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By Ghulam Suhrawardi
The Collapse of “Arab Solidarity” and the Age of Complicity
For generations, the rhetoric of “Arab solidarity” has been presented as a unifying moral anchor of the Middle East, an unbreakable commitment to justice, dignity, and above all, the Palestinian cause. Yet today, that once-sacred ideal lies in ruins. Across Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, and the Horn of Africa, Arab regimes, particularly in the Gulf, have shifted from passive bystanders to active collaborators in campaigns of dispossession, genocide, and resource extraction.
Gaza is perhaps the most visible manifestation of this new order in overdrive. Israel’s war crimes are magnified by Arab silence and, in many cases, direct collusion. As hospitals are destroyed, as schools are demolished, as entire neighborhoods and refugee camps are flattened, Gulf monarchies issue carefully worded statements of “concern” and double down on their intelligence, security, and business relationships with Israel. Palestinian suffering is no longer a tragedy to be alleviated by these rulers but rather an opportunity to be exploited. A depopulated Gaza cleared of its Palestinian residents is both a boon for Israeli annexation and, in the long term, for certain Arab states grappling with their own demographic nightmares.
Gaza is just one front in this toxic realignment. Thousands of miles to the southwest, in Sudan, a genocide more widespread and haunting is unfolding in near-total media silence. In that case, too, Arab collusion is unmistakable. Israel is one actor in a well-financed, well-armed, and well-directed set of policies. The United Arab Emirates is the other. In Sudan, as in Gaza, the once-proclaimed moral brotherhood of the Arab world has ossified into a full-fledged machinery of mercenary armies, gold smuggling, and geopolitical aggrandizement.
What binds Gaza and Sudan and what exposes the rot at the heart of modern Arab statecraft is a single chilling formula. Displacement is not a by-product of this process. It is the goal. Space is cleared. Populations are uprooted and fragmented. Entire societies are torn asunder, so that foreign actors and their regional proxies can then seize land and minerals, ports and waterways, so that they can “create stability” and “deepen security cooperation.”
Sudan: The Deadliest War No One Talks About
All wars are terrible, and most of them should be prevented. But of all the wars being fought in the world right now, Sudan’s is the deadliest and the least reported. More than 150,000 people have been killed. Twelve million people have been displaced, making it one of the largest mass displacements of the twenty-first century. Women are gang-raped in front of their daughters and sisters. Children are abducted or forcibly conscripted. Mass graves have been found on the outskirts of Khartoum. Entire towns across Darfur and Kordofan have been burned to the ground.
The response? American campuses are quiet. Hollywood celebrities post nothing. News networks have given it minimal coverage. The world looks the other way as one of Africa’s most strategically important countries is reduced to warlordism, foreign interference, and imperial plunder.
To say that Sudan is caught up in an internal ethnic or tribal conflict is to commit an intellectual sin. In fact, Sudan is the site of a multi-tiered proxy war choreographed from afar. This war has been amplified and empowered by a host of foreign states and non-state actors: private armies, mercenary networks, and global resource cartels.
At the top of one list is the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). At the top of the other is the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). This militia originated as a paramilitary version of the Janjaweed death squads that perpetrated some of the Darfur genocide. But the RSF’s present strength, its modern weaponry, its fleet of armored vehicles, its satellite-guided targeting, and its access to massive mercenary manpower did not spring organically from within Sudan itself. It was built abroad.
The UAE provides the financial largesse. Israel provides the intelligence backbone and logistical architecture. Both coordinate the importation of tens of thousands of mercenaries from Chad, South Africa, Libya, Colombia, and El Salvador. Today, the RSF has a standing force of nearly 30,000 foreign fighters as well as dozens of private armies of its own that specialize in high-profile assassinations, ethnic cleansing, and “territory clearing.” Their mission is simple, brutal, and effective: empty land, empty villages, terrorize populations, and clear corridors for foreign gold extraction.
The result is a war no longer driven by any vision other than profit. No longer lubricated by religious dogma but by minerals. No longer sustained by nationalism but by geopolitics. Sudan’s agony is the price for the gold that funds Gulf wealth and Israeli regional strategy.
Gold, Mercenaries, and the New Colonial Map of the Red Sea
Gold is the dark fuel of Sudan’s genocide. The country has some of the world’s largest gold reserves. In 2022, more than 400 tons of Sudanese gold (worth more than $40 billion) were smuggled to the UAE. The figure has skyrocketed since the full-scale war began. The pipeline is as chillingly simple as it is predictable. RSF-controlled mines export gold into Emirati merchant networks that then transport it to Dubai’s opaque bullion markets, where it is laundered, refined, and resold to buyers around the world.
Every massacre enlarges the extraction zone. Every village burned opens a new mining corridor. Every dead body becomes a unit of profit.
Israel’s role in all this is equally significant. It has long sought to expand its footprint along the Red Sea, a maritime corridor linking the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and one of the world’s most strategic shipping chokepoints. A stable, democratic Sudan, closely aligned with the broader Arab world, would pose a serious problem for Israeli interests. An RSF-controlled Sudan dependent on Israeli intelligence and Emirati financing is a highly compliant gateway to the Horn of Africa.
The Emirati-Israeli alliance in Sudan is therefore no accident but a strategy. It is a marriage of convenience between Abu Dhabi’s financial ambitions and Tel Aviv’s geopolitical aspirations. And it is rewriting Sudan as a battlefield of extraction: a grand prize whose gold profits are transferred into offshore accounts while whose people are left with ashes.
