What is the Zionist-Emirati order?

The Zionist–Emirati order is a bid for regional hegemony that treats sovereignty as property and rule as coercion—imposed through shock and secured by the threat of annihilation.

It reflects a contemporary stage in capitalism’s evolution—or, more accurately, its degeneration. Its main source of strength is that it is far ahead of others in recognizing what this historical moment demands.

In the midst of a deepening global economic crisis, it presents itself as a convenient, ready-made model, positioning itself as the region’s natural vehicle for US colonial interests.

In more abstract terms, we might call it the “Zio-sultanate.” What, then, is the “Zio,” and what is the Emirati—or sultanate—element?

Zionism, in material terms, functions as an advanced military base for US colonial power. Yet at its core it is also a project anchored in people themselves—one that legitimizes its existence through religious sanctity.

That human base allows it to penetrate, blackmail, and neutralize a substantial segment of Western societies. It reinforces this influence by exploiting the Holocaust—a crime committed by Europe’s far right against Jews during World War II—turning it into a shield that grants immunity to any act committed by the descendants of those incinerated in the Nazi hell.

Under these conditions, this human–military base is granted wide latitude to act without restraint, violating established norms under the claim of historical trauma. In doing so, it acquires the capacity to push the boundaries of custom and law, and, as far as possible, to legislate new ones.

This is a decisive advantage. Through Israel, US colonial power is able to justify and market what would otherwise be difficult to present as anything other than naked force—military action recast as sovereignty.

Through Israel alone, the United States is able to experiment with operations such as the bombings that resembled the targeting of Hezbollah members’ phones.

As for the sultanate, its most advanced regional form is the Emirate: an economic and sovereign domain built on the model of a corporation. Its working “people” are foreigners who are denied naturalization and governed by criteria and rules closer to permanent labor-residency regimes in wealthy countries.

Its population base is a replaceable labor force. That is the contractual formula that defines its relationship with them.

On this basis, jobs within the corporate-state’s “national” institutions are treated as profit-based contract work, embedded in a system adept at assembling private security forces and mercenary armies.

The “Emirate” thus frees itself from the burden of the idea of “a people.” In this respect, it is more flexible than Israel itself, particularly because it can deploy vast rentier surpluses and convert them into accumulation, growth, and profitability—or, more precisely, capitalize them in a more advanced manner—from the position of a partner that has shed the role of the ignorant Arab fool in the American drama.

The owners of capital become its custodians and partners in the power generated by its ownership.

As these surpluses search for markets that can be reshaped in their image, Emirati sultanate-corporations will seek to generalize a political model that facilitates the operation of their capital.

Within this model, “peoples” are recognized only as an enemy and as raw material to be crushed. It is colonial and exterminatory in nature, and viscerally, fundamentally hostile to the poor and to working people.

The flexibility inherent in the Emirati sultanate condition allows it to perform roles that Israel cannot.

It is Arab, Muslim, a “sister,” and rich.

We understand the Emirati corporate-sultanate well, because we are all Arabs. The shock of this new colonialism does not lie in its appearance as an alien brute force, endlessly dispensing violence. It lies in the shock of betrayal—or, as the pre-Islamic Arab poet Tarafah ibn al-Abd put it, “a wound from kin is more painful than the strike of a sharpened sword.”

When all is said and done, Arabs remain Arabs: emotion runs deep, drama even deeper, and neither is likely to disappear any time soon.

The Emirate and its counterparts seek to monopolize both media and symbolic space. They penetrate state and security structures under the pretext of protecting investments. They assemble mercenary formations under the guise of security companies. And, finally, they assert sovereignty by publicly displaying their capacity for cross-border repression—such as the deportation of the Egyptian poet Abdel Rahman Youssef Al-Qaradawi to the UAE from Lebanon, where he was arrested, on the pretext that he had ‘insulted’ the sacred Emirati ruling order.

The alliance between Zionism and the Emirati corporate-sultanate is therefore logical—indeed, inevitable. Each understands its own vulnerabilities and the other’s strengths. Each struggles to survive in order to preserve abnormal arrangements and relations that cannot endure.

Both do so in opposition to the overwhelming majority of the region’s population, in every country alike.

A material condition, not pure evil

The Emirati corporate-sultanate did not appear out of nowhere. It has a logic of its own, shaped by the security fears of small, wealthy Gulf states after hard lessons. That logic applies most clearly to the UAE, then Qatar—after Kuwait served as the first testing ground.

What follows does not necessarily apply to Saudi Arabia. Yes, Riyadh ultimately supports the Zionist-Emirati order  as a regional ruling model for poor peoples. But it has more than one line of retreat, because over decades of development the kingdom has grown too large to be reduced to a political appendage of Aramco.

Over a century, Saudi Arabia transformed from a rentier corporate-state into a society forming under absolute monarchy—a society divided by classes, regions, currents, inclinations, and temperaments, and shaped by the interactions among them.

So Saudi Arabia cannot be treated as a solid block or a static condition.

It is increasingly clear that, despite its reactionary nature, the Saudi system has become far more progressive than Egypt’s reactionary system, which has largely squandered its own potential.

The same applies to Bahrain. Despite being trapped in its sectarian binary—managed by a crude Saudi military fist that revealed itself plainly in 2011—Bahrain cannot be seen as one of the rich surplus states.

It was once a center of progressivism in the Gulf. It saw the growth and organization of a militant local labor base and a brave trade union movement since the mid-20th century.

In the early 1970s, Britain relinquished sovereignty over the sheikhdoms of the Oman Coast—what were called the Trucial States. That led to the founding of the United Arab Emirates, along with Qatar and Bahrain.

But only 20 years separated those micro-states’ declarations of independence from Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Kuwait in 1990 and erase it as a sovereign state within days.

That historic wrong brought colonialism back to the Gulf in the form of an international coalition led by the United States.

In the few years that followed, Kuwait—shocked by the Iraqi invasion—shifted from a state that championed Arab nationalism as culture and identity, and that had backed the Palestinian cause with real fervor since independence in the 1960s, into an inward-looking country that became a staging post for US ground forces in the region.

Qatar followed years later when it allowed the establishment of America’s Al-Udeid Air Base.

The UAE and the smaller sheikhdoms faced a real test. Either they would join the official Arab regional order—an order that could end their political existence in a moment of rage, as happened to Kuwait—or they would accept the return of US occupation under new rules and conditions, according to which they would play different roles.

That choice came after they concluded they could not trust their stronger neighbors, who are periodically tempted by greed for wealth that the sheikhdoms lack the force to protect.

While Kuwait settled for retreat, Qatar and the UAE began playing political and economic roles in the region resembling the export of crises. Qatar used politics, media, diplomatic penetration, and, as a mediator, a strategy of talking to all opposing parties. The UAE relied on money and business, wearing the costume of wisdom, modernity, and effectiveness.

But the question is: What accelerated the Zionist-Emirati alliance over the past decade?

What turned the UAE from the “wise Arab” into the “Tony Soprano of the Arabs?”—from mediator to enforcer.

As I argued, the alliance is, in a sense, structurally inevitable—coded into the DNA of both sides. But inevitability does not mean it had to crystallize, within just a few years, into the present arrangement, so crude and unapologetic.

So what are the weaknesses of this new alliance, and how can it seal its own gaps?

That is what I will discuss in the next article, along with the role of the region’s major powers—and, most important, where are the peoples?

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*An Arabic version of this article was published Jan. 16, 2025.