Israel - UAE agreement changes mideast power dynamic

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Israel and the United Arab Emirates reached an agreement to begin normalizing relations, a potentially historic breakthrough hailed by American and Israeli leaders as a crucial step toward peace yet assailed by Palestinian officials as a betrayal.

A joint statement Thursday from the U.S., Israel and UAE announced that the two Mideast nations will establish normal ties, signaling they will send ambassadors and open more direct commercial relations, including air travel. According to the statement, the UAE and Israel will begin a range of talks in the “coming weeks,” while Israel also agreed to suspend efforts to declare sovereignty over parts of the West Bank.

“This is a truly historic moment,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Not since the Israel-Jordan peace treaty was signed more than 25 years ago has so much progress been made towards peace in the Middle East.”

As part of the deal, Israel agreed to temporarily suspend controversial moves to annex portions of the West Bank, an effort that was widely seen as having put any final peace agreement further from reach. No timeline was set by American or Israeli officials on how long the suspension was expected to hold. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emphasized that the pause was temporary.

“There is no change in my plan to extend our sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, in full coordination with the U.S. I’m committed to it,” Netanyahu said in a national address, using a biblical name for the West Bank.

Officials said a signing ceremony for the accord would take place at the White House. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien said he expected Netanyahu and UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed -- “or another prince” -- to attend.

On Friday, Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper reported that the chief of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, Yossi Cohen, will soon travel with a delegation to the UAE -- a monarchy of seven emirates including Dubai and Abu Dhabi -- to discuss security aspects of the emerging agreement.

Ties between Israel and Gulf Arab states have warmed in recent years, in large part due to a shared distrust of Iran, which denounced the deal as a “foolish mistake” that could lead to the escalation of tensions in the region. But the rapprochement hadn’t ripened into open relations, let alone normalization. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and point person on Mideast peace efforts, said the talks with Israel and the UAE had been going on for 18 months.

Eyes are now on other Gulf states to see if any will follow suit, as U.S. and Israeli officials predicted. On Friday, Oman hailed the decision to normalize ties as boosting “permanent peace” in the Middle East.

“The announcement is big and the White House will be able to claim that it has achieved a breakthrough in the traditional wall of divide in Arab-Israeli relations,” said Ayham Kamel, a Mideast expert at the Eurasia Group. Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former Mideast official at the State Department, called the accord a “win for all 3” nations.

Comments from the UAE’s crown prince were more nuanced, but still emphasized a historic achievement.

“During a call with President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu, an agreement was reached to stop further Israeli annexation of Palestinian territories,” bin Zayed wrote on Twitter. “The UAE and Israel also agreed to cooperation and setting a roadmap towards establishing a bilateral relationship.”

The announcement was a bit of rare good news for Netanyahu, who is under fire politically for his handling of the Covid-19 outbreak and facing multiple indictments for corruption.

“Today we usher in a new era of peace between Israel and the Arab world,” Netanyahu said.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi wrote on Twitter that he followed the agreement and its efforts to foster peace “with attention and appreciation.”

Yet pushback came swiftly from Palestinian officials, who called the UAE’s decision a “betrayal of Jerusalem, Al-Aqsa and the Palestinian cause.”

“The Palestinian leadership announces its strong rejection and condemnation of the surprising American, Israeli, and Emirati tripartite declaration on a complete normalization of relations between the Israeli occupation state and the United Arab Emirates,” presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh said.

At a White House briefing, Kushner dismissed the rejection by Palestinian leaders.

“They have a fairly predictable response that we’ve seen time and time again to all types of things that help make their people’s lives better,” he said. “I think that a lot of people in the region are seeing that we can’t wait for the Palestinian leadership to try and resolve this.

‘More Aggression’
Officials with Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization that runs the Gaza Strip, were more blunt. Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum told Al Jazeera that the move was a “stab against the Palestinian cause and will encourage the Israeli occupation to commit more aggression against our people.”

Trump and other officials signaled that more nations may seek to reach a similar deal, with the U.S. president saying there is “a lot more to come.”

A White House signing ceremony would also help Trump -- lagging in the polls ahead of November’s election -- evoke the spirit of the original peace deal between Israel, Egypt and Jordan, facilitated by then President Jimmy Carter as part of the Camp David accords in 1978.

Trump later joked to reporters in the Oval Office that he wanted the new agreement “to be called the Donald J. Trump accord. O’Brien suggested the accord should vault Trump into the top tier of Nobel Peace Prize candidates.

