There is a doctrinal comedy unfolding across the Arab world this week that would be amusing if it were not so grotesque in its hypocrisy. As Iranian missiles rained down on Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia – striking airports, shattering buildings, killing civilians on Arab soil – millions of Sunni Arabs took to social media and to the streets (and will no doubt take to Friday pulpits this week) not to condemn the regime that was bombing their own countries, but to mourn its Supreme Leader and denounce the Americans and Israelis who killed him.

Bahrain’s Interior Minister, Sheikh Rashid bin Abdullah Al Khalifa, captured the absurdity in a single sentence when he said, in effect, that anyone whose loyalty lies with Tehran rather than with the country that feeds them, shelters them, and employs them should pack their bags and go live in Iran. It was blunt. It was impolite. And it was the most honest thing any Arab official has said in months.

Because what is happening right now is not solidarity. It is a sectarian short circuit of staggering proportions – the product of a civilization that has spent fourteen centuries constructing the most elaborate confessional architecture in the history of organized religion, only to abandon it overnight the moment Israel enters the frame.

The Arabs have an ancient proverb for this: “Ana wa akhouya ala ibn ammi, wa ana wa ibn ammi ala al-gharib” – I and my brother against my cousin, and I and my cousin against the stranger. It is the oldest logic of tribal solidarity: internal feuds are suspended the moment an outsider appears. For fourteen centuries, the Shia were the cousin you fought. The moment Israel became the stranger, the cousin became a brother – and every century of enmity was dissolved in a single political reflex.

For the better part of a millennium, Sunni orthodoxy has treated Shia........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)