In January, Arabic-language social media platforms saw a sharp, highly coordinated surge in incitement against the United Arab Emirates. Over the course of just three days, anti-UAE hashtags spiked dramatically, carrying a strikingly uniform tone and content.
The UAE was repeatedly branded “the Gulf’s Israel,” described as a “Zionist proxy” and a “Trojan Horse,” and accused of acting against Islam itself.
The timing was especially revealing. The escalation peaked on the week of January 17, coinciding with the anniversary of the 2022 Houthi drone and missile attack on Abu Dhabi, a moment of national trauma comparable to 9/11 for Emiratis. The choice of date underscored the campaign's intent not merely to criticize policy but to inflict psychological and moral wounds. The message was clear: Peace with the Jewish state is still punishable.
What makes this campaign particularly revealing is not only its intensity but the contradiction it exposes. As Saudi-linked media ecosystems, including Turkish and Egyptian voices, saturated Arabic and Islamist platforms with anti-Zionist incitement, Saudi officials began projecting a markedly different posture abroad.
Saudi Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman Al Saud rushed to engage American Jewish leaders in Washington, as well as Sen. Lindsey Graham, who had cautioned earlier that Saudi Arabia cannot say one thing behind closed doors and another to the public, especially as a US ally.
A 200-PERSON delegation from the Israel Economic Forum is landing in Riyadh this week for a three-day economic forum, and Riyadh even saw its first Holocaust memorial event last week, a symbolic gesture suggesting the door to Saudi normalization remains ajar. These events were not insignificant. Yet they exist alongside a domestic and regional information environment in which “Zionist” continues to function as a moral slur leveraged for regional influence and bullying. On X/Twitter spaces, Saudis insist they don’t have a problem with Jews. It’s just the Zionists they oppose.
These two realities cannot coexist indefinitely. No Arab state can meaningfully benefit from Jewish cooperation while rejecting Jewish sovereignty. If Zionism remains framed as shameful, conspiratorