Enjoy this extra edition of Contention News! Know someone who might like to see it? Share it with them now:
The signing of the so-called Abraham Accords on Tuesday between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain -- brokered by the United States -- opened up discussions of further business ties between the countries.
“The UAE has financial capital in excess of what can be put to effective use within the country, which is why we have sovereign wealth funds,” Emirati entrepreneur Sabah Al Binali told the Saudi-based Arab News. “Israel has the advantages of human capital and ingenuity from all around the world. It’s a perfect fit.”
This is a neat summary of the real menace behind recent “peace in the Middle East” headlines: two of the region’s most notorious aggressors are teaming up to make more war in the future.
Israel’s historic role in destroying the homeland of the Palestinian is well-established. What may be just as important is the country’s role in the international arms trade. Tel Aviv has pushed arms sales to countries both openly and quietly. Even before the normalization of relations, Israel exported hundreds of millions of shekels worth of arms and defense-related services to the UAE annually.
Now, the UAE is seeking to transition from being a pure-play arms buyer -- one of the Middle East’s biggest -- to a weapons manufacturer and exporter. In November 2019, the UAE consolidated more than 25 companies in its armaments fields -- including the Emirates Defence Industries Company, owned by the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund -- into the Edge Group.
The combined firm touts $5 billion in annual revenue across industries including missiles, cyber warfare, electronic warfare and military surveillance technologies. The company told the trade magazine Army Technology that Edge's early focus is "not to drive revenue, but diversification and rapid expansion" including "export potential."
The UAE and Israel not only share a common business interest in exporting weaponry, they also seek to threaten Iran and authentic popular movements across the region. Eighty-five percent of the UAE’s population are non-citizens, and the government is a colonial-era fiefdom with no accountability. These recent moves create synergies in the effort to maintain the present structures in the Middle East, legalizing sectors of the UAE’s military and intelligence industry that were shadowy until now.
One such company under the Edge umbrella: Beacon Red, a for-profit intelligence firm established in 2018 by Fasial Al Bannai, now Edge’s CEO. The company’s core philosophy is “to adapt and evolve, disrupting the complacency of the status-quo in any conventional or asymmetric environment.”
Edge CEO Faisal rose in business as an electronics distributor before forming DarkMatter -- another firm now under the Edge umbrella -- which describes itself as a "cyber security partner to the UAE government and other clients ... as well as partner with vetted global technology companies to develop cyber security products, solutions and services."
DarkMatter's history lies in the grey zone between an above-the-board cybersecurity company and state weapon. Whisteblowers described a firm that poached employees from the U.S. National Security Agency and paid well -- up to $1 million annually -- for graduates of Israeli military technology programs.
Two confidential DarkMatter programs, Project Raven and Karma, turned out to be offensive cyberweapons used to surveil dissidents and hijack electronic devices within the UAE for the purposes of cyberwar.
"In a near future, every single electronic device in the UAE will unwillingly be part of their state botnet," Italian security researcher Simone Margaritelli told The Intercept.
Now the consolidation of Edge as the UAE’s military industry umbrella and the normalization of UAE-Israeli ties can further open up Emirati markets to Israeli companies, expanding the Israeli footprint in the Middle East and Africa. The UAE and Israel are both already backers of the warlord Khalifa Haftar, the leader of the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army, yet another foothold for U.S.-aligned power in the region.
But don’t tell that to the triumphant liberal voices in the U.S. media that can only frame the issue in terms of settling some long-standing blood feud. The UAE’s corrupt monarchy has long collaborated with the war criminals in Tel Aviv to maintain their respective positions of power. Now they are simply dispensing with the need for pretending otherwise.
Photo credit: U.S. Air Force