Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has to “knock it off” in his feud with the UAE, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said on Friday, picking a side with one US Gulf ally over another in a rift that has echoed across the Middle East.
“Knock it off Saudi Arabia, knock it off. I’m tired of this crap. MBZ is not a zionist and you are emboldening Iran by having this conflict,” Graham said at the Munich Security conference on Friday evening.
MBZ is the acronym for UAE leader Mohamed bin Zayed.
Graham appeared to be particularly upset with criticism that Saudi thinkers and analysts have levelled against the UAE over its close partnership with Israel.
Israel has been isolated in other Arab capitals over what the United Nations says is a genocide in Gaza, with over 72,000 killed, and Israeli attacks against Lebanon, Syria and Iran. But the UAE has generally stood by Israel. The two countries normalised ties in 2021 as part of the US-brokered Abraham Accords.
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Current and former US officials told Middle East Eye that the Trump administration had noted the “religious dimension” in the feud between the wealthy Gulf families that rule the two Gulf states.
MEE revealed on Wednesday that the UAE pressed pro-Israel lobbying groups, including the American Jewish Committee, which has an office in Abu Dhabi, to condemn Saudi Arabia for alleged antisemitism.
Saudi Arabian commentators have virulently pushed back on the notion that criticism of Israel, and the UAE’s partnership with it, equates to antisemitism.
‘Knock it off Saudi Arabia, knock it off. I’m tired of this crap’
– Senator Lindsey Graham
“The UAE knows antisemitism is sensitive in the US, so they are trying to manipulate it with allies of Israel for gain. But this claim is outrageous and completely false,” Dr Ahmed Altuwaijri, a Saudi academic and former dean at King Saud University in Riyadh, told MEE.
Ironically, by denying that the UAE’s ruler was a Zionist, Graham appeared to acknowledge that the charges levelled against the UAE over its deep ties to Israel could be damaging its standing in the region.
The Trump administration hasn’t publicly waded into the rift, but Graham is a close ally of US President Donald Trump and an ardent supporter of Israel.
‘We gotta think big picture’
Ties between the erstwhile allies, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, have been strained for years, but the tension erupted in spectacular fashion in December when the latter led a counter-offensive against the UAE’s allies in Yemen. Riyadh has since moved to evict the UAE and its local proxies from the country.
Across the Red Sea, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are at loggerheads over Sudan, where the kingdom, along with Turkey and Egypt, backs the Sudanese army against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which is supported by the UAE.
Saudi Arabia is also moving closer to Eritrea and Somalia as the UAE deepens ties to Ethiopia.
UAE lobbied pro-Israel groups to level antisemitism charges against Saudi Arabia
“I know they’ve got differences in Yemen and they’ve got differences in Sudan, but we have got to think bigger,” he said, spending little time discussing both conflicts, which have had a tremendous humanitarian toll and which leaders in many Arab capitals aligned with the US view as destabilising.
The RSF has been accused of committing war crimes such as extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape during a conflict in which an estimated 2.5 million people were displaced and 300,000 killed.
The Sudanese army has also been accused of committing atrocities.
The war’s outcome is seen as vital to security in the Red Sea by regional countries.
Likewise, Yemen is often described by Saudi Arabian officials and analysts as one of the kingdom’s top security concerns. Riyadh views the UAE’s support for secessionists there as destabilising. For its part, the UAE, a country one-third the size of Saudi Arabia, has long cultivated militias and secessionists in the region as allies.
Western and Arab diplomats tell MEE that despite tensions, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are trying to manage relations. The feud has not reached the level of the 2017 blockade against Qatar, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE jointly imposed, when all contact was severed.
For example, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan attended a lunch in Munich on Friday alongside Anwar Gargash, the UAE’s diplomatic advisor, and Qatari spokesman Majed al-Ansari.
But Graham’s main message was on the necessity of the US following through on an attack against Iran, saying “We gotta think big picture,” and that Riyadh was “emboldening Iran by having this conflict”.
“If we back out now, it would be the biggest mistake we made. Far worse than the Syrian redline. Far worse than Afghanistan,” he said, when asked about the US’s military build-up in the region.