President Biden, a week ago, touting his latest proposal for peace in the Middle East:
With a deal, a rebuilding of Gaza will begin [with] Arab nations and the international community, along with Palestinian and Israeli leaders, to get it done in a manner that does not allow Hamas to re-arm.
And the United States will work with our partners to rebuild homes, schools, and hospitals in Gaza to help repair communities that were destroyed in the chaos of war.
A meeting between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and a group of Arab officials about a month ago flew off the rails after an unusual shouting match between the UAE foreign minister and a senior adviser to the Palestinian president, according to five sources with knowledge of the incident.
Toward the end of the meeting the Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed pushed back and said he hasn’t seen any significant reform inside the Palestinian Authority, the sources said.
According to two sources, the Emirati foreign minister then called the Palestinian leadership “Ali Baba and the forty thieves” and claimed senior officials in the Palestinian Authority are “useless” and therefore “replacing them with one another will only lead to the same result.”
“Why would the UAE give assistance to the Palestinian Authority without real reforms?” he asked.
Now, Emirati foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed is just one high-ranking government official in the Arab world. But it is unlikely that he is the lone Arab leader with deep skepticism about the leaders of the Palestinians. Egypt refuses to open its border to Palestinians, and the Jordanians have a similar attitude. Former ambassador Ryan Crocker said earlier this year that despite public support for Palestinian rights, in truth nearly every Arab state has long viewed the Palestinians with “fear and loathing.” To get the Arab world to pay for rebuilding the Gaza Strip is a tall order; there’s an enormous amount of skepticism and suspicion to overcome, as the foreign minister’s outburst demonstrates.
Perhaps since that April 29 meeting, there has been some sort of breakthrough, or dramatic change in the UAE’s attitudes toward the Palestinians. If so, the Arab world is hiding this breakthrough or change in attitudes really well.
The issue of Biden’s mental state and advanced age isn’t just a question of memory lapses or weird squatting while on stage during the D-Day anniversary ceremony. It’s also a question of whether the president perceives things accurately, or just hears what he wants to hear and sees what he wants to see.