When it was writ­ten, there was no obvi­ous con­nec­tion to the Beatle’s prof­itable lyric “mon­ey can’t buy me love” and the Paul the Apostle’s warn­ing that “the love of mon­ey is a root of all kinds of evil’. In a coin­ci­dence you couldn’t make up, how­ev­er, mon­ey is the basis of an unholy link-up of two rep­re­hen­si­ble regimes and an eas­ing of a record-break­ing enmi­ty between two others.

The col­lu­sion of Moscow and Sau­di Ara­bia to dri­ve oil prices up by cut­ting pro­duc­tion, at the risk of a crip­pling world eco­nom­ic reces­sion, is more a “friends with ben­e­fits” arrange­ment than a love-fest, but mon­ey and evil are the com­mon ground.
Putin bla­tant­ly show­cased his dark­est side in Chech­nya. By the time he gave up try­ing to sub­due them in 2009, ten per­cent of the Chechen pop­u­la­tion had been killed and their cap­i­tal city, Grozny, was a pile of rubble.
It was one of the most bru­tal con­flicts I have ever report­ed on.
By col­lud­ing with Moscow to dri­ve oil prof­its up, the Saud­is are not only aid­ing Putin’s efforts to repeat that in Ukraine, they are sym­bol­i­cal­ly spit­ting in the eye of their most slav­ish body­guard. Amer­i­can pres­i­dents have been mak­ing secret pledges to pro­tect the Sau­di monar­chy since 1947.

                                      MONEY VS MORALS

For the past three decades the U.S. has been the world’s largest arms exporter, Sau­di Ara­bia its largest sin­gle customer.
Stag­ger­ing prof­its for the arms indus­try and the des­per­ate need for oil secu­ri­ty, go a long way to explain­ing why Wash­ing­ton pol­i­cy-mak­ers haven’t seemed to have noticed – or choose to ignore — that the Sau­di regime has more in com­mon with Vladimir Putin than them.
The short list of par­al­lels includes repres­sion of polit­i­cal dis­sent, human rights abus­es, long jail sen­tences for teenagers for “offens­es” as banal as regime-crit­i­cal Tweets, and intim­i­da­tion and mur­der of dis­si­dents abroad.
The Rus­sians tend to use poi­son. The Saud­is chose dis­mem­ber­ment for jour­nal­ist Jamal Khashoggi.
Fif­teen of the nine­teen 9/11 hijack­ers were Sau­di. The ques­tion of what, if any, role their gov­ern­ment may have played in the plot is still unanswered.
None of the five Sau­di air­bas­es often used by U.S. forces were made avail­able to help in the evac­u­a­tion when Kab­ul fell.
Nor have the Saud­is, despite being “Guardians” of two of Islam’s three holi­est sites, tak­en in any of the main­ly Mus­lim refugees and eco­nom­ic migrants flood­ing into Europe.
Recent­ly, some of them have been com­ing from Lebanon, once a favourite Sau­di play­ground, whose econ­o­my was all but trashed even before the threat of a world-wide reces­sion loomed.

                                   THE FLIP SIDE, UP TO A POINT

Ener­gy reserves have giv­en the coun­try poten­tial hope.
Lebanon and Israel have been tech­ni­cal­ly at war since the Jew­ish state was found­ed in 1948, longer than the more well-known sim­i­lar rela­tion­ship between North and South Korea.
The Mediter­ranean neigh­bours have just made what Israeli offi­cials called “an his­tor­i­cal agree­ment” that could pave the way for both sides to ramp up pro­duc­tion in a dis­put­ed off­shore gas field.
As Charif Sou­ki, the exec­u­tive chair­man of a Hous­ton-based liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas com­pa­ny put it: “Play­ers are final­ly real­iz­ing that it’s bet­ter to coop­er­ate than to con­tin­u­ous­ly fight.”
That sim­ple log­ic also helped dri­ve the 2020 “Abra­ham Accords”, which nor­mal­ized diplo­mat­ic rela­tions among Israel, the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, Bahrain. Moroc­co and, poten­tial­ly, Sudan.
Of course, it also comes with a price. Noth­ing in the deals has so far and prob­a­bly won’t ever make a dif­fer­ence to the Pales­tini­ans. It will just mean the Israelis have a lit­tle less oppo­si­tion (such as it ever was) to their refusal to make peace with the Pales­tini­ans, whose con­sis­tent resis­tance to com­pro­mise isn’t doing them any favours, let alone earn­ing a profit.
The evi­dence of that is clear in the case of the killing of Pales­tin­ian jour­nal­ist Shireen Abu Akleh in the Israeli-occu­pied West Bank. The Israelis ini­tial­ly blamed the Pales­tini­ans. Incon­tro­vert­ible evi­dence to the con­trary forced them to grudg­ing­ly admit there was what they termed a “high pos­si­bil­i­ty” that she was shot by an Israeli sol­dier. Acci­den­tal­ly, of course.
In 2020, the U.S. gave Israel $3.8 bil­lion dol­lars in aid, almost all of it for mil­i­tary assistance.
Abu Akleh was an Amer­i­can citizen.
To date, no one has been held account­able for her death.
The Bea­t­les could update their hit by adding jus­tice to the line about what mon­ey can’t buy.
Paul the Apos­tle has passed the test of time.

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