In both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the press is not free, but expresses the party line of their respective governments. And both in their press, and in the opinions of Emirati and Saudi individuals on social media, there is no sympathy for the PIJ, that was so devastated during the 66-hour war by the IDF.
“Saudi Arabia, UAE Criticize Palestinian Islamic Jihad Rocket Attack on Israel,” JNS.org, August 10, 2022:
Following the military conflict between the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Israel from Aug. 5-7, criticism was leveled in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against the terror organization entrenched in the Gaza Strip; it appeared in both the press and social media.
According to a report by MEMRI, critics claimed, among other things, that the PIJ is an Iranian proxy organization acting for the benefit of Iranian interests and thus inflicting suffering on Gaza residents. Further, they argued that the conflict erupted due to Iran’s desire to expedite nuclear talks in Vienna. One writer criticized the launch of Iranian missiles from within the civilian population in Gaza.
The PIJ certainly has been backed to the hilt by Iran, which has supplied it with weapons. But it is not true that the three-day conflict began when the PIJ was “ordered” to plot attacks against Israel. The PIJ is not like the Houthis in Yemen, who loyally follow orders from Tehran. While the PIJ accepts Iran’s support, it makes its own decisions as to when to launch terror attacks on Israel. Iran may have had no idea that the PIJ’s Bassem Sa’adi was planning attacks in the West Bank, nor could it have known what the IDF’s response — a preemptive attack — would be. But for the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, the PIJ’s receipt of weaponry from Iran is enough for it to be considered nothing more than a puppet of Iran.
Elements in Saudi Arabia and the UAE also mocked recent statements by commanders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warning that Israel would pay a high price for its crimes in Gaza and that Hezbollah would strike Israel hard when the time was right. They questioned why Iran was not following through on its threats.
In the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, there has been much mocking of the IRGC, which yet again has been threatening Israel, promising that the Jewish State would pay dearly for its attacks on the PIJ in Gaza, and insisting that the Iranians were only waiting for when the time would be right for them to strike. But during all the years of its threatening Israel, Iran has yet to launch a single attack itself (as opposed to occasional attacks from Lebanon by its proxy Hezbollah) on the Jewish state. And it was no different during Operation Breaking Dawn, when the IDF killed the leaders, and destroyed the weapons warehouses, command centers, and terror tunnel, of the PIJ. The UAE and Saudi commentators wondered aloud, mockingly , why Iran continued to utter threats but never to actually follow through.
In a lengthy front-page report on Sunday, the London-based UAE daily Al-Arab criticized the PIJ, writing that “Gaza again became an arena for the settling of accounts between Iran and Israel, when the Palestinian citizens are the ones paying the price.”
The Al-Arab paper blamed not Israel, but the PIJ, for starting the latest round of violence by plotting to attack Israeli targets. Israel, unwilling to let its citizens be harmed, at once preemptively unleashed its own attack, killing the entire leadership of the PIJ, including Tayseer Jabari and Khaled Mansour, PIJ commanders in the northern and southern sectors of Gaza, respectively, as well as hitting 170 separate targets in Gaza, including PIJ weapons storehouses, rocket launchers, control and command centers,.and a major tunnel project.
Saudi journalist Tariq Al-Homayed mocked Iran and PIJ in his Sunday column in the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat daily: “The question addressed here to the Qods Force commander and all members of the mendacious resistance is: When will ‘the time be right’ to remove Israel from the map and the globe … and why not [do it] now in response to Israel’s focused attack on Gaza, especially against the [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad movement?”
The Saudis know that Israel is here to stay, and they know, too, that Israel is the single most valuable ally they have against an aggressive and threatening Iran. It is the Mossad that time and again has disrupted Iran’s pell-mell rush to manufacture a nuclear weapon. The Emiratis know that not only is Israel here to stay, but that it provides great economic benefits to those Arab states that are willing, like the UAE, to enter the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with it. The UAE has already, in less than two years since it joined the Abraham Accords, made more than $2 billion in deals with Israel, in technology, trade, tourism, agriculture, defense, and cybersecurity. Now that the UAE and Israel have recently signed a free-trade agreement, the UAE predicts that by 2025 that UAE-Israel trade will be worth $10 billion.
In the Gulf Arab states, the PIJ’s destruction has been met with positive glee. It’s seen, correctly, as a severe blow to the PIJ’s ally, Iran. And how amusing for the Arabs who most detest and fear the Islamic Republic to point out the hollowness of Iran’s threats to attack Israel. What could be worse, for the ayatollahs who keep hoping to be feared, to find their current threats against Israel met only with mickey-mockery by Iran’s two worst Arab enemies, the UAE and Saudi Arabia?
