A report on Tuesday that Washington intends a "giant" sale of F-35 fighter jets and drones to the United Arab Emirates, in the wake of its rapprochement with Israel, was met with deafening silence by UAE officials on Wednesday.
In the wake of the report, Intelligence Services Minister Eli Cohen said there was "no change in Israeli policy opposing US sales of advanced weaponry to Arab states that could diminish Israel's military superiority."
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Last week, the UAE and Israel announced a historic peace deal, which made the UAE the first Persian Gulf state to forge official diplomatic relations with Israel and the third Arab country overall to normalize relations with the Jewish state, following Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994.
The US Embassy in Jerusalem had no immediate comment on the report. According to understandings dating back decades, Washington has refrained from Middle East arms sales that may diminish Israel's "qualitative military edge."
Meanwhile, Amjad Taha, an international affairs expert, a confidant of UAE government officials and popular social media pundit in the Persian Gulf, said it was Iran, not Israel, which should be worried by such an arms deal.
"Members of the Iranian regime are the Nazis of the Middle East," Taha told Israel Hayom. "The Iranians have a problem with Arab countries. Since the 1970s, the Iranians have held three islands belonging to the UAE. They killed millions of Arabs in the war with Iraq, in Syria, and Yemen," he said.
(Reuters via West Asia News Agency)
"They are brutally oppressing the Arab minority in the Ahvaz region, which Iran has occupied for some 100 years – some 11 million people, living under Nazi occupation conditions. They don't have the right to learn Arabic, unlike the Arabs in Israel, who also have representatives in the parliament. The Arabs in Iran have no rights whatsoever. They are killed in the streets," Taha told Israel Hayom.
Taha, who believes Iran will try torpedoing the historic diplomatic initiative via its proxy agents across the Middle East, mainly in the Gaza Strip, issued strong advice to Israel: "I assume the Palestinian [terrorist] organizations will try attacking civilian targets in Israel with missiles. But, the support for them and for the PLO in the Arab world is waning. Many Palestinians in the Emirates and other Gulf states are calling for the downfall of the Palestinian Authority because of the corruption in it and its inability to achieving anything at all for the Palestinians."
Taha continued: "We hope to see a revolution among the Palestinians against the PA. The Palestinian leadership has no other choice than to go back to war to try to garner any support whatsoever or to return to any form of negotiations with Israel. We hope Israel will not negotiate again with terrorists. We need to return to the principle of no negotiating with terrorists."
Taha also went on to describe the significant change in attitudes in the Middle East toward the Palestinians.
"There have been several Israeli attacks in Gaza in recent days. People started rallying support on social media sites under the slogan 'Gaza is under attack.' In the past, such a campaign would have quickly gained steam. Now people are saying: 'Hamas, the militias, and the terrorists are under attack.'
"We see Hamas using children, schools, hospitals, to shoot missiles [at Israel]. When the Palestinians lamented the assassination of [former Iranian general] Qassem Soleimani, a commander in Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – and the most loathed individual in Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf States – it was the final straw from our perspective. They called this man a 'martyr of Jerusalem.' This was the breaking point in Arab support for them," Taha said.
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