Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, Saudi King Salman, and Donald Trump
BY AHMED THARWAT
We all watched it in the movie theater as we consumed our popcorn and drank our favorite soft drinks and lost ourselves in the myth of the charismatic British Army officer T. E Lawrence (played by Peter O’Toole). Lawrence spoke fluent Arabic, having worked as an archaeologist in Syria before the war. Lawrence thought of his mission as a private venture, a white man’s burden, without British material support or orders. British officials were skeptical of Arab abilities and sympathies after the 1917 Russian Bolshevik revolution. Arab countries were divided up between the British and the French, but the Sykes-Picot secret treaty and betrayal was leaked to Arab leaders by Russian Bolsheviks.
Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia
The British had been trying to convince Arabs that the Muslim Ummah should be led by an Arab from the Qurayish tribe from the Arabian Peninsula. Sharif Hussein was promised a prestigious position and a wide Ummah once the Ottomans were kicked out of Arab lands; he received neither. In hindsight, if Sharif Hussein had sided with the Ottomans against the British, it would have been a different story and a different film. In 1916, the Ottoman forces at Gallipoli beat the British, and the British were beaten again in Mesopotamia. Had the Arab leaders sided with the Ottomans, the British would have lost control of Egypt, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, and with it access to India. Lawrence of Arabia glorifies the role of the civilized Western white man who was able to lead savages and barbaric Arab tribes to organize and fight as soldiers. The scene that stood out to me is the battle of Aqaba where you can see Lawrence with his white robe riding on his camel, talking to Sharif Ali (Omar Sharif) and Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn ) heads of the two tribes and representing irrational tribal leaders who are about to start a tribal fight after a member of one tribe was shot. “I didn’t come here to watch a tribal blood bath,” Lawrence told them, as he grabbed a gun and took justice in his own hands and killed the perpetrator, who happened to be his beloved Arab guide Qassim. He avoided the tribal blood bath.
In the battle of the Aqaba, the Arab tribe’s forces descended on the retreating Turkish forces and slaughtered them without mercy. After the victory, you see Lawrence watching the Arab forces’ savagery and the barbarity of Arab troops, who seemed inherently bloodthirsty for violence. They were chanting, making noises common only in western films when the native Indians attacked the white settlers. Lawrence seemed to be the only one with emotional complexities. At the end you see Lawrence riding a camel alone looking at the Red Sea, the sun is breaking into the dawn, reflecting, contemplating the future of Arabia, whispering to himself, “God I love this country.”
Lawrence told Sharif Ali that he is embarking on a secret trip, leaving for Cairo, a journey of 600 miles across the Sinai. “If those Bedouins went to Cairo and told the Generals that they took Aqaba, they would laugh,” Lawrence explained, “The West only believes people who look and speak like them.”
Trump of Arabia’s first international visit was to Arabia, riding horses and dancing with leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE. This time, he asked Arab leaders not to revolt but to surrender. As the Palestinians are still resisting the Zionist colonial project in the area, Arab leaders are spending billions of dollars on new weapons not to fight the Zionist project and help the Palestinians, or to stop the genocide in Gaza, but for their own self-aggrandizement. Arab leaders are dancing with Trump, giving him a private jet and gifts as the Israelis bomb and massacre Palestinian children and women in hospitals and camps, and Israelis and Trump accuse the reporting of killing children as antisemitic. Western media is up in arms for the Qatar $400M plane given to Trump, using language like “illegal,” “bribe,” “payback,” “Qatar gaining political influence,” and “Arab lobby.” Qatar is a country the size of Connecticut that we have been defending for years, where we have the biggest military central command base in the Middle East. “Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country,” Trump explained on his Truth social media.
Trump seems to think we can negotiate directly with the Houthis and Hamas.
Americans used to spend 50-100 billion dollars to invade a country in the Middle East, Israel did that for much less, $10B. Now Israel is failing miserably in Gaza, exposing the barbarity of the Western colonial settler project, giving America and the West a moral and political headache. If Trump of Arabia can stop the Arab revolt against the Zionist project and make them submit to Israeli supremacy, then America can get billions of dollars from rich Arab countries without getting involved in wars in the area. That devil’s bargain brings flags, frameworks, photo ops and deals. The new order demands normalisation with Israel, submission to its military might, and silence on Palestine. “Once-defiant slogans are replaced by fintech expos and staged smiles beside Israeli ministers,” wrote Soumaya Ghannoushi in Middle East Eye. In return, Trump of Arabia offers political protection and weapons. For Trump of Arabia, “It is a doctrine of immunity, bought with gold and soaked in Arab blood,” Soumaya added. This week marks the 77th anniversary of the Nakba – The Catastrophe, replayed again through the ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinian refugees, and this time not with an Arab revolt but with Arab complicity.
