The Secret Marriage: How Arab States Betrayed Palestine While Denouncing Gaza

Someone had to organize the catering; that’s the detail that got me.

From the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, Arab states have issued a steady stream of condemnation – labeling it genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing – even as they’ve been secretly deepening their military ties with the very state carrying it out. The secrecy, however, hasn’t protected them.

That was the conclusion of a leak obtained by the Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – published in October 2025, months before the United States and Israel’s own war on Iran began: five CENTCOM PowerPoint presentations documenting an entity called the “Regional Security Construct” – a secretive network, operating since 2022, tying Israel to six Arab states: Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, with Kuwait and Oman standing by as “potential partners.” Every one of these governments has at some point in the last three years stood up and condemned the genocide in Gaza. Every one of them has also helped keep Israel’s military machine running. It’s a staggering betrayal.

The condemnations at the UN in September 2025 were strong: Qatar’s emir called it genocide; the Saudis said starvation and ethnic cleansing; Egypt and Jordan agreed.

Now look at what those same states were getting up to in private. In May 2024, high-level Arab and Israeli military officials met to coordinate – at Al Udeid Air Base, the US facility located inside Qatar. Traveling the usual way – the airport at Doha, passport and diplomatic controls – would leave a paper trail, hence the Israelis bypassed formalities and instead flew directly onto the base.

The internal planning document for the meeting contained a section with the heading “MUST NOT DO”, and strictly forbade photographs and any media contact. Beneath the itinerary, a note reminded staff they should observe culinary restrictions for both Muslim and Jewish delegates: “No pork / crustaceans.” Someone still had to sort the catering for this shadowy military alliance. Mirrors, Cocteau said, are the doors through which Death comes and goes. In this case, it was the catering memo.

Governments lie, everyone understands this. However, these documents are about a lot more than that. The slides state clearly that the partnership “does not form a new alliance” and that meetings are to be “held in confidence.” Concealment was part of the blueprint, and of course they all played along.

As Palestinians in Gaza were being bombed, the men whose governments claimed to speak for Palestine were coordinating regional air defenses with Israeli military officials down the hall – discussing radar coverage against Iran over lunch, while the genocide continued next door. By 2024, CENTCOM had linked most of the seven partners – the six Arab governments plus Israel – into a joint radar and air-defense picture focused on Iranian missiles and drones.

A detail in the slides that catches the eye: a 2025 meeting at which a Saudi representative and a US intelligence official jointly delivered an “intelligence overview” – Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, Islamic State – one of the two briefers from a kingdom with no formal diplomatic relations with Israel.

All of this elaborate scheming failed spectacularly when Doha was struck on 9 September 2025 in a sneak assassination job on Hamas officials. The complex air-defense system the Arab-Israeli network had just spent three years building amounted to nothing. The American radar was pointing in the wrong direction, since the attack didn’t come from Iran – but from Israel. Qatar’s separate air defense systems missed it too. The Trump administration reportedly leaned on Netanyahu, who apologized three weeks later.

The network’s failure wasn’t limited to Doha. On 28 February 2026, the day the US and Israel opened their war of aggression on Iran by killing its Supreme Leader, Iran’s retaliation went for the network’s jugular – ballistic missiles and drones struck the US Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain, while simultaneous strikes smashed a THAAD missile-defense radar at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan and a phased-array radar in Qatar, with widespread damage reported across the UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Following a brief pause, hostilities resumed in early July, and on 23 July Iran’s military said it had destroyed a second radar and a Patriot system at another US base near Azraq, in Jordan. Every partner state named in the CENTCOM documents except Egypt has now had its radar coverage hit, disabled, or claimed destroyed.

On 29 July, Iran returned to Muwaffaq Salti – the same US/Jordanian base it struck earlier in February – launching ballistic missiles in what CENTCOM had the cheek to call a “surprise attack.” CENTCOM did not clarify whether it came before or after the US and Saudi Arabia struck Iran-backed militias in Iraq that same morning. Trump’s response was characteristically restrained: “We are going to beat the f**king sh*t out of them.”

Fresh strikes were hinted at for the first weekend in August but did not materialize – according to reports that came to light during the pause, Washington’s munitions stockpiles, both defensive and offensive, have been significantly depleted since the start of its war on Iran in February. The secret network that these Arab states built in collaboration with Israel and the US to guard the Gulf is in ruins. The global hegemon that built it with them is running low on ammunition.

The system is crumbling under the threat it was built to stop.

So why the secrecy? Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies identified the answer: it allowed everyone involved to sidestep the bitter pill of the political argument. Working covertly with Israel’s generals is more palatable than being seen as direct collaborators. But, he said, the network masks how profoundly these states distrust each other and Israel – a distrust the Qatar strike exposed. “A key member of the American effort has attacked another,” he said, “with America seen as complacent, complicit, or blind.”

Mainstream media coverage has largely framed this as merely embarrassing – hypocritical Arab leaders caught out, business as usual. Except that is not what the documents are about, and it lets the governments involved off far too lightly. The same regimes that normalized ties with Israel have essentially reduced the Palestinian cause to lip service – and the CENTCOM documents show exactly how far that abandonment extends, as The Electronic Intifada has argued. This goes way beyond leaders occasionally crossing paths with their Israeli counterparts on the sidelines of a conference. Built by the United States, this three-year-old network has its own dedicated bureaucracy – a cyber center, an encrypted messaging network, information-operations planners, even special dietary instructions and a “MUST NOT DO” slide – all of it built to hide an alliance that Israel’s genocide in Gaza had already made politically toxic.

The Palestinians are not an incidental factor; they are the reason for all the secrecy. The Gaza genocide is built into this, with each government named in these documents consciously choosing to sustain it.

Richard Edain is a teacher and writer based in the UK and Vietnam. His long-form historical journalism appears on Substack as the Ulysses Files and has been published on Antiwar.com. Contact: edainrichard@gmail.com.