Even the president’s rival in the November election, Joe Biden, praised the agreement, though not Trump.

“The UAE’s offer to publicly recognize the State of Israel is a welcome, brave, and badly-needed act of statesmanship,” Biden said in a statement.

Trump has long pursued a Mideast breakthrough that would allow him to withdraw U.S. troops from the region and get out of what he called “endless wars.” He’s also sought to strengthen an anti-Iran alliance in the region, led by Saudi Arabia.

At the beginning of his term in 2017, Trump called upon Kushner to help broker a big Mideast deal, though his efforts for a grand bargain had largely stalled. Trump’s move early in his term to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and his decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty of the Golan Heights, quickly alienated Palestinian officials and much of the Arab world, leaving Kushner’s peace plan with few champions in the region.

The backdown on the West Bank annexation may have been the issue that helped seal the agreement, analysts said.

The timing of the move also allows Netanyahu and Trump to climb elegantly down the annexation tree, when neither leader has the stomach to follow through on what would likely have been a destabilizing move in the region,” said Shalom Lipner, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who has served seven Israeli prime ministers.

The decision by the UAE may also be seen as a prelude for its far bigger neighbor, Saudi Arabia, which has close ties with the UAE and has been viewed as informal contacts with Israel. Trump has made the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia the centerpiece of his Mideast strategy.

Kamel of the Eurasia Group said Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will inevitably follow the UAE’s lead but that will take longer as “his society is more conservative and succession politics adds a layer of complications. However, Riyadh will eventually move in a similar direction, albeit at a slower pace and with hesitation given the risks.

The treaty between Israel and the United Arab Emirates is a big deal.

The agreement, announced Thursday in a joint statement from the White House and called the Abraham Accord, means that Israel will now have diplomatic and economic relations with a country that had not recognized it. In return for recognition and relations, Israel has pledged to suspend its ambitions to annex parts of the West Bank.
The UAE is a Muslim kingdom in the Persian Gulf made up of seven smaller entities, called emirates, with huge oil and natural gas reserves. Its metropolis, Dubai, is a wealthy city known as a commercial center for the region. The country borders Saudi Arabia and is only dozens of miles across the water from Iran. It has a tiny Jewish community.
It becomes only the third Arab nation to establish official ties with the Jewish state. In addition to trade, tourism and other exchanges, the treaty means the two countries can collaborate on treatment for the coronavirus and countering the influence of Iran, a shared nemesis.

That makes Iran a likely loser in this deal. The dealmakers are, of course, likely winners.
Here’s our analysis of who stands to benefit from this historic accord — and who has been dealt a surprise setback.

Winner: The long view of Israeli history
Throughout its 72-year history, Israel has been at war with, or largely ignored by, most or all of its neighbors. The nation has fought four major wars with coalitions of Arab states that pledged and failed to destroy it. Until this week, Israel had diplomatic relations with only two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan. The rest of the region, at least officially, continued not to recognize the Jewish state.

That changes now. Israel and Israelis can now openly trade with, meet with and travel to a third Arab country. Another Arab embassy will open in Israel, and an Israeli flag will fly in that country. This also may open the door for other countries to follow suit.

Yes, the accord merely formalizes unofficial contacts between the two countries for years. It doesn’t meaningfully change the contours of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And like every diplomatic deal, this one has many critics who say it carries risks and drawbacks for Israel and its future.

But the hope for peace in the Middle East is written into Israel’s founding documents. Israel and an Arab nation have taken another step in that direction.

Winner: Benjamin Netanyahu
Israel’s prime minister has long argued that Israel can and should pursue diplomatic relations across the Middle East and the globe without making concessions to the Palestinians or withdrawing from territory.
For years, Israel’s allies and neighbors told him otherwise: that to make peace with the broader Middle East, first he needed to reach an agreement on the future of the West Bank. The promise of relations with the wider Arab world was seen as a bargaining chip in Israeli-Palestinian talks.

This accord proves them wrong. The one big promise Netanyahu made was to temporarily suspend plans to annex parts of the West Bank. In past diplomatic accords, Israel has withdrawn from territory in exchange for peace.
The vow isn’t exactly a drastic change of plans for the longtime leader, as he had already pushed off annexation due to squeamishness from the Trump administration regarding the move.

Netanyahu also gets a boost domestically. He has boasted that his experience and global relationships put him in “another league” diplomatically. Now he enters an exclusive pantheon of Israeli leaders who have signed a treaty with an Arab state, joining the ranks of the admired Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin.

