Divide and rule – how UAE is Israel’s ‘Trojan horse’ in the Gulf

APR editor — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 03:00:53 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

Without understanding the astonishing network of power exercised by the United Arab Emirates you would have no idea why the UAE was hit particularly hard by Iran in recent weeks.

Nor would you know what fuels chaos from Libya to Sudan to Somalia to Yemen.

If you understand the UAE’s business-geostrategic model and how it mobilises warlords, gold, oil, regional logistics and finance — you get much closer to seeing the pattern in the seeming madness.

Tiny UAE, 1.4 million citizens, wields so much power that Saudi Arabia sees it as a serious threat. In December, Saudi Arabia bombed UAE surrogates in Yemen and told the emirates to exit the country. They didn’t. If the US and Israel hadn’t attacked Iran, more fireworks were in the offing.

Israel is the UAE’s close ally. They collaborate not just on the War on Iran but in many of these various “civil wars” that are both money-making ventures and a series of heartless state-destruction campaigns that give them greater geopolitical weight in the region.

Israel is UAE’s close ally. Image: Google Earth map

We first need to understand what UAE (United Arab Emirates) really is. Comprising seven emirates — Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al-Quwain, Ras Al-Khaimah, and Fujairah — it is now the hub of an empire that both Iran and Saudi Arabia would like to knee-cap.

The powerhouse is actually Abu Dhabi, the oil giant which is the effective boss of the rest, including Dubai.

Family business with six sons
Abu Dhabi is a family business, run by The Bani Fatima, the sons of Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Al Ketbi who is the most influential of the wives of the late Sheikh. Today, ultimate power resides with MBZ (Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan) the eldest of her six sons.

MBZ was a long-time buddy of MBS (Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman) but those days are well behind us. In the words of a senior Saudi figure, Ahmed Altuwaijri, Abu Dhabi is Israel’s Trojan horse in the region.

Along with Bahrain, UAE is a signatory to the Abraham Accords which is a US vehicle to bring Israel in from the cold. The other Gulf States oppose this “Israel First” policy and are clear that a resolution of the rights of the Palestinians must come first, although they do little about it.

The Bani Fatimid system works like this: identify a country that is experiencing instability, pick a side (preferably anti-political Islam) and offer not only to finance that militia or warlord of choice but provide the immense logistical support the UAE has, including air freighting weapons, supplies and soldiers, and the complex systems needed to convert, for example, stolen gold into arms or other assets.

Time and again this has resulted in the creation of shadow economies that end up controlling significant resources (gold, oil, agriculture, ports) and creating parallel states. Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen have all been played in this way. It is textbook divide and rule: weakening a state from within to then exert ongoing influence and resource extraction.

Dr Andreas Krieg of the School of Security Studies at King’s College London told The Thinking Muslim channel recently that UAE is far more advanced than Saudi Arabia in establishing powerful, agile networks across a wide zone of influence.

“It’s not about size. Size doesn’t matter in the networked global order that we’re operating in today. It’s about connectivity and who you can mobilise on your behalf — whether it’s in the information environment or armed non-state actors, such as the STC (in Yemen).

“But it’s also the commodity traders, the financiers, the banks, the insurance companies, the other trading corporations, that you can mobilise to generate what strategy is all about: influence and power,” Krieg says.

Libya’s terrible 15-year civil war has been immensely worsened by outside states, including UAE which turned general Khalifa Belqasim Haftar from a YouTube revolutionary into the head of the massively resourced LNA militia that now controls about a third of the country.

With UAE commanding the centre of a hub-and-spoke system, it can move fighters around the region at will, for example from Libya to Yemen where it sent thousands of LNA fighters to support local client militias. By backing the Southern Transition Council (STC) in Yemen, UAE got control over the vital Port of Aden. Similarly, by partnering with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, tons of stolen gold flows into Dubai. You get the picture.

Gold is the prime currency of the Bani Fatima empire (MBZ and his brothers). Dubai is known in the region as The City of Gold, the place where the bulk of Africa’s yellow metal, much of it smuggled, finds its way.

Imagine this: at the very time tens of millions of Sudanese are suffering famine or near-famine conditions, the UAE is facilitating the export to Dubai of tons of gold to fuel the war. This represents billions of dollars that should be held for the benefit of the people but instead is being used for empire building.

In Somalia the UAE has switched sides when economic or strategic advantage could be made. Along with Israel, UAE is backing militias who have declared a break-away state “Somaliland” that borders the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

The UAE has military bases in “Somaliland” and has poured millions of dollars into the port of Berbera. With hundreds of kilometres of coastline adjacent to vital Red Sea shipping lanes, UAE and Israel will be important players in a contest with Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other powers.

In December last year Israel became the first to recognise Somaliland as a state. UAE is understood to be working on the Trump administration to do the same – further trashing the idea of territorial integrity for the sake of advantage. As an aside: Israel hopes to ethnically cleanse Palestinians to Somaliland one day.

All this dovetails with Israel’s strategy of smashing states to control them. For them, an alternative to regime change in Iran is Balkanisation to create several weak statelets thereby enhancing Israeli security and influence.

For those reasons and more, I hope the sovereign state of Iran survives the onslaught. I hope UAE and Israel’s genuinely evil business of fragmenting state after state is defeated. I hope the Western countries look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves: what kind of moral monsters would be allies of Israel and the UAE?

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz

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Divide and rule – how UAE is Israel’s ‘Trojan horse’ in the Gulf