It was essential to launch the “Green Saudi” initiative for a Green Middle East so as to serve as an Arab project to compete and fight the Iranian nuclear projects in the Middle East.

On the one hand, our region is not in a position to endure any nuclear arms race. Rather, it needs a race in peaceful projects. The majority of countries in the Middle East region are Arab, and the majority of people in the region are also Arabs.

This majority wants to keep the countries and peoples of the region away from nuclear projects, and instead eager to enjoy a culture of reconciliation, peace and stability.

Throughout history, this has been the case and they did not aspire for any nuclear programs, until the Western countries implanted colonial entities and tools of occupation in our region, and these entities were alien to our region, our culture and our morals.

Indeed, these Western colonial countries brought in sectarian systems that are perverse even to sects and schools of thought that claim to represent them. Then the nuclear arms race erupted between an entity that usurped land and a regime that usurped peoples.

Saudi Arabia’s mission of the “Green Middle East” initiative, unveiled by Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman, is not an easy task.

The Kingdom is building and adopting the culture of peace with its green project, green awareness and green weapon, in a region whose cities have become a den of fear, and its relations are the trigger of mistrust, and its streets are arenas for wars and a haven for militias and mercenaries, a region that filled the international waterways with ships of refugees and desperate migrants.

Saudi Arabia, with what it represents as a heavyweight in Middle East and the world in terms of its predominant position in the oil industry as well as its significant Arab and Islamic role, is now embarking with an ambitious local and regional environmental project titled “Green Saudi” and Green Middle East” initiatives.

The Kingdom announced the “Green Middle East” initiative as an ambitious environmental project by planting 50 billion trees.

It is tipped as the largest reforestation program in the world, with restoration of 200 million hectares of degraded land, which represents five percent of the global goal, and by reducing 60 percent of carbon emissions from oil production to keep pace with joint global efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

The attack on the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz during the past days is nothing but an incident in a series of Israeli-Iranian nuclear arms race in the region and the world, which will not bring security to either of these countries but put the Arab countries and peoples in the region in the grip of perpetual fear about the Israeli and Iranian nuclear projects.

Therefore, the nuclear arms race in the Middle East is much more dangerous than its counterparts in the Far East and the Indian subcontinent.

This is mainly because of two reasons. Firstly, the Iranians are in an intense competition for acquiring natural resources from a number of countries in the region. Secondly, there is the intensity of the historic hatred and enmity that the nuclear rivals carry against everything Arab.

The massacres committed by Israel and Iran against the Arabs in times of war and times of peace demonstrate the rancor and racial hatred of these hostile neighbors.

The “Green Middle East” initiative has posed another challenge, besides its challenge to the two states engaged in the nuclear race, and that is its challenge to countries with ambitions over the rivers that flow through the Arab countries.

Israel, Iran, Turkey and Ethiopia have used everything they can in order to use the weapon of thirst even against the Arab countries, which have presence of rivers. And yet the “Green Middle East” initiative comes from an Arab country that does not have abundant sources of water.

Will the “Green Middle East” initiative pull the rug from under the feet of the enemies of the environment and the enemies of peace?