Finally, it’s another way that Netanyahu can distract from his ongoing criminal trial for corruption and from the nightly street protests against him and his government’s coronavirus policies.

Winner: The United Arab Emirates
As far back as the 1990s, the UAE has sought relations with Israel, and Israel and the UAE have shared military intelligence for decades. According to an extensive 2018 account in the New Yorker, the country appreciated Israeli defense technology and has seen a shared threat in Iran, which the UAE and other Gulf states oppose in part due to the Muslim Sunni-Shia divide. In January, the Emirati foreign minister published an op-ed in an Israeli paper, a major symbolic step, and in June an Emirati plane carrying aid for Palestinians landed in Israel.

The deal promises both symbolic and tangible benefits for the UAE, positioning the country as a diplomatic leader in the region. If others follow suit in establishing formal relations with Israel, the UAE can say it was the catalyst. More immediately, it could mean an influx of Israeli tourists and money, as well as collaboration on medical and other research with a regional economic power as both countries fight the pandemic.

Winner: Donald Trump
Since his first presidential campaign, Trump has promised to deliver a peace deal for Israel, and has expended effort into reaching an Israeli-Palestinian accord, to no avail. Although this isn’t the deal he initially wanted, now he can legitimately claim credit for helping achieve a historic Israeli treaty.

In Trumpspeak, this is a clear win. And it’s a boon for Jared Kushner, a top adviser and his son-in-law, who has succeeded here after failing to secure an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal and drawing criticism for his management of the coronavirus response.

It’s also helpful for Trump in an election year. In a campaign where Israel has come up repeatedly, Trump can position himself not just as a staunch ally of the Netanyahu government, but as a regional peacemaker. It’s not likely to shift votes, though. Trump voters already see him as pro-Israel and probably haven’t changed their minds, while those who oppose the incumbent generally dislike him on issues that range far from the Middle East.

Winner: Liberal Zionists
Liberal Zionism is built on the idea that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Israel’s most pressing diplomatic concern. This accord does not do that.

Yet liberal Zionist groups are celebrating the agreement. After all, their long-term goal is an Israel at peace with its neighbors. This isn’t how they thought they would get there, but a treaty is still a treaty. J Street, the largest liberal Zionist organization, said in a statement that the pact is “just the latest evidence that dialogue and diplomacy, rather than unilateral action and belligerence, are the route to long-term security.”

The suspension of annexation is also at least a temporary win for liberal Zionists, who have been bemoaning that such a move would mean the end of efforts toward a Palestinian state alongside Israel. For them, this is a temporary reprieve from that threat.

Loser: Liberal Zionists
Still, the accord is a major blow to the idea that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Israel’s most pressing diplomatic concern. Liberal Zionists have warned that without sacrifices on the Palestinian issue, peace with other Arab countries is impossible.

Liberal Zionists have said, too, that continued West Bank occupation harms U.S.-Israel relations. The UAE deal is a major blow to that idea. Occupation wasn’t an obstacle for the Trump administration, and apparently it’s not for the UAE, either.

Liberal Zionists have protested for more than a decade against Netanyahu and his policies. This is a major win for a man they desperately want to see lose.

The suspension of West Bank annexation isn’t a sure thing, either. Hours after the treaty was announced, Netanyahu said he still hasn’t given up on annexing parts of the West Bank. So the one concession Netanyahu appeared to have made on their issue might not even last.

Loser: The Palestinians
However tough of a pill this is to swallow for the Zionist left, it’s even more bitter for the Palestinians. Not only do they see their enemy sign another diplomatic accord without promising them anything, they also feel “sold out” by a country that was supposed to have their back, in the words of veteran Palestinian diplomat Hanan Ashrawi.

For decades, Arab countries united around the idea that Palestine must be liberated and Israel was not to be tolerated. Decades ago, as Israel continually proved its staying power and made strides toward peace with the Palestinians, Arab states began seeking an accommodation with the Jewish state — as long as the Palestinian issue was solved.

The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative said that normalization with the Arab world would come only after Israel ended its occupation. Besides Egypt and Jordan, no Arab country bit at the offer of peace with Israel.

Now that has shifted. An Arab country has normalized ties with Israel without any concession on the Palestinian issue. More may follow.

Palestinians face the prospect of watching their allies make peace with their enemy without gaining anything along the way and with the eyes of the world focused elsewhere.

