It’s clear that Israelis have no time or patience right now for the theatrics of a ceremony on the White House’s South Lawn while wondering how they’re going to be able to make a living.
By LAHAV HARKOVPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sarah take off for the signing ceremony of the peace agreement in Washington(photo credit: AVI OHAYON/GPO/FLASH90)
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, disembarked from the El Al plane that landed at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington, DC, it was a scene that had been repeated many times during his years as prime minister. The couple walked on a red carpet down the stairs from the plane and waved for the cameras.But one thing was different: They were both wearing masks over their mouths and noses.Technically, they didn’t need to. For most of their descent from the Boeing 777, they were well over two meters away from anyone not in their family unit.But with all of Israel set to go into a lockdown four days later on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, this was no time to get technical.Netanyahu has been piqued in the past by his big diplomatic achievements being overshadowed by what he and his supporters saw as petty political distractions.This time, however, it seems Netanyahu and those surrounding him get it. This is an opportunity that the prime minister would be remiss to let pass, but for now, at least, he’s toning down the bombast.Israelis are happy about peace with the UAE and Bahrain, as polling shows. It’s a historic and meaningful moment for a country that has spent its entire existence as more or less a pariah in the region, and even many of Netanyahu’s political rivals are able to recognize that.But it’s clear that Israelis also have no time or patience right now for the theatrics of a quadripartite signing ceremony on the White House’s South Lawn while wondering how they’re going to be able to make a living when their store or restaurant is shut down, or while watching their children who are home from school for three weeks, or despairing over another major Jewish holiday spent at home alone without family, or stressing over the climbing COVID-19 morbidity numbers.So Netanyahu turned down the volume a bit this time. He didn’t make a big statement on his way onto the Boeing 777 on Sunday, which he boarded shortly after giving a press conference announcing Friday’s lockdown, with Israeli, Emirati, Bahraini and American flags posted by the red carpet.Nor did he say anything on his way off the plane the next morning. And the first photo and piece of information his press apparatus released from Washington was of the prime minister in Blair House – the White House’s guest house, his preferred DC digs – on a phone conference with Health Minister Yuli Edelstein, coronavirus commissioner Prof. Ronni Gamzu and several others.In addition to not giving reporters anything to write about while getting on and off the plane, Netanyahu didn’t give a briefing on the plane like he often does. That could be chalked up to coronavirus concerns; it’s hard to keep social distance while crowding around someone standing in the aisle of a plane.In Washington, coronavirus remained at the top of the delegation members’ minds. Journalists were told that the rule of the trip is that no one – including press – was to leave the hotel at any point except to go to the White House on Tuesday.Netanyahu was not leaving Blair House either, his aides said, and is holding fewer meetings than usual and not going out to dinner with his wife and sons, who joined him on this historic trip, as he usually would. Anyone who broke the rules would have to find his or her own way back to Israel, as opposed to taking the plane with the prime minister and then self-quarantine for two weeks.When Itamar Eichner of Yediot Aharonot spotted Netanyahu’s top foreign-policy adviser, Reuven Azar, on a run outside, there was an uproar among the journalists who were having breakfast together in a small conference room designated for us to eat without commingling with other guests.In the end, Netanyahu’s chief of staff had to reiterate the rules. But TV reporters were permitted to stand a few meters outside the hotel for a better background for their broadcasts.More importantly, his “capsule,” as Israelis call it, or “pod,” as Americans say, caused some complications between the Israeli and American teams working on the event. The Israeli side asked to stand separately from the rest of the guests to stay in its own pod, and the Americans struggled to figure out a way to make that work at an event with 1,000 invitees.Of course, there were other, more substantive things to work out before Tuesday’s event, like the actual content of the agreements. Since the Bahrain normalization was announced over the weekend, it was clear the deal would be more like a declaration that the sides intend to make peace.But UAE ties were made public over a month ago, and the agreement between Netanyahu and Emirati Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed is supposed to have some serious meat on its bones, so much so that the latter brought four other ministers with him to sign the chapters on areas under their responsibility.Yet a day before the signing, there was no final answer as to whether the agreement is peace, normalization or something else. Negotiations were ongoing.And without any real, new substance to the reason the delegation was in Washington in the first place, coronavirus was left as the big story even on the diplomatic beat.
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