ByCHAMA MECHTALY

A video circulating online with a reportedly manipulated deepfake appears to show a Moroccan border guard throwing an object toward an individual. In the original footage, it makes no contact.

Last week, Reuters disclosed that a draft report by the United Nations Panel of Experts on Sudan had been submitted to the Security Council. The panel alleges that aircraft transported weapons, drones, fighters, and Colombian mercenaries to the Rapid Support Forces through Global Security Services Group, a UAE-based company, citing two eyewitnesses and two unnamed member states. The UAE says it found no company involvement.

Those gaps will not survive the propaganda cycle. A UAE-based company will become “the UAE,” a draft will become a verdict, and alleged assistance to one armed faction will become “the Emirati genocide of Sudan.” By publication, the conclusion will already have moved through activist accounts, Qatari and Iranian media, Islamist-aligned human-rights organizations, universities, and Western newspapers, until anyone asking what the evidence proves is accused of defending mass murder.

This is how a political blood libel is manufactured in 2026. The medieval version accused Jews of secretly taking Christian blood; its modern descendant accuses Israel, and now the states that chose peace with it, of manufacturing wars to harvest Arab and African blood, land, gold, and ports. Every evidentiary gap is filled by the certainty of the accuser.

I recognize this pattern because I am Moroccan, because I lived for seven years in the United Arab Emirates, and because my work has placed me inside the frequently punished effort to build relations among Arabs and Jews. I have watched Emiratis described as secretly Jewish, Moroccans accused of becoming Zionist colonizers, and Arabs who choose normalization treated as though they had forfeited the right to speak for their countries.

An AI- generated picture depicting a Moroccan border guard throwing a rock towards an individual, August 6, 2026
An AI- generated picture depicting a Moroccan border guard throwing a rock towards an individual, August 6, 2026 (credit: SECTION 27A COPYRIGHT ACT)


In 2004, Natan Sharansky proposed his three-part test for identifying when criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism: demonization, double standards, and delegitimization. Those methods are now transferred to Israel’s allies. The UAE, the largest government donor to Sudan’s humanitarian response in 2025, is demonized as the sole author of the country’s catastrophe, even as Qatar, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan support Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood networks.


Netanyahu has called the information battlefield Israel’s “eighth front,” where enemies that cannot defeat Israel militarily try to isolate it morally and economically. Only months after the Security Council condemned Iran’s missile attacks on the Emirates, a still-unpublished UN report is transforming Abu Dhabi from a victim of aggression into the architect of an African conflict it is doing the most to relieve.


The draft may contain important evidence, but the public record does not prove that the Emirati state commissioned the flights or directed the RSF.


The double standard is clearest in what disappears from the Sudan story. The Sudanese Armed Forces are heirs to Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist security state. In March 2026, Washington designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, including the al-Baraa bin Malik Brigade, as terrorist organizations, citing more than 20,000 fighters trained or supported by the IRGC. Iran has supplied the SAF with drones, while Sudanese and Israeli reports allege that Burhan’s government is courting Hamas in Port Sudan.


Yet the campaign against the UAE minimizes this Islamist infrastructure, reduces Iran’s role to a footnote, barely examines Turkish and Qatari support for the SAF, and presents Abu Dhabi as the omnipotent hand behind a war sustained by Bashir-era networks and competing regional powers.


Yesterday’s
Financial Times
portrayal of the UAE as a thief of Sudanese gold follows the same pattern. Because Dubai is a global center for refining and re-exporting gold, commercial flows through Emirati markets are presented as proof that Abu Dhabi entered Sudan to plunder Africa. Switzerland, Singapore, and Hong Kong require no domestic mines to operate as refining hubs, yet the UAE’s role is called colonial exploitation.


Morocco is being placed inside the same frame. During the current Ceuta crisis, approximately 60,000 people crossed into the Spanish enclave after false claims spread online that the border had opened, encouraged by a July 8 Spanish Supreme Court ruling that granted neither residency nor entry.


No evidence has shown that Israel organized the movement, yet those theories appeared immediately. According to narrative-warfare researcher Travis Hawley, around fifty X/Twitter accounts drove most of the claim that Morocco had acted on Israel’s behalf, amplified by the same voices who turn every regional crisis into evidence of hidden Zionist direction.


The mythology outlasted Israel’s own denial. If Rabat pressures Madrid, Israel must be directing it; if Morocco asserts its position in the Moroccan Sahara, it becomes “the Israel of North Africa”; and if Morocco buys Israeli technology, every alleged abuse proves that Zionism corrupted the state.

Theories began long before normalization

The rehearsal began well before normalization. As Morocco contained political Islam and reasserted state authority after 2017, Amnesty and the wider anti-Zionist NGO network turned an internal struggle against Islamist capture into a story of Israeli control. Organizations that spent years accusing Israel of apartheid and colonialism now direct the same charges at Rabat and Abu Dhabi, while Algeria and Iran’s sponsorship of the Polisario Front disappears from view.

The objective is not to correct one Emirati policy in Sudan, but to dismantle the regional front built by Israel, Morocco, the UAE, and Bahrain against the Muslim Brotherhood, the IRGC, and the forces that require permanent war. Israelis should not watch these campaigns in silence, and should defend the sovereignty of Morocco and the UAE with the same seriousness Israel defends its own, not as diplomatic courtesy, but to protect the civilizational alliance they are building together.

Before repeating another allegation, readers should ask who produced it and whether it would carry the same force if Israel were absent. Peace will survive only if the countries that chose it refuse to let one another be defamed by enemies who could not defeat them on the battlefield.

The writer is a writer and policy advisor pioneering the bottom-up movement of the Abraham Accords. She leads initiatives that turn the Accords from a diplomatic framework into a living ecosystem of cultural collaboration, de-radicalization, and regional integration.