Loser: The Israeli opposition
For a few moments over the course of 2019 and 2020, as Israelis voted in election after election, it appeared that Netanyahu, after a decade as prime minister, could be replaced by a center-left coalition.

That didn’t happen. But rising public anger over Netanyahu’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, as well as the criminal indictments he’s facing, have led to tens of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets to protest him. Were he to call another election due to domestic concerns, polls showed his chances of staying in power were tenuous.
Now he could take the podium in triumph, announcing an achievement more often dreamed of on the left: a treaty with an Arab nation. If another election is afoot, he now has something positive to campaign on.

Loser: The settlers (or at least some of them) and their American supporters
Israel’s annexation plan was never overwhelmingly popular among Israeli West Bank settlers because many of them feared that it would bring along the establishment of a Palestinian state in the rest of the territory, albeit a fragmented one.

Still, for the past few months, Netanyahu was focused on the goal of making some of the territory officially part of Israel, a longstanding goal of many settlers. Supporters of the settlements in the United States, from evangelical Christian Zionists to the Jewish community’s right wing, also cheered on the prime minister’s pledges to annex.

He said he was going to do so in July, but July came and went. Now the prospect seems even more distant. Yes, Netanyahu said he would still deliver annexation. But officially the process has been suspended, when fewer than two months ago it appeared to be imminent.

“They pulled a fast one on the settlers,” one settler mayor said.

For once, I am going to agree with President Trump in his use of his favorite adjective: “huge.”

The agreement brokered by the Trump administration for the United Arab Emirates to establish full normalization of relations with Israel, in return for the Jewish state forgoing, for now, any annexation of the West Bank, was exactly what Trump said it was in his tweet: a “HUGE breakthrough.”

It is not Anwar el-Sadat going to Jerusalem — nothing could match that first big opening between Arabs and Israelis. It is not Yasir Arafat shaking Yitzhak Rabin’s hand on the White House lawn — nothing could match that first moment of public reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

But it is close. Just go down the scorecard, and you see how this deal affects every major party in the region — with those in the pro-American, pro-moderate Islam, pro-ending-the-conflict-with-Israel-once-and-for-all camp benefiting the most and those in the radical pro-Iran, anti-American, pro-Islamist permanent-struggle-with-Israel camp all becoming more isolated and left behind.

It’s a geopolitical earthquake.

To fully appreciate why, you need to start with the internal dynamics of the deal. It was Trump’s peace plan drawn up by Jared Kushner, and their willingness to stick with it, that actually created the raw material for this breakthrough. Here is how.
The Kushner plan basically called for Israel and the Palestinians to make peace, with Israel being able to annex some 30 percent of the West Bank, where most of its settlers were, and the Palestinians getting to establish a demilitarized, patchwork state on the other 70 percent, along with some land swaps from Israel.

The Palestinians rejected the deal outright as unbalanced and unjust. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who basically helped to write the very pro-Israel plan, said he intended to proceed with the annexation part of the plan by July 1 — without agreeing to the part that his political base of Jewish settlers rejected: Palestinians later getting a state on the other 70 percent. (I wonder if Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, a pro-settler extremist himself, encouraged Bibi to think he could get away with this.)

It didn’t work, because Kushner, who was hearing regularly from Egypt, Jordan and the gulf Arabs that such a unilateral Israeli annexation would be a total deal-breaker for them, told Bibi, “Not so fast.” Kushner persuaded Trump to block Bibi’s cherry-picking of the plan by taking annexation now.

This was causing Netanyahu to lose support from the settlers — and, at a time when he is on trial on corruption charges and facing daily protests outside his home over his poor performance in leading Israel out of the coronavirus epidemic, left him sinking in the polls.

So what Trump, Kushner, Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto leader of the Emirates, and Netanyahu did was turn lemons into lemonade, explained Itamar Rabinovich, one of Israel’s leading Middle East historians and a former ambassador to Washington.

“Instead of Israeli annexation for a Palestinian state, they made it Israeli non-annexation in return for peace with the U.A.E.,” said Rabinovich in an interview. Kushner, he added, “basically generated an asset out of nothing, which Israel could then trade for peace with the U.A.E. It was peace for peace, not land for peace.”

This process apparently started after the U.A.E.’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, published a letter in Hebrew in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot in June directly warning that Israeli annexation of the West Bank would undermine the quiet progress Israel had made with the gulf Arabs.

