The Zionist–Emirati Order| Capital, sovereignty, and the politics of annihilation

“I looked at a picture of Gaza. Gaza is like a massive demolition site. That place has really got to be rebuilt in a different way… You know Gaza is interesting it’s a phenomenal location… On the sea, best weather… some beautiful things could be done with it.”

This was a statement by US President Donald Trump immediately after his inauguration in January 2025, as he set out the fate and future of the Gaza Strip from his vantage point. After genocide comes investment—or perhaps there is no investment without genocide. Within this phase of late capitalism, the Zionist–Emirati dream has been transformed into a concrete, living nightmare.

In the previous article, I discussed the inevitability of the alliance between Zionism and the Emirati sultanate, rooted in the symmetry of their potential destinies when confronted with the unified fate of the Arab world’s working majorities. Yet several factors accelerated this alliance, rendering it crude, explicit, and unapologetic.

The first was the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on Dubai and its resulting financial distress—rescued only by the Abu Dhabi sheikhdom. The world produced by that crisis demonstrated that investment appeal and efficiency alone were insufficient to turn the UAE into the Singapore of the Middle East. What was required was parallel political expansion and broader, more aggressive forms of penetration—each of which, in turn, demanded partnerships with different regional actors, each according to its capacity to contribute.

Zohar Palti, former head of the Mossad, has stated that regarding the Abraham Accords—and speaking as the man who signed their security component—military power was the last thing Mohammed bin Zayed cared about. In fact, I find myself agreeing with the senior Israeli official. Those who live under American protection have no particular need for Israeli security, especially given the US occupation of the Arab Gulf through its extensive network of permanent military bases.

Palti added that bin Zayed “wanted our friendship because he values ​​our ingenuity and our capacity for high-tech innovation. What they wanted was our technology, our expertise in artificial intelligence, and the geniuses behind Israeli patents.”

Enmity toward everyone

All of the above, however, required a regional political earthquake to be truly tested. The Arab Spring was the decisive accelerant that allowed the Zionist–sultanic formation to take shape in an official, enthusiastic manner.

The acceleration triggered by the Arab Spring did not move history in a single direction. Rather, it propelled it toward multiple—and even contradictory—scenarios, all contingent on the dynamics and outcomes of struggle. Yet all of these scenarios, despite their contradictions, stood in opposition to the Zionist–Emirati condition, which revealed itself with clarity in the Spring’s aftermath.

The Arab Spring had to arrive somewhere, and every conceivable destination posed a threat to the Zionist–Emirati order. Any victory for any sovereign political formation in the Arab Mashreq or Egypt—of any kind—so long as it was backed by genuine popular support, would within a few years have translated into a confrontation with this alliance.

Let us imagine that the Arab Spring had ended in a progressive democratic outcome, an Islamist authoritarian one, or a revolutionary populist scenario. Any of these would have raised questions of wealth, sovereignty, and regional standing—their distribution and hierarchy. Even a comprehensive normalization or settlement project would ultimately have raised the same questions, so long as popular will was not entirely excluded from the equation.

It requires little effort to see that the Zionist–Emirati order does not support one political project over another. Rather, it is hostile to power as such—just as it understands itself as power merely by virtue of being power.

From this perspective, the UAE’s position toward “political Islam” and the Muslim Brotherhood more broadly becomes intelligible. The claim to be combating political Islam stems from the fact that it represents an organized, oppositional force aspiring to impose a rival sovereign order—not because it is undemocratic, illiberal, or anything of the sort.

When the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 1996, only Pakistan and Saudi Arabia recognized its regime. But wait—there was a third state: the United Arab Emirates.

Zionism, however, cannot be measured by the same standard. From the outset, it presents itself as a project of organization and salvation for God’s chosen people—and God’s chosen people cannot be imitated or replicated except from the position of a subordinate, humiliated other.

In reality, the Zionist–Emirati formation wages war against any and every tendency that ultimately points toward a shared destiny for Arab peoples. In contrast, it supports Kemetic, Assyrian, Phoenician, and Kushite identities—abstract unknowns and caricatured identities alike.

The Arab Spring failed catastrophically, and it was its failure—not its eruption—that enabled Zionist–Emirati expansion. This alliance certainly played a role in crushing the Spring and later exacting revenge upon it, but that role followed—rather than preceded—the Spring’s own internal conditions of failure, of which there were many.

If we borrow from early twentieth-century nationalist literature, which long accused Zionism of seeking to fragment the Arab homeland into small, manageable states, the truth is that the Zionist–Emirati epoch harbors a far more aggressive ambition: to subjugate the Arab world and dismantle and reassemble national states on thoroughly non-contractual, sultanic foundations between rulers and ruled—under conditions far worse than occupation itself. The choice is no longer between the stick and the carrot, but between the stick and the bullet.

From here, the “Palestinian National Authority model” becomes intelligible. A form of self-rule and local policing subordinate to a dominant regional complex—one that will evolve into a new High Gate, a center of wealth and a refuge for elites, the pampered, and the privileged; a court for the favored drawn from within exhausted regions. Consider, for instance, the relationship between the Egyptian elite and Dubai, and the connections become immediately clear.

What Will We Do With the Peoples?

Yet none of the above means that the Zionist–Emirati alliance is truly capable of controlling the region’s resources and populations. This alliance has a central weakness. It lacks the material power required to govern “colonies” directly on the ground. Israel, after all, has destroyed Gaza atop its inhabitants, without any capacity to rule them again.

If this is the case with Gaza—two million people under total siege—how, then, can Lebanon, Sudan, Syria, or certainly Egypt even be imagined?

The Zionist–Emirati order possesses only a corporate militia whose capacity to govern and to formulate a social contract with populations approaches zero. There are therefore no conditions for victory followed by endurance and the imposition of sovereignty. Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, for example, might have been able to present themselves as a political sovereign alternative under different premises, given the fluidity produced by the Sudanese revolution after the fall of Omar Al-Bashir. But the Janjaweed are, in fact, an exterminatory mercenary militia. No matter how much the UAE spends on them or how enthusiastically Naguib Sawiris praises them, they will remain a criminal force on which nothing can be built.

Perhaps the Zionist–Emirati order has succeeded in inaugurating the first phase of its hegemony—by imposing its visions of economy and prosperity, promoting the corporate-state model, and the city of settler luxury as the emblem of the future. But how can this alliance and its logic rule a country the size of Egypt? Can it truly govern Egypt—with its population, its political currents, its youth, and its historical depth? Will the Egyptian state, in all its institutions—or what remains of them—be reduced to a Mamluk possession of the new High Gate?

That is what I intend to discuss next.

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(*) A version of this article first appeared in Arabic on Jan. 23, 2025