'There is no Palestine, no occupation': Kuwaiti writer sparks outrage

Abdullah Al-Hadlaq commented in an interview, televised on the Kuwait Alrai TV channel earlier in the week, saying that there is no occupation of Palestine, and it is simply a case of "a people returning to their promised land."

"When the State of Israel was established in 1948, there was no state called Palestine," said Al-Hadlaq in the interview.

"There were various communities living in Arab countries under a host of other names."

Al-Hadlaq continues by quoting verses from the Islamic holy book, the Quran and providing them as 'evidence' of the land promised to the Israelis.

"The usurping entity is whoever was there before the arrival of the Israelites – not the Israelis," he says in a bizarre twist rendering the Palestinians as the occupiers of Israel.

In fact, Al-Hadlaq continues, "Why shouldn't we live in peaceful coexistence with Israel, and cooperate with it against my great enemy, which is the Persian regime? I support the establishment of a three-way alliance, consisting of Israel, the Arab Gulf states, and America, in order to annihilate Hizballah beyond resurrection."

The interview comes against a backdrop of a series of reports of Saudi-Israeli normalisation.

Recent events have been taken as a rupture of one of the principle social pacts between the Saudi royal family and the general populace.

Earlier this week, an Israeli blogger posted images onto the popular social media platform Instagram of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina.

The kingdom continues to deny any official relations with Israel, despite the deluge of recent reports claiming rapprochement between the two states.

Kuwait, similar to Saudi Arabia, does not recognise Israel.

In the face of the continued expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories and Saudi Arabia's assertion to lead both the Arab and Muslim worlds, the reported rapprochement of the governments of Binyamin Netanyahu and Mohammad bin Salman seems to be gathering pace against a common Iranian foe.