The U.A.E. had been mulling going for more open diplomatic ties with Israel for a while, but it was the discussions over how to stop annexation that created a framework where the U.A.E. could be seen as getting something for the Palestinians in return for its normalization with Israel.

The Netanyahu dynamics here are fascinating, or as Israeli writer Ari Shavit remarked to me: “Netanyahu is trying to get out of his own personal Watergate by going to China. He’s like Nixon in reverse.”

What he meant was that Netanyahu had been doing everything he could to appease the right-wing forces in Israel — with shiny objects like annexation — so they would side with him in his corruption trial against Israel’s court system and attorney general.

By taking this deal, Netanyahu, as Nixon did with China, abandoned his natural ideological allies — the settlers who supported him because they thought he would deliver annexation — “and this will force Netanyahu to become more dependent on the center and center-right in Israel going forward,” said Shavit. “This deal may help save Israeli democracy by now depriving Bibi” of the full army of right-wing forces “he needed to destroy the Israeli Supreme Court.”
The Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas, was also stripped of something by this deal, which may force him to the negotiating table. It stripped him of his biggest ace in the hole — the idea that the gulf Arabs would normalize with Israel only after the Israelis satisfied the demands of the Palestinian Authority with a state to its liking.

(Free advice for Abbas: Come back to the table now and say you view the Trump plan as a “floor,” not a “ceiling” for Palestinian aspirations. You will find a lot of support from Trump, the Europeans and the Arabs for that position. You still have leverage. Israel still has to deal with you, because your people in the West Bank are not going to just disappear, no matter what happens with the U.A.E. and Israel.)

This deal will certainly encourage the other gulf sheikhdoms — Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — all of which have had covert and overt business and intelligence dealings with Israel, to follow the Emirates’ lead. They will not want to let the U.A.E. have a leg up in being able to marry its financial capital with Israel’s cybertechnology, agriculture technology and health care technology, with the potential to make both countries stronger and more prosperous.

Three other big winners here are: 1) King Abdullah of Jordan. He feared that Israeli annexation would energize efforts to turn Jordan into the Palestinian state. That threat is for the moment defused. 2) The American Jewish community. If Israel had annexed part of the West Bank, it would have divided every synagogue and Jewish community in America, between hard-line annexationists and liberal anti-annexationists. This was a looming disaster. Gone for now. And 3) Joe Biden. Biden, if he succeeds Trump, will not have to worry about the thorny issue of annexation, and he should have a much stronger pro-American alliance in the region to work with.

The big geopolitical losers are Iran and all of its proxies: Hezbollah, the Iraqi militias, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis in Yemen and Turkey. This is for a number of reasons. Up to now, the U.A.E. has kept up a delicate balance between Iran and Israel, not looking to provoke Iran, and dealing with Israel covertly.

But this deal is right in Iran’s face. The tacit message is: “We now have Israel on our side, so don’t mess with us.” The vast damage Israel inflicted on Iran through apparent cyberwarfare in recent months may have even given the U.A.E. more breathing room to do this deal.

But there is another message, deeper, more psychological. This was the U.A.E. telling the Iranians and all their proxies: There are really two coalitions in the region today — those who want to let the future bury the past and those who want to let the past keep burying the future. The U.A.E. is taking the helm of the first, and it is leaving Iran to be the leader of the second.
When the Trump administration assassinated Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, the foreign-operations branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in January, I wrote a column saying that America had just killed “the dumbest man in Iran.”

Why? Because what was Suleimani’s business model, which became Shiite Iran’s business model? It was to hire Arab and other Shiites to fight Arab Sunnis in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria — to project Iran’s power. And what was the result of all this? Iran has helped to turn all four into failed states. Iran’s clerical leadership has become the largest facilitator of state failure in the Middle East — including its own — which is why so many Lebanese blame it and Hezbollah for their country’s mismanagement that led to the devastating explosion last week in Beirut’s port.

I have followed the Middle East for too long to ever write the sentence “the region will never be the same again.” The forces of sectarianism, tribalism, corruption and anti-pluralism run deep there. But there are other currents — young men and women who are just so tired of the old game, the old fights, the old wounds being stoked over and over again. You could see them demonstrating all over the streets of Beirut last week demanding good governance and a chance to realize their full potential.

The U.A.E. and Israel and the U.S. on Thursday showed — at least for one brief shining moment — that the past does not always have to bury the future, that the haters and dividers don’t always have to win.

It was a breath of fresh air. May it one day soon turn into a howling wind of change that spreads across the whole region.