OPINION:
The Trump team, led by Jared Kushner, Ambassador David Friedman and the others who worked on the recently-announced Israel-UAE agreement to normalize relations, deserves great credit for accomplishing the first such diplomatic breakthrough in almost three decades.
While Israel and the United Arab Emirates were never in military conflict, and unlike Israel’s treaties with Egypt and Jordan, the agreement with the UAE isn’t really a peace deal but does have major potential for a political realignment in the Middle East.
Israel’s earlier peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, which had fought multiple wars with Israel, involved the Egyptian and Jordanian borders with Israel, diplomatic ties and much-needed security arrangements that have proved beneficial to all parties over the years. Borders and security arrangements are not part of the deal with the UAE, and fortunately are not the result of years of hostility and warfare.
Israel had fought five wars with Egypt, and the historic peace accord removed the largest Arab nation as an immediate threat, and for Egypt this meant the return of the Sinai peninsula in addition to opening a strategic relationship with the United States.
The peace with Jordan in 1994 came over two decades after any major clash with Israel and formalized a security arrangement that had been operating quietly since 1968. For Jordan, a nation with a large Palestinian community, it enabled the country to withstand a civil war and gain assistance in dealing with Israel’s ongoing problem with the Palestinians.
Until this agreement, Israel has not had diplomatic relations with any of the Arab countries in the Persian Gulf, but these states have had great concerns over Iran leading to a series of unofficial contacts. Increasingly, since the Iranian missile attack on Saudi oil fields, the Gulf states have come to see Israel as the only realistic military power in the region that can withstand Iranian aggression. Cutting a deal with Israel seems like the most logical thing to do.
This new agreement with the UAE is also the result of an openness and a relationship that has evolved during the Trump administration and represents a realization of common interests, largely in the economic sphere.
The business communities in both countries have rapidly become engaged as have government ministers on both sides to phone their counterparts, with the block on the +972 country code for Israel removed to immediately allow direct phone calls. In social media, Israelis and Emiratis quickly posted greetings in Hebrew and Arabic, with some 7,000 UAE accounts beginning to follow the Israeli Foreign Ministry on Twitter.
Shortly after the official announcement that Israel and the UAE were opening diplomatic relations, the first public business was quickly signed between Israel’s Tera Group and the UAE’s APEX investment fund on joint research into COVID-19 treatments. By most accounts, this was a deal that had been in the works for some time and long before the diplomatic breakthrough.
The open question now is what this normalization of Israeli ties with the UAE means for the regional geopolitical situation and possibly a wider regional realignment. In 2002, a Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative first outlined the prospects for full normalization between Israel and most of the Arab countries, which was then conditioned on an Israeli retreat from all of the so-called occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza.
While the Arab League has reaffirmed support for this initiative, many of its members have been quietly normalizing ties with Israel behind the scenes, irrespective of the Palestinian issue, which has gone nowhere in the past 18 years and is highly unlikely to go anywhere in the foreseeable future.
Realistically, the UAE and other Gulf states have decoupled their support for the Palestinian cause from their own security and economic interests.
Not unexpectedly, the Palestinians have soundly rejected this agreement and what it portends. They continue to live in a fantasy that low-level attacks on Israel from Gaza and appeals to their terrorist supporters around the globe will result in a Palestinian state or the “two state” solution that was the mantra before Mr. Trump.
By decoupling of the Israel-Arab conflict from the Israel-Palestine conflict, the UAE foreign minister, Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has made the relationship with Israel open and public, even though he has insisted that the deal with Israel was in return for Benjamin Netanyahu relinquishing annexation of the West Bank, at least for the time being.
Most analysts agree that this was simply a matter of optics, and note that Mr. bin Zayed didn’t even give Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas any advance warning. In reality, Mr. bin Zayed is the second Arab leader, after former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, to reject the Palestinian cause, paying it little more than lip service, for an open relationship with Israel.
Unlike Sadat, however, he is now going much further, expecting that the UAE will not be alone, and is encouraging other Arab and Muslim nations to follow suit.
Together with Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu, Mr. bin Zayed has formed a group, with the assistance of the Trump administration that seeks to attract other members among the regional states, who can join under the same terms — alignment with the United States, open normalization with Israel, only empty gestures toward the Palestinians and fierce opposition to Iran and its regional proxies.
In short, the Israeli-UAE deal is an attempt to establish a group of like-minded nations in the Middle East and achieve a regional realignment based on confronting Iran; promoting trade and technology relations; and avoiding any real notion of solidarity with the Palestinians. Will this work? Clearly, it’s too early to say for sure, but there is a far better chance of success than anything else that has happened in the Middle East in a very long time.
• Abraham Wagner has served in several national security positions, including the National Security Council staff under Presidents Nixon and Ford.
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