It wasn’t long after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ended his short visit to Sudan and the Gulf states that a senior PLO official was in praise of the Arab leaders standing up to the American official. Saeb Erakat, the PLO’s Executive Committee secretary, took to Twitter to send words of appreciation to the leader of Bahrain. “We highly appreciate the position of H.M. King Hamad Bin Issa Al Khalifa of Bahrain. We hope that Mr. Pompeo will use his hearing skills. End the occupation then normalization,” he wrote. 

Earlier, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki had praised Sudan for its principled stand for rejecting the US attempts at “blackmailing Sudan to trade normalization with the lifting of Sudan’s name from countries that support terrorism.”

Erakat’s tweet was followed Aug. 27 with a strong statement by the PLO Executive Committee that included a warning to Arab states not to follow the path of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The committee “warned against the repercussions of any normalization of relations between the Arab countries and the Israeli occupation, calling on all Arab countries not to follow the footsteps of the United Arab Emirates that recently signed a normalization agreement with apartheid Israel,” the official WAFA news agency reported.

While the tweets and public statements combined both support and warnings, the Palestinian leadership was active on other fronts including calls on the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to meet and denounce the UAE for violating the consensus that has been reached and repeated since Saudi Arabia suggested the Arab peace initiative at the Beirut summit in 2002.