have also been relaxing their stance on Israel. Up until 2009 there was an Israeli ‘commercial interest section’ based in Doha,96 and in 2010 it was reported that the Qatar Investment Authority and the Saudi Olayan Group had partnered with Credit Suisse and Israel’s IDB Holdings in order to form a new fund to ‘opportunistically pursue credit investments in emerging markets’. With each partner putting in $250 million, the $1 billion fund is one of the largest new funds created since the 2008 credit crunch. Although the resulting media coverage noted that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were still technically part of an Israel boycott group, analysts were quoted as stating that ‘the Arab boycott is mainly on paper’ and that ‘there is a flow of Israeli know-how and products to the Arab world’.97 Interestingly, it appears that Qatar’s relaxations on Israel have now also extended to education. According to documents leaked to Al-Arab newspaper in summer 2011, documents and course material supplied to trainee Arabic teachers in the emirate were written in both Arabic and Hebrew and seemingly sourced from the Israeli Ministry for Education. When questioned on this matter, the distributors simply argued that ‘there had been a mistake’.98

  With regards to security ties, as with Bahrain an open channel of communication now exists between Qatar and the Israeli security services. In late 2010 a large delegation of senior Israeli policemen was in the emirate, ostensibly taking part in an Interpol assembly, with the head of the Israeli police’s investigations and intelligence branch being among them. Remarkably, it was reported by Agence France Presse that the Israeli delegation also met with Dubai’s chief of police ‘by chance’ and that ‘there was no apparent tension… despite the dispute between their countries’.99 Thus far there is little firm evidence of growing security ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel, or at least there have been no blatant admissions as with Bahrain and Qatar. Nevertheless, for the past few years there have been frequent and powerful rumours circulating that the two powers are co-operating, mostly as a result of Saudi Arabia’s stance on Iran and the existence of a mutual enemy.100

  Division and disunity

  Despite a range of current shared threats, perceived or otherwise, and despite the invasion of Kuwait remaining fresh in the minds of many Gulf nationals, the Gulf monarchies nevertheless seem further away than ever before from enjoying basic co-operation and collective security. Although, as discussed in the following chapter, there have been a number of recent actions that have been branded as ‘collective action’ in the wake of the Arab Spring, in practise these have been effectively unilateral or bilateral efforts on the part of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to head off regime collapse in their most precarious neighbours. Indeed, while formal councils and various mechanisms now exist on paper, there is still no effective body to bind together these largely similar states into a meaningful alliance. In the short term this means the Gulf monarchies remain highly vulnerable to foreign aggression and petty disputes between themselves, and in the long term means that their dependency on external security guarantees and the resulting exposure to its associated pathologies will remain high.

  The Co-operation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, better known as the ‘Gulf Co-operation Council’ is the organisation many had expected to present a ‘united front’ for the Gulf monarchies. Founded in 1981 in Abu Dhabi, the Council’s creation was spurred by the Iran-Iraq War and,
in particular, Kuwaiti concerns of collateral damage or attack from its warring neighbours. On an economic level the Council was supposed to foster joint ventures between the monarchies, remove barriers to trade, and establish a common GCC currency by 2010. While there has been some limited success in establishing a GCC customs union, more serious economic integration has remained elusive, as a number of disputes have prevented stronger ties. In particular, Oman announced in 2006 that it would be unable to meet the requirements of the common currency, while in 2009 the UAE announced its complete withdrawal from the project, seemingly as retaliation to the GCC’s announcement that its central bank would be located in Riyadh, not Abu Dhabi. Within days of the UAE’s secession thousands of its truck drivers were left stranded at the border with Saudi Arabia. Described in a leaked US diplomatic cable as a ‘humanitarian crisis’ the problem was publicly blamed on a new, unexpected Saudi fingerprinting system,101 but most analysts agreed that it was a tit-for-tat response to the UAE’s currency stance. Moreover, although a GCC common market was launched in 2008, some Gulf monarchies have continued to sign bilateral free trade agreements with other states. Bahrain, which has developed an extensive FTA with the US, has been viewed by Saudi Arabia and other GCC members as having bypassed the GCC’s common market.