‘The Sky is Falling’: Arab League Warns ‘Religious War’ Could Follow Israeli Sovereignty

The head of the Arab League made catastrophic predictions in front of the UN, despite the fact that Israel’s sovereignty plan extends only to Jewish communities, leaving Arabs under Palestinian control.

By Ezra Stone, United with Israel

The head of the Arab League claimed at a UN meeting on Wednesday that Israel’s extension of sovereignty over Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria would fracture peace in the Middle East and could cause “a religious war in and beyond our region,” The Associated Press reported.

Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit also claimed sovereignty will have “broader ramifications on the international security around the world.”

“If implemented, Israeli annexation plans would not only be detrimental to the chances of peace today but will destroy any prospects for peace in the future,” he told the Security Council. “Palestinians will lose faith in a negotiated solution, I’m afraid Arabs too will lose interest in regional peace. A new dark reality will set in vis a vis this conflict and in the region at large.”

Whether or not Gheit’s predictions have any basis in reality remains to be seen.

While individual countries in the Arab world have also condemned Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, a number of them maintain strong back-channel relations with Israel, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

These countries seek relations with Israel to both combat the Iranian threat and bolster their economies with deals with “startup nation.”

Saudi writer Abdulhameed Al-Ghobain recently told Arabic media that he and others in Saudi Arabia support Israel’s sovereignty over Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Al-Ghobain also noted that the mythical “Palestinian state” never existed in history, referring to the Palestinian cause as “an illusion,” according to a translation provided by MEMRI.

In May, Al-Ghobain told BBC Arabic, “[Our] public has turned against the Palestinians in general. They have not contributed anything.”

He added, “Relations with Israel have gone beyond normalization. The relations have reached a very warm level.”

Harold Rhode, a former adviser on Islamic affairs within the U.S. Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, recently commented on the sovereignty issue, telling JNS, “Past history shows us that whatever [Arab leaders] say in public, they will most likely find a way to cooperate in private. [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas and other senior officials are running a racket and the money for the Palestinians is going straight to their own foreign bank accounts, so they have the most to lose.”

In the same JNS piece, author Ariel Ben Solomon notes, “Warnings from the P.A., Arab leaders and even Western leaders regarding the planned application of Israeli law in Judea and Samaria ring similar to the doomsday scenarios that were proclaimed prior to the Trump administration’s transfer of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The same rhetoric was also heard leading up to the annexation of the Golan Heights with U.S. support. Nothing happened in either case.”

In other words, whether or not the “sky is falling” because Israel is going to extend sovereignty over Jewish towns, as the Arab League publicly claimed in front of the UN, remains to be seen.