benami167_ DEBBIE HILLAFP via Getty Images_netanyahu

The Consequences of the Israel-UAE Peace

Sep 14, 2020 Shlomo Ben-Ami

It is highly probable that more Arab countries will, like Bahrain, follow in the footsteps of the United Arab Emirates and normalize relations with Israel. Once the supposed epicenter of the region’s worries, Palestine has become a disposable cause.

TEL AVIV – Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has hailed the agreement normalizing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates – which the two countries will sign at a White House ceremony on September 15 – as a historic step that equals Israel’s previous peace deals with Egypt and Jordan. The Israeli leader also boasted that the agreement with the UAE vindicated his “Netanyahu doctrine” of peace for peace, rather than land for peace.

But even peace with a country with which Israel does not share a border and has never fought a war required Netanyahu to give up his plans to annex large parts of the West Bank. So, there was a “land for peace” aspect to the deal after all.

More important, Netanyahu’s “doctrine” practically buries the concept underlying the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative: that an Israeli-Palestinian peace should be the precondition for normalization of Arab states’ relations with Israel. The Arab League itself has rejected the Palestinians’ request to condemn the Israel-UAE deal, and the pact also signals the defeat of the Israeli left’s vision of Palestine as the key to peace with the Arab world.

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Dallas Weaver, Ph.D. Sep 20, 2020

Watching from afar, it appears that the interests of the Palestine citizens are being opposed by their leadership, which remains in power as a parasitic institution grabbing money and power for their benefit. The people would massively benefit from peace and trade while the leadership benefits from creating conflict that keeps them in power.

This is true for many nepotistic governments around the world.
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Jaap Bosma Sep 20, 2020

Shlomo Ben Ami is a Zionist, and that clarifies his distortions in this article.
For instance, there is no proof, nor is there any reason to assume it is likely, that Iran attacked Saudi oil installations in Sept. 2019. Ben Ami also conveniently 'forgets' the U.S.'s murder of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.
Also, the Palestinians' most important strategic asset is not their purported veto on Arab-Israeli normalisation, but simply their human rights, the rights that the BDS movement is fighting for!
And Palestinians are not the serial rejectors that Shlomo Ben Ami likes them to be. Israel is the serial rejector! Every day it has he opportunity to end it's apartheid regime over the Palestinians.
One day this apartheid regime will end though, and as normalisation with Arab states seals the end of the two state solution, that 'one democratic state solution' is only brought closer!
Let's end apartheid, have equality for Jews and all other Palestinians (including refugees), and share the land between the river and the sea!
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j. von Hettlingen Sep 14, 2020

Shlomo Ben-Ami says the Arab states’ silence over the peace deal the oil-rich United Arab Emirates and Israel reached last week is a blatant example of a new geopolitical reality on the ground. It has been met with strong condemnations from non-Arab Muslim countries like Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. While the Arab world has chosen to be mute, Qatar is an exception, because it is at loggerheads with the Saudi-led Sunni states in the region.
The author says Netanyahu’s “doctrine” basically buried “the concept underlying the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative: that an Israeli-Palestinian peace should be the precondition for normalization of Arab states’ relations with Israel.” That the Arab League itself “has rejected the Palestinians’ request to condemn the Israel-UAE deal,” is another tragic evidence that Arab states all through “decades of Arab-Israeli antagonism” do not hesitate to betray the Paletinians – at least “no less than Israel has.”
The Arab silence is seen as a tacit acceptance of the deal and a clear retreat from their unanimously accepted initiative back in 2002, when Saudi Arabia proposed a peace plan with Israel in exchange for the withdrawal of Israelis from all occupied territories. Last week, while Saudi Arabia publicly said that it will not follow suit with the UAE-Israel deal, they have still not condemned it either, giving the impression that they are playing a wait-and-see game.
The author, like many critics, says the Palestinians had in the past missed several opportunities for peace. “In his 1979 peace agreement with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin made far-reaching commitments on the Palestinian question. But both leaders knew that theirs was a separate peace driven by vital strategic needs – as shown by its subsequent survival despite Israel’s ever deepening occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands.”
Today, power-holders in the Middle East have other worries and priorities, which motivate Mohammed bin Zayed, the UAE’s ruler, to be realistic, while sparking “the rage of the betrayed Palestinians.” Arab autocrats are increasingly fearful of Iran, which is backing several proxy forces across the Middle East from Iraq to Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. The region has been divided into two major political camps, one led by Israel and Saudi Arabia and the other by Iran.
Iran’s ambition to secure its Shia Crescent from Central Asia to the Mediterranean drives the Arab states into the arms of Israel, which has had “discreet security relations” with the Gulf states including the UAE and Saudi Arabia for years. “As a major military and technological power in the Middle East, Israel has become a necessary ally for conservative regimes shaken by the 2011 Arab Spring, the threat of Islamist radicalism, and Iran’s growing regional clout.”
The author says, “it is mainly the fear of a withdrawal from the region by the United States that is bringing Arab states closer to Israel. They saw how….Trump refrained from any direct military response to Iran’s devastating September 2019 attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil installations.” Trump was not bothered to “respond to Iran’s downing a few months earlier of a sophisticated US surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz,” suggesting Iran shot it down mistakenly.
As the US is Israel’s staunchest ally, Arab leaders know that reconciling with Israel “also means peace with America.” Despite its retreat from the region, the US will still defend Israel. “Sadat signed the 1979 peace agreement because he wanted to shift Egypt’s strategic orientation from the Soviet Union to the US. The $2 billion in annual military aid that Egypt still receives from the US is a direct product of that peace. And Syria, Israel’s staunchest Arab enemy, became interested in peace only after the Soviet Union collapsed.”
The Trump administration’s “apparent decision to sell F-35 stealth fighter jets to the UAE has been an important objective in the Emirati peace strategy toward Israel. These advanced warplanes – which only the US and Israel currently possess – will secure America’s engagement with the UAE, and add muscle to a small country that has global ambitions and many enemies.” But many Israelis fear that if relations with the UAE sour, the military hardware and technology would fall into the wrong hands.
These sophisticated weapons will not secure peace in the region if the Arab states do not find a way forward to co-exist with Iran. “Qatar and Turkey. Both countries support the Muslim Brotherhood, a UAE nemesis, which explains Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s virulent reaction to the normalization deal. In Libya, the UAE is fighting together with Egypt and Russia in support of the Tobruk-based Libyan National Army led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, while Turkey and Qatar are backing the internationally recognized government in Tripoli. The UAE has also sought to check Turkey’s punitive incursions against Kurdish forces in northern Syria.”
Netanyahu seeks to portray himself as the region’s peace broker, backed by Trump, whose transactional and isolationist foreign policy has sparked outrage across the globe. “The truth is that the UAE has been pursuing a prudent strategy vis-à-vis Iran. It recently abandoned the Saudi-led coalition in the war against Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen, and has even disengaged from Trump’s sanctions regime against Iran.”
By reaching out to the Arab states, Netanyahu denies Palestinians “their most important strategic asset: their veto power over an all-Arab peace with Israel.” It looks likely that other Gulf states might follow suit, because the “region is changing, and the Arabs are accepting that Israel is a legitimate strategic player.”
Both Palestinians and Isreal’s left would have to change their “vision of Palestine” as the "key to peace" with the Arab world. It may take generations before Palestinians and Israelis find a solution to their decades long conflict and chart a way forward toward peaceful existence. Israel is here to stay and Palestinians have no way to prevent their land from being grabbed.
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