AN OPEN QUESTION:

By Tim Porter, CircumspectNews.com, Updated Jan 6, 2024

Israel’s war against Hamas has reminded the entire world that it is in agreement on at least one point: The Middle East remains a powder keg. Factions within factions have been in conflict for millennia.

Despite that camel in the room, some have had the audacity to envision the unthinkable, as outlined by Ed Husain in his 2014 Financial Times op-ed, entitled, The EU Offers a Model for Unifying the Middle East. Re-posted by the prominent globalist think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, Husain’s op-ed opened with this premise:

“Not long ago, Europe was a continent that resembled how the Middle East looks today…. Yet there is reason to hope Europe’s past and present can inform the Middle East’s future. Just as a warring continent found peace through unity by creating what became the EU, Arabs, Turks, Kurds and other groups in the region could find relative peace in ever closer union. After all, most of its problems – terrorism, poverty, unemployment, sectarianism, refugee crises, water shortages – require regional answers. No country can solve its problems on its own.“

A Middle East Union?
So the globalist hope is for Middle East nations to follow the example of the French and Germans, who buried the hatchet after their historic enmity in Europe culminated in two world wars. Europe memorialized that conciliation by erecting the European Union’s Tower of Babel parliament building in Strasbourg, France, just west of the Rhine River adjoining Germany. But how on earth do globalists think they can pull off an open-border region-building project in the Middle East, where the original Tower of Babel fragmented into more ancient hatreds that many project will not end until Armageddon?

At a 2009 Global Policy Council confab in Berlin, CFR icon Henry Kissinger, in the euphemistic manner of a seasoned globalist, summarized the globalist approach to how Islamic nations will organize  “either into larger states or one unit”:

“The problem of the future of Islam will be one of the huge global problems of the next decades….
As Islam organizes itself – either into larger states or one unit – but as Islam organizes itself…. if it becomes an issue of conversion by Islam of the rest of the world, then other regions will be drawn into confrontation. If Islam operates on a basis – however it is internally – but where towards the outside world, it recognizes a multilateral and pluralistic approach, then it would be an important component of the international system.”

In other words, Kissinger would be fine with Islamic nations uniting into what would widely be considered as a vast caliphate, as long as they do not attempt to force their caliphate onto “other regions,” like the EU. Such an Islamic cooperation with the global order would take a heavy amount of moderation or secularization toward the “outside world.” Otherwise, Kissinger would foresee its conflict with other regional blocs.

Moreover, a “one unit” of Islamic nations would cover a vast land mass, but Kissinger surmised that Islam could organize into more than one bloc. That would allow for Husain’s more exclusive Middle East Union.

Region-building
As farfetched as the scheme appears, globalists’ current lack of region-building success hasn’t been for lack of effort. That same globalist mindset was the premise for the U.S. quagmire campaign to moderate, secularize and region-build Islamic Afghanistan and Pakistan, along with Hindu India, into the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC). After decades of blood and toil, that initiative has proven to be a fool’s errand, and India has lately been turning its South Asian multilateral efforts more toward its eastern neighbors within BIMSTEC.

Attempts to build EU-style regional blocs in South Asia and the Middle East have been part of an ongoing globalist effort to develop similar pan-regional organizations in all other regions of the world, including North America. Ultimately, the current number of roughly ten regional blocs are meant to be an incremental step toward a federated world order of regional blocs.

BLOC HEADS (2013) Part 4 of 10: SAARC (S Asia), Arab League

Arab League, GCC and MEFTA
Concurrent with the birth of the United Nations, efforts to bring about a pan-Arab regional organization first came into focus in the closing days of World War II with the founding of the Arab League in 1945. The Arab League’s development preceded even that of war-torn Western Europe. The more exclusive Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a bloc of Arabian Peninsula monarchies headed by Saudi Arabia, was established in 1981.

Since those days, bickering among member nations and various pugnacious leaders has rendered both Arab regional organizations relatively ineffective. A series of limited Middle East peace agreements, brokered by the United States, closed out the 20th century.

The turn of the century brought renewed efforts to regionalize Middle East nations. Following 9/11, it was the neocon globalist George W. Bush administration that first embarked on the ill-advised mission in Central-South Asia to region-build Afghanistan into SAARC. That project continued throughout the presidency of Barack Obama.

Bush, aided by like-minded neocon globalists, Senator John McCain and then-Congressman Paul Ryan, also pushed for a MEFTA (Middle East Free Trade Agreement). But much like the Afghan-SAARC project, MEFTA failed to sustain any momentum. It was shelved about the time that the Obama State Department’s proposed “jobs for jihadis” program was met with much ridicule.

“Free trade” agreements are often a first step utilized by globalists to open borders among nations and lead them incrementally toward political unions, following the model of the European Union. Despite its setbacks, Saudi Arabia’s GCC is now a leading candidate to become the first regional bloc other than the European Union to reach the EU’s geopolitical level of integration.

A big step toward open borders in the GCC has just recently been achieved with the approval of a new single unified visa for all GCC nations. Similar to the EU’s Schengen Zone, the visa allows entry into any GCC nation with unimpeded travel throughout all nations in the bloc.

Abraham Accords
Conspicuous in its absence from the premise of Husain’s wistful Middle East vision is a definite reference to the state of Israel. A subsequent interview article in The Guardian gave some clarification, quoting Husain as referring to a “Middle Eastern Muslim Union.” So, according to Husain, Kissinger and other globalists, just what would Israel’s place be, situated right in the middle of a Middle East Muslim Union?

