There is a recording making its way around Arab intelligence services this month. In it, the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas
...aka Abu Mazen, a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial. While no Yasser Arafat, he has his own brand of evil, just a little more lowercase....
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula, largely made up of sand and oil rigs. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual haj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Formerly dictatorial and steeped in Olde Tyme Religion, deferring to Salafist holy men on all issues, it has now done a 180 and is making a serious effort to modernize, so as not to be left in the sand by its Gulf Arab neighbors. The holy men have been shoved to the background and the nation is now still dictatorial but somewhat rational. That doesn't make them trustworthy, but it's a start...was struck by Iranian regime missiles during the war. He says, in the coded language Paleostinian politicians use when they think nobody is listening, that the Saudis had it coming.
He did not know he was being recorded.
He knows now.
The tape is just the symptom. What it exposes is that the president of the Paleostinian Authority has no friends left in the Arab world, and the leaders of Hamas
..the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®,...
, sitting in their Doha hotel suites, have just spent six weeks demonstrating the same thing.
The English-language press has missed almost all of it. Don’t be too shocked. Here is what actually happened.
When Israel and the United States opened the war on the regime in Iran
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for
spontaneouslytaking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet
militiasto extend the regime's influence. The word
Iranis a cognate form of
Aryan.The abbreviation
IRGCis the same idea as
Stürmabteilung (or SA).The term
Supreme Guideis a the modern version form of either
Duceor
Führeror maybe both. They hate
this spring, the Paleostinian factions discovered something they had spent decades insulating themselves from. They were irrelevant to their own war. The biggest Middle East war in a generation was unfolding, and nobody in any serious capital was asking Ramallah or Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response...
what they thought.
The Paleostinian commentator Ahmad al-Attawna put words to it on Arab television:
"The Paleostinian people clearly have no leadership, and I’m not speaking metaphorically; even in reality, there is no true leadership capable of presenting the Paleostinian people with a vision or a sense of where they are headed."
That is a Paleostinian, in Arabic, to an Arab audience, saying the thing Paleostinian intellectuals have been whispering in private from Amman to Ramallah for years.
Start with Hamas.
For two decades, Hamas has been Iran’s most valuable asset in the region. Funded and armed by Tehran, built carefully into an organization capable of executing October 7th. Ismail Haniyeh
...became Prime Minister of Gaza after the legislative elections of 2006 which Hamas won. President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed Haniyeh from office on 14 June 2007 at the height of the Fatah-Hamas festivities, but Haniyeh did not acknowledge the decree and continued as the PM of Gazoo while Abbas maintained a separate PM in the West Bank. Zapped during the 2023-24 war, to eveyone's satisfaction...
, the Hamas political chief the Israelis killed in Tehran in 2024, said it plainly on camera before his death: "I can only thank the Islamic Theocratic
Republicof Iran, which did not withhold money, weapons, or technology from the resistance."
Simply reading from the ledger. Without Iran, the Qassam Brigades would be a street gang with grievances. With Iran, they became the most effective non-state terrorist army on the planet.
Which is why what Hamas did when the war started is so revealing: Nothing.
Hamas did nothing. Not one rocket from Gaza. Not one drone. Nothing beyond a thin statement from Abu Obeida, formerly the masked front man of Hamas’s military wing, that was so perfunctory it felt drafted by committee: "We welcome the Iranian response that targeted all of occupied Paleostine and dealt a heavy blow to the criminal occupation forces."
Twenty years of Iranian investment, returned with a blurb.
And it got worse. According to reporting circulating in Gulf capitals, Hamas quietly asked Iran to stop attacking neighboring Arab states during the war.
The reason is not complicated, once you know the geography of power inside Hamas.
Iran was firing on Qatar
...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi...
. Qatar is where the political bureau sleeps, where the money clears, where the deals get cut. In the choice between the patron that had built the army and the host that was paying the bills, Hamas sided with the host.
The Egyptian analyst Ahmed Sultan, who watches these relationships the way Kremlinologists once watched Politburo seating charts, summed it up: "Hamas’ leaders have a pragmatic strategy; they see relations with Arab countries as purely based on interest, but the relationship with Iran is strategic. It is truly shameful."
In Arabic political discourse, ’shameful’ is a charge of moral bankruptcy that does not translate cleanly. When an Egyptian analyst applies it to Hamas on Arab airwaves, he is not describing a policy disagreement; He is saying the organization has lost its honor.
Tehran heard it too. There is already talk within Iranian security circles of making Hamas pay for its silence. Hamas will pay in ledger entries. Hezbollah showed up and paid for it in bodies. Hamas went quiet and will pay for it in dollars.
Then came the line from the Kuwaiti analyst Ayed al-Manaa that I suspect will outlive this war:
"Iran, which supported Hamas in Gaza, slaughtered, along with Hezbollah, the Syrians with knives. This is the Iran that Hamas is crying over."
It took a war and the collapse of Iran’s deterrent for an Arab analyst to say that on television.
Now to the Paleostinian Authority, which is a different story, and a darker one.
On paper, Mahmoud Abbas should have welcomed this war. The regime in Iran is the patron of his worst enemies; the force that expelled his government from Gaza in the 2007 coup and has been agitating against his rule in the West Bank ever since. The humbling of Tehran should have been the best month Abbas had in twenty years.
Instead, he spent it nursing a grievance.
Saudi Arabia has spent the last several years reducing its financial support to the Paleostinian Authority, the slow drawdown Gulf royals use to send a message. Abbas has never forgiven them.
Layer in two other resentments: the United Arab Emirates bypassed him entirely through the 2020 Abraham Accords, and Qatar funds Hamas, which is trying to destroy him. Abbas looks around the Gulf and sees no allies, only men who either ignored him or bankrolled the people who want him gone.
So when Iranian missiles started landing in Riyadh, Abbas, if the recording is authentic, which every official I have spoken to about it believes it is, expressed joy in what he thought were private conversations. Open pleasure that the Saudis were getting what he felt they had coming.
The Saudis found out, as the Saudis always do.
Abbas was forced to send Hussein al-Sheikh, his deputy and the man most people assume will inherit whatever is left of the PA, to Riyadh on a mission of abject apology.
Samir Hulileh, the former Secretary-General of the Paleostinian Cabinet, described the situation with the kind of candor you rarely hear at that level: "From the beginning, we didn’t have much influence over what was happening; now we’ve become even more irrelevant."
"More irrelevant." The word does almost the entire work of the sentence.
What this month exposed is a truth the Paleostinian national movement has spent fifty years concealing from the world and from itself.
It does not have principles. It has patrons. Hamas’s loyalty to Iran lasted exactly as long as Iran was the strongest player in the room. Abbas’s commitment to Arab solidarity lasted exactly as long as the Saudis were signing the checks.