DOMINOES must be a devil's game. Sudan has become the third Arab nation, after the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, to fall in the dominoes game of "normalising" relations with Israel.
This is no normalisation. This latest stab in the back of the Palestinians is a result of the devilish scheme of the Zionist regime and wayward administration of United States President Donald Trump.
Israel may as well be the 54th state of the US. If the New York Times is right, Sudan paid a heavy price for the thickening plot to isolate the Palestinians. One always does in deals with devils.
The price? Some US$335 million as settlement for a court case. And, more disgustingly, Sudan was forced to recognise Israel as part of a deal to get the country off the US terrorism list.
Arab nations cannot plead ignorance for not having been warned about making deals with the devil. Nearly a millennium and a half ago, the Arabs were so warned. What is more menacing is Trump was quoted by Al Jazeera as saying: "This will be the third country where we're doing this — and we have many, many more coming." Mind the "we're doing this". Yes, the Arab deal makers are done for.
We have three concerns with this Tel Aviv-Washington Mephistophelian machinations.
First is a very American one. The US$335 million is said to be as compensation to be paid to American victims of bombings against American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the destroyer USS Cole for harbouring terrorists. Let's assume Sudan did harbour the terrorists, though the court has yet to rule on this.
If Sudan is guilty, isn't this tantamount to allowing the country to buy its way out of the US terrorism list? Little wonder the NYT is calling Trump a transactional president.
To him, everything is up for sale, at a gunpoint if it has to be. Is Trump preparing the US to buy its way out by paying the victims and their families of American bombings in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere?
Then there is the issue of putting a value on life and limb. Just US$335 million? Even a mere institutional failure cost Goldman Sachs a US$5 billion payout to regulators around the world.
Second is a very Palestinian concern. Trump is following a very bad example set by Britain and France of dispossessing the Arabs.
If the US is truly a nation of law and order, as it claims to be, it must not coerce the Palestinians out of their right to have their own independent state.
The Zionist regime of Israel, with the complicity of the West, has long persecuted the Palestinians with the aim to drive every native Palestinian out of his land with the view to settling non-native Jews there.
Every move the Palestinians make to free themselves from persecution is crushed by the Zionists in Israel, the US and Europe.
Even a harmless movement such as Boycott Israel, which aimed to stop Palestinian persecution, was itself put to a quick end by anti-Boycott Israel laws in the West.
Finally, a very Arab concern. We can understand if the Arabs are willing to do their all for Arab unity. But to agree to do a deal that dispossesses fellow Arab Palestinians must be the costliest give out ever. The Palestinians will never forgive the Arab deal makers. So will not the Muslim world.