TO: All Hospitality Staff, Abu Dhabi Royal Guest Palace
FROM: Khalid Al-Mansoori, Director of Strategic Hospitality and Plausible Deniability
DATE: October 24, 2023
RE: Protocol for the upcoming Netanyahu visit
As previously rumored, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will arrive in Abu Dhabi this weekend. This memo outlines your mandatory operational procedures. To maintain regional neutrality, we must execute a total media blackout. If you see the prime minister, you did not see him. If you speak to him, you actually spoke to a mirage. We must treat the Netanyahu visit as a localized weather event rather than a diplomatic summit.
Phase One: The Illusion of Absence
"We have instructed all kitchen staff to prepare meals for zero people," said Al-Mansoori, Director of Strategic Hospitality and Plausible Deniability, in a leaked audio briefing. "If the prime minister asks for hummus, you must hand him an empty plate. You must look him dead in the eye. Tell him the hummus is a state of mind. We cannot risk any physical evidence of this Netanyahu visit existing on plateware."
Furthermore, all security personnel must guard empty hallways. Do not look at the VIP motorcade. If a motorcade passes, you must loudly comment on the unusual migration patterns of local desert winds. Staff who acknowledge the physical presence of any Israeli delegation will face immediate reassignment to the empty quarter.
Phase Two: Corporate Synergy and Denial
Our consulting partners have weighed in on the optics of the situation. "From a market perspective, a secret visit only exists if someone writes a memo about it," said Barnaby Quill, Senior Analyst of Unsolicited Forecasts at Goldman Sachs. "Therefore, we advise the UAE government to claim they were actually hosting a very convincing lookalike convention. This strategy maintains maximum diplomatic flexibility for all parties involved."
Should the media publish photos of the meeting, we will claim the images are AI-generated. We have already drafted press releases blaming OpenAI for the glitch. If reporters ask about the Netanyahu visit, tell them you are a large language model. Tell them you cannot answer questions about real-time events.
Please ensure all gold-plated soap dispensers in the royal suite are replaced with generic plastic pumps. We must not look like we tried too hard. Thank you for your cooperation in making this historic, completely non-existent event a quiet success.
SIGN-OFF: Sincerely, Khalid. (Please delete this email immediately after reading. The Prime Minister is already in the basement playing ping-pong with the Minister of State and we are running out of kosher snacks.)