This predatory expansion does not end with Sudan. From Yemen to Libya, Somalia to Ethiopia, the UAE is building a vast mercenary empire that finances separatist militias in Yemen, bankrolls Khalifa Haftar’s brutal offensives in Libya, manipulates domestic political factions in Somalia, and secures basing rights along the Horn of Africa. It is, in other words, seeking to build a twenty-first-century imperial corridor: a string of ports, bases, and mercenary armies across the Red Sea basin.
The phenomenon we once called colonialism is today recast as “security cooperation.” The reality we once denounced as an occupation is today dressed up as “counterterrorism.” The outcome, however, remains the same: foreign domination, resource extraction, and the extermination of indigenous populations.
Gaza and Sudan: Scenes of Displacement and Treason
One fact to bear in mind, among many, is that Gaza and Sudan are reflections of each other. In both, displacement is not collateral damage but the endgame. In Gaza, Israel is waging a war of attrition and atomization against Palestinian society writ large. The goal is to break it and, if possible, to empty Palestinian land. That result, long taboo for any Arab state to consider, has been quietly embraced as an alternative to the Palestinian question itself by some Arab regimes. In Sudan, the RSF is waging war by depopulating entire regions via murder, arson, and sexual violence. There, too, this is done in the name of resource extraction and mercenary control.
In both, Israeli interests are enmeshed in an Arab architecture of collusion. In Gaza, Gulf regimes maintain security and business relations, intelligence coordination, and backchannel ties with Israel even as its military flattens Palestinian neighborhoods. In Sudan, Israel’s operational support for the RSF is complemented by Emirati financing and arms pipelines, jointly forming a genocidal machine of death.
The tragedy here is not merely geopolitical. It is moral. Arab rulers have long peddled the myth of pan-Arab or pan-Islamic solidarity. But in Gaza, as in Sudan, they have behaved as accomplices to the murder of fellow Arabs and African Muslims. The entire edifice of Arab state legitimacy has been inverted from representing a citizenry to guaranteeing resources, intelligence, and strategic cooperation to Western powers and, above all, Israel. Arab regimes have thus lost touch with their own people even as their political economies and strategic decision-making have become more dependent on relationships structured around extraction and violence.
Gaza bleeds under the bombs. Sudan burns under mercenary boots. Yemen starves. Libya fractures. Somalia disintegrates. Yemen. Libya. Sudan. Syria. Across the region, societies are being shattered not merely by foreign adversaries but also by local collaborators.
The Gulf Rift: MBS, Trump, and Shifting Power Lines
Part of what makes this new order so explosive is that it helps to explain a recent and growing fissure between two of the region’s most important states: Saudi Arabia and the UAE. These two regimes have long been viewed as ideological soulmates: the so-called “princes of light” marching through history in lockstep, if in different languages. The recent meeting between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and former U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington has exposed a new reality: the Arab Gulf is in the process of shifting power lines.
For Riyadh, MBS’s visit to Washington was essentially a diplomatic hedge. By meeting with Trump, Saudi Arabia had sought to protect its interests with a sitting president and, by extension, to maintain influence with a possible future administration. For Abu Dhabi, which sees itself as Saudi Arabia’s junior partner in a bilateral axis, the optics were disastrous. A Saudi ruler willing to move his own way and, in the process, to hobnob with Trump, made it clear that this so-called “GCC” partnership was far less ironclad than previously assumed.
Saudi–Emirati relations are coming undone, behind the curtain. Their economic models are now at odds: in key areas, Riyadh is no longer a junior partner to Dubai but its chief competitor for dominance across a range of fields, from finance to tourism to logistics to the race for world headquarters relocation. The two countries have different geopolitical calculations in several theaters, including Yemen, the Horn of Africa, and Israel. The UAE is further along the path of private armies and mercenary operations in the region; Saudi Arabia has more interest in a state-centric, centralized form of influence projection.
The optics of Trump and MBS sitting next to each other were thus not mere diplomatic indulgence. It was a signpost, a thermometer, of a Gulf order in which the old certainties of alliance and alignment are no longer frozen. The region’s dominant states are no longer in step. Their respective heft and hunger, refracted through Vision 2030 or Emirati expansionism, are reshaping the politics of the Arab world.
In this, both are guilty. In their different ways, both have sought to prop up or, at the least, acquiesce to the region’s collapse into geopolitical hell. Both have failed to live up to the principles of Arab solidarity they like to mouth. And both have allowed their foreign policies to be conditioned, even dictated, by foreign actors and interests, American, Israeli, and European, among others.
Conclusion: A Region of Injustice and Betrayal
The great betrayal of Gaza and Sudan will be etched in history not only through the bombing and the killing on the ground. It will be etched through the palace walls of those who posed as brothers, yet took to the rear the role of genocidaires. Today, the Arab world has a choice. It can continue down the road of fragmentation, of mercenary armies, and the plundering of its resources and of its own morality. It can change course. It can set the path straight. It can call for justice from Israel and from the international powers, but above all, it can call for justice from Arab regimes themselves. Until the Arab world is willing to face up to its own complicity in all this, until it holds its own leaders to account, the whole region will pay the price. Gaza will bleed. Sudan will burn. Yemen will starve. Libya will fracture. Syria will disintegrate. Somalia will dissolve. The societies of this region will continue to collapse not just at the hands of external enemies, but due to the sins of internal betrayal. The Arab world is not only in a political crisis. It is in a crisis of conscience.
The author is the Publisher of the South Asia Journal.