Muslims have squabbled enough among themselves, but today much of the turmoil in the Middle East has been compounded by the thriving reemergence of a modern-day Jewish homeland in Israel. Whether or not the world goes further to accept the following biblical depiction as an actual prophecy from God, none can deny that Israel’s modern reestablishment has indeed become a “burdensome stone” – a heavy lift to consider in multilateral negotiations.

The Abraham Accords, brokered by the Trump administration to normalize Israeli relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, has become the globalist means to breach that regional discord, particularly with the expected addition of an Israeli agreement with Saudi Arabia.

After Hamas
The Saudis reportedly have indicated a willingness to resume normalization talks with Israel, including joint regional infrastructure projects, once Israel concludes its war with Hamas. A Saudi-Israeli agreement, along with the Abraham Accords, would bring three of the six GCC nations into a peace agreement with Israel, including the most prominent GCC member.

Several points work in favor of a Saudi-Israeli agreement: GCC nations, as wealthy Arab monarchies, are better able to subdue protest and assuage public opinion, as they did while other Arab nations were besieged by Arab Spring uprisings. Also, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has shown a propensity toward business profit above other concerns.

Likewise, the Israelis are not immune to a profit motive themselves, although many secular Jews in Israel also share what David Horowitz described as the “raft” perception of Israel. That sentiment – from which Horowitz dissented after his leftist younger days – yearns for a politically socialist world order that suppresses national distinctions, so that Jewishness can simply blend in with other “world citizens.” However, it allows exception for a state of Israel as a temporary “raft” until the world is delivered from the “shipwreck” of nationalism. It is that sentiment which would allow added support for Israel to dip its toes into the sandy waters of multilateral peace talks.

Egypt and Jordan, with whom Israel already has peace agreements, are commonly suggested to be the next likely candidates for GCC expansion. If that indeed occurs, then the Abraham Accords would augment the peace agreements already made with nations directly bordering Israel.

However, a comprehensive agreement with all nations bordering Israel cannot occur until Israel”s immediate border security threats are eliminated – the militant terrorists allied with Hamas in Gaza and Judea-Samaria, and those allied with Hezbollah in the two nations to Israel’s immediate north, Lebanon and Syria.

That additional scenario would, presumedly, complete a security rim with an inner periphery of nations buffering Israel’s borders. These nations would either all have peace agreements with Israel, or would have been subdued into ceasing border conflict. That would be to the chagrin of a distinct outer periphery of simmering nations that would include Russia, Iran, Libya and Turkey.*

‘Unwalled villages’? Ezekiel 38:11-17 *
As mentioned, a key goal of regional “free trade” blocs is eventual open borders, allowing a “free flow of goods, services and people” within each bloc. National borders are considered an obstacle to overcome.

That goal is supported by building regional infrastructure to accommodate “free flow.” Regional infrastructure has gained even greater emphasis since the perceived “fragmentation” of global supply chains into regional chains to support “nearshoring.” Regional infrastructure includes ports, manufacturing hubs, trade-route railways, highways, waterways, and power grids that transcend borders with customs-free, express connection within a bloc of nations.

The protocol directives of the Arab GCC are consistent with these goals. Under a proposed Saudi normalization with Israel, including the IMEC (India-Middle East Economic Corridor), the GCC’s ongoing regional infrastructure projects and underlying trade routes would extend from Saudi Arabia through Jordan to port at Haifa, Israel, and by sea to the EU port of Piraeus, Greece. So, at the very least, GCC regional trade routes would expedite the linking of Israel’s economy directly with GCC “free trade” commerce and its trade route to the EU.

Multilateral ‘covenant with many’
Daniel 9:24-27 **
Since the Saudi-led GCC is a formal “free trade” bloc, then any Saudi trade and infrastructure agreement with Israel would be bound to recognize that reality. For Israel, such an agreement with the Saudis would, by extension, be a de facto trade agreement with the entire GCC, short of actual accession to membership.

Proposed agreements notwithstanding, no other region on earth has a longer history of bazaar-like deal making, cloak-and-dagger intrigue and treacherous deception than does the Middle East. Given that reality, how could this region ever confirm such a comprehensive multilateral peace agreement, involving EU-like political union, “free trade” and open borders? That’s an open question.**


* The events and scenarios described above are believed to be consistent with a literal interpretation of the Bible’s prophetic events leading up to and into the Great Tribulation period.
In Ezekiel 38, the alliance, the battle’s magnitude and its contextual sequence of events has never happened in history. None of the inner periphery of nations surrounding and directly bordering Israel are identified in this passage as being part of the attacking alliance. (Also see this full text online: Things to Come: A Study in Biblical Eschatology by J. Dwight Pentecost)

**Regardless of whether Israel would actually become a member of a Middle East Union (MEU), the coming antichrist’s deceptive “covenant with many” described by Daniel – perhaps augmented by a multilateral, inter-regional trade/security agreement between an an emerging MEU and the EU – would likely include convincing Israel and the Arab bloc that they all can reap benefits from an Israeli “free trade” arrangement with its neighboring regional bloc. These are particularly intriguing considerations in light of both the “ten kings” (Dan 7:23-28; Rev 17:3, 12-13) and the Gog-Magog (Ezekiel 38) prophetic scenarios.