On July 10th 2017 the U.K. High Court rejected a bid by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) that ‘Britain’s multi-billion-pound arms sales to Saudi Arabia should be halted because they were being used in Yemen in violation of international humanitarian law. ‘
The British High Court judges claimed that the Saudis had “sought positively to address concerns about International Humanitarian Law”…..”Saudi Arabia has been, and remains, genuinely committed to compliance with International Humanitarian Law; and there was no ‘real risk’ that there might be ‘serious violations’ of International Humanitarian Law (in its various manifestations) such that UK arm sales to Saudi Arabia should be suspended or cancelled,” the court said. “
One wonders whether judges can be indicted for perjury? Those judges would have known full well that their legal judgement was a total and outright lie. The Saudis have in fact done everything possible to exacerbate the suffering of the Yemen population over the past two years, with massive starvation and typhoid outbreaks the consequence of Saudi bombing of civilian infrastructure and a blockade of aid and food to Yemen (using British and U.S. aircraft ordinance, guidance and coordination) .
One might put this ruling alongside the eagerness of the U.K. to continue to pour millions into the Israeli military, which has for the past 60 years engaged in a war of not-so- slow motion genocide of the Palestinian people, for whom it has legal responsibilty as the occupying entity . One has only to read John Pilger’s account of the horrendous ordeal of the Palestinian people, to be shamed by our complicity in Israeli war crimes. What do these two delightful pariah states have in common?- firstly an overweaning desire for expansion and power; secondly the destruction of the Iranian state, and thirdly the use of religion to justify their expansionist goals; with the Saudis using their Wahhabist dogma to promote sectarian violence against those who do not subscribe to their bizarre version of the muslim faith, while the Zionists use the Jewish religion as a weapon against all those who defy their expansionist policies and appropriation of other people’s lands. As the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement gathers steam against the Israeli entity, having at least some friends Israel can rely on, may prove rather useful…
It is no wonder then that the long-standing secret alliance between the Saudis and Israel is now becoming visible, as political and moral pressure continues to escalate against both of them. The Saudi ‘princes’ have continued to publicly preach their opposition to Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands , whilst clandestinely supporting Israel. As the article in Investigaction notes: With some exceptions, support for the Palestinian cause in the Arab world is overwhelming. And regimes like Saudi Arabia have happily betrayed the Palestinian cause over and over again because they are aware that key to their survival is subservience to the United States, and that an alliance with Israel may boost their regional hegemony prospects. But because their legitimacy to rule is incredibly thin to say the least, royals and officials need to keep pretending in public that they are defending and fighting for the Palestinians.
As the economic and military power of Iran continues to grow, (despite the best efforts of most of the Western world; with sanctions and attempted coups and assassinations and wars), the anti-Iran hysteria within the ruling classes in these two regimes continues to escalate. For the Saudis, Iran , a largely Shi-ite theocracy ( i.e. decidely more democratic than the Saudis, but with brutal political oversight by its religious governing bodies) is a complete anathema to Saudi Wahhabist Sunni ideology, which holds that all non-Sunni muslims are in fact not muslim at all. In addition Iran’s rapid development of an internal arms industry (particularly in missile development) totally unreliant on Western imports, along with an economic structure largely independent from the West ( largely as a result of Western sanctions based on fraudulent claims of its development of nuclear weapons) has allowed it to pursue a totally independent foreign policy line- unlike the Saudis who remain completely reliant on U.K. and U.S. weaponry and therefore required to be largely compliant to U.S. and U.K military and political objectives in the Middle East.
For the Israelis, Iran remains the one major threat to its goals of a larger and all-powerful Israel; the Middle East country with the largest military (courtesy of the United States) and a nuclear arsenal . Iran continues to support fund and train Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to some degree Hamas in the Occupied Territories of Palestine itself. Both Hezbollah, with its devastating victory over the Israeli Army in Lebanon in 2006, and to a smaller degree Hamas, with its ongoing resistance to Israel’s brutal military incursions into the West Bank, have been a thorn in the side of Israeli expansionism, and hence have been deemed ‘terrorist organisations’ by the West. Hezbollah has again played a significant role against Al Qaeda (Al Nusra) and ISIS ( funded and armed by the Saudis and to some degree by Turkey, Qatar and Israel in the Syrian war, with coordination and logistics provided by British and United States intelligence agencies). And while Israel knows that Iran is not going to acquire nuclear weapons, it is fearful of the increasingly advanced home-grown missile technology that Iran posseses which now poses a significant deterrant to Israeli expansion.
Thus Israel and the Saudi regimes; both rapidly becoming pariah states, have increasingly cosied up to each other, (just as Israel did with apartheid South Africa in the 1960s) with Israel providing overt support to the Saudi war in Yemen, along with the British and Americans, on the premise that somehow/somewhere the Iranians must be supporting the Yemenese Houthi forces there. This most un-holy of alliances will inevitably be the undoing of both regimes…
Links
https://www.caat.org.uk/campaigns/stop-arming-saudi/judicial-review
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-saudi-arms-idUKKBN19V0YR
http://johnpilger.com/articles/palestine-is-still-the-issue
http://www.investigaction.net/en/israel-and-saudi-arabia-a-match-made-in-heaven-or-in-washington/
New Antarctica 