THE announcement on Thursday that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel have reached a peace deal did not emerge suddenly in the past months but had been prepared for at least five years.
What is also becoming clear is that this deal brokered by US imperialism was not simply a move by either Trump or Israeli prime minister Netanyahu to bolster their standing in the polls, although each of them has claimed it as some kind of victory.
Yesterday, the Sunday Telegraph disclosed that in 2015 a secretive office was opened by the UAE and Israel to house an Israeli task force set up in the headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE.
According to the paper, with no formal UAE diplomatic relations with Israel at the time, this acted as the centre for developing plans for a US-UAE-Israel alliance.
The true intent of this deal has been revealed by the interview published in the Telegraph with Dore Gold, a former Israeli Director General of the Foreign Affairs Ministry from 2015- 16.
Gold told the paper that he predicted this deal would be the first step in forging a NATO-style alliance between Israel and the reactionary Gulf States, under the US umbrella, to wage war against Iran.
He said: ‘I think there’s an analogy here to what happened in Western Europe after the Second World War. You had former adversaries, France and Germany, being able to pull together under the America umbrella and form an organisation called NATO. I see the issue of a mutual threat providing the basis for cooperation between former enemies.’
Gold made it clear that the ‘mutual threat’ was Iran saying that the UAE had a ‘very big problem with Iran’.
Ever since the clandestine task force was set up, there have been reports alleging joint military cooperation between the UAE and Israel, including the Israeli military hosting members of the UAE military in 2018, and of covert intelligence cooperation.
According to the Telegraph, Yossi Cohen, director of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, secretly visited the UAE on several occasions before the deal was announced.
What is clear is that all these moves towards a military force to confront and wage war on Iran pre-date Trump’s deal of the century which gave the green light to the Zionist state to seize a third of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley and claim it as Israeli territory.
The UAE claims that it reached its deal to prevent this illegal seizure of Palestinian land. This claim is nothing more than a tissue of lies to cover up the real intention of forging an alliance with Israel. They and the imperialists intend to expand the pact to include Saudi Arabia and other reactionary Gulf states to wage a war against Iran.
So far, Saudi Arabia has kept silent on this deal that has met with widespread condemnation throughout the region as a betrayal of the Palestinian people but it is certain to be in favour of joining a NATO-like alliance for war against Iran.
The common interest of Israel, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the US is to forge a joint force, like NATO, to drive war across the entire region to place it and its resources under the direct control of US imperialism.
This war against Iran was stepped up last week when it was confirmed on Friday that the US had seized four ships containing Iranian oil bound for Venezuela and ‘confiscated’ over a million barrels of fuel as part of its economic war against both Iran and Venezuela.
The Tories are of course fully in support of these plans. Johnson welcomed this deal and last year the UK government announced it wanted to set up a ‘coalition of the willing’ to police the Gulf.
This failed when it could not get support at home or from amongst EU states, but it is certain that the Tories will be right behind a NATO-style force in the Gulf.
Workers in the US and UK must lead the way in defending Iran and the Palestinian people from imperialist war by rising up and overthrowing ‘the enemy at home’, their own capitalist ruling class, with socialist revolution.
