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As Gaza starves, Gulf leaders toast champagne behind closed doors. As children lose their eyesight from malnutrition, Trump is handed private jets. As hospitals are flattened, investment deals are signed. It’s not just surrender – it’s performance art. Theatrics of betrayal wrapped in the robes of prestige.
By PROFESSOR JUNAID S AHMAD
Donald Trump did not arrive in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha as a statesman seeking peace. He landed as a grifter in a gilded circus, surveying oil-rich satrapies that behave more like obedient franchisees than sovereign nations. This was not diplomacy – it was pageantry masquerading as politics, a grotesque theatre of indulgence and complicity. The backdrops were gold-plated. The applause was bought. The script was soaked in betrayal.
And while Trump basked in this manufactured reverence, Gaza burned.
Just a few hundred miles away from where Gulf royals offered him palaces, private jets, and trillion-dollar pledges, Palestinians were dying. Starved, bombed, and besieged, Gaza is being turned into a mass grave. Infants blind from malnutrition. Hospitals levelled with American-made bombs. Journalists killed while receiving treatment. And amid this horror, the same man who armed Israel to the teeth and cheered on its assault received thunderous applause and mountains of cash from the Arab world’s richest rulers.
Not metaphorical cash. Literal treasure. Saudi Arabia, whose entire GDP barely cracks $1 trillion, is reportedly preparing to invest that entire amount into the US economy – at Trump’s request. The UAE is pledging over $1.4 trillion in deals. Qatar, ever eager to keep pace, has gifted Trump a $400 million airborne palace. All this for a man who greenlit the annihilation of Gaza and praised the ethnic supremacists running the Israeli government as visionaries.
What, exactly, are the Gulf monarchs getting in return?
Nothing. Not peace. Not dignity. Not even basic respect. Trump openly mocked Salman, once boasting that the monarch ‘wouldn’t last two weeks’ without US protection. Instead of demanding an apology, they offered more. More jets. More investments. More humiliating deference. The rulers of the Gulf have become caricatures – crown princes who confuse capitulation with strategy, and who mistake grovelling for statecraft.
Let’s be clear: the Gulf states have leverage. Colossal economic clout. Strategic geography. Control over oil, trade routes, and soft power in the Islamic world. But what have they done with that power? Absolutely nothing. Not to stop the genocide. Not to lift the siege. Not even to extract a single concession. The most they offer is a photo op – staged smiles next to the man who has done more to dismantle Palestine than any US president in history.
This is not realpolitik. It’s cowardice dressed in designer robes.
Trump understands one thing: power. It’s why he fawns over Putin and respects Erdogan – not because he shares their ideologies, but because they assert national strength and refuse to be patronised. Arab rulers, by contrast, act like ATM machines with national anthems. They don’t demand anything. They just pay. And Trump, ever the opportunist, laughs all the way to the bank – literally.
Since leaving office, Trump has transformed the Gulf into a personal cash cow. A hotel in Dubai. A tower in Jeddah. A golf resort in Qatar. Cryptocurrency schemes. Private clubs. Billions funnelling into his family’s coffers. Jared Kushner, the princeling son-in-law, already secured a $2 billion investment from the Saudis despite having all the foreign policy nuance of a hedge fund intern. Now Trump’s being gifted aircraft fit for emperors. And for what? For offering the keys to the US arsenal and turning the Middle East into a showroom for American weaponry.
This isn’t foreign policy. It’s feudalism with Wi-Fi.
Gulf leaders are not paying for influence – they’re paying for indulgence. What they fear more than Israeli bombs, more than American disdain, is their own people. The prospect of a second Arab Spring terrifies them. They saw what happened in 2011, and they know they’re one spark away from popular rage returning. So, they do what desperate kings have always done: they buy protection from foreign mercenaries. Trump’s offer is straightforward: obey me, and I’ll keep you on the throne. Disobey me, and I’ll feed you to the wolves.
It’s a tempting deal for rulers allergic to democracy. Far easier to appease a foreign demagogue than answer to your own citizens. Far easier to normalise with Israel and parrot the language of ‘peace’ than confront occupation and apartheid. They kneel, not to preserve Palestine, but to preserve themselves. The price of their survival? The blood of Gaza’s children.
And yet, they have the audacity to call it diplomacy.
Meanwhile, Israel continues its rampage, emboldened by silence, protected by superpower impunity. Entire neighbourhoods in Gaza have vanished. Bunker busters are deployed on hospitals. Schools double as morgues. Humanitarian aid has collapsed. And still, Israeli ministers openly talk of transferring Gaza’s population to ‘third countries’. Ethnic cleansing is no longer whispered – it’s a campaign promise. Genocide is not denied; it’s livestreamed.
And Trump? He hands them more bombs. More green lights. More rhetorical cover. He doesn’t even bother with euphemisms anymore. His Middle East vision is simple: erase Palestine, prop up dictators, and redraw the region in Israel’s image. To him, Arabs are chaos. Israel is order. Arabs are instability. Israel is civilisation. It’s not a worldview. It’s a business model – and Gulf leaders are buying in bulk.
Trump came to the Gulf not to negotiate, but to collect. He held out his hand, and they filled it. He demanded obedience, and they saluted. He presided over the slaughter of Gaza, and they handed him gold.
And yet, some analysts – eyes wide shut – are heralding a ‘pivot.’ They claim Trump is finally distancing himself from Netanyahu, that he’s turning the page on Israel’s excesses. But this supposed shift is smoke and mirrors. The optics may have changed, but the payloads haven’t. The bombs still fall. The weapons are still American. Gaza is still being crushed under the weight of a US-backed war machine. What’s unfolding isn’t a break with Zionist brutality – it’s camouflage. A recalibration of PR, not policy. While pundits marvel at geopolitical theatre, the genocide continues offstage, uninterrupted and underwritten.
Even the anniversary of the Nakba – the original catastrophe that displaced over 700 000 Palestinians in 1948 – is now commemorated not with resistance but with complicity. As Gaza starves, Gulf leaders toast champagne behind closed doors. As children lose their eyesight from malnutrition, Trump is handed private jets. As hospitals are flattened, investment deals are signed. It’s not just surrender – it’s performance art. Theatrics of betrayal wrapped in the robes of prestige.
Some may say it’s American pressure that ties their hands. But that excuse doesn’t hold. Trump, for all his bluster, has repeatedly shown he can be influenced – when the Saudis pushed, he backed the Yemen war. Later, under pressure, he reversed course and made deals with the Houthis. He even considered lifting sanctions on Syria at Riyadh’s request. No president is beyond pressure. But when it comes to Gaza, the Gulf states offer only silence. Not because they can’t act – but because they refuse to.
Their fear is not Israel. It is democracy.
Because to act against genocide would mean standing for justice. And to stand for justice would mean inviting scrutiny at home. That is the real terror: not Mossad, but masses. Not tanks, but tweets. Not IDF air raids, but Arab uprisings. The real enemy, in the eyes of the monarchs, is their own population – restless, angry, and increasingly unafraid.
Meanwhile, Trump struts across the Gulf like a colonial viceroy. He doesn’t offer respect; he demands tribute. And the kings, the sultans, the emirs – they comply. They nod. They pay. They fund the very machinery that razes their own relevance. They do not merely allow the obliteration of Palestine – they underwrite it.
But while they play sultans in palaces of glass, the ground beneath them is shifting. The wider world is no longer watching quietly. Europe is beginning to fracture on the question of Israel. Latin America is speaking out. Even Canada, traditionally allergic to courage, has found its voice. Protests are erupting from London to Santiago, from Johannesburg to Jakarta. Students are risking arrest. Artists are defying censorship. Civil society is rising. The moral clarity that eludes Arab rulers is not absent everywhere.
In fact, it is growing.
And yet, in the Gulf, there is no such reckoning. Only cynicism. Bent spines. Open wallets. A diplomacy of disgrace. They are not securing their legacy. They are sealing their irrelevance.
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This is not leadership. It is treason.
History will not be kind. It will not remember the size of their palaces or the sparkle of their robes. It will not reprint their press releases or parade their summit photographs. It will remember what they allowed. It will remember what they funded. It will remember who they applauded while children were buried in rubble and entire families were erased from existence.
So let us not sanitise this moment with euphemism. Let us not mistake this grotesque performance for strategy. What we are witnessing is not a new era of Middle Eastern diplomacy. It is the coronation of cowardice. A coronation drenched in oil, splattered in blood, and gilded in gold stolen from the dignity of the Arab street.
Professor Junaid S Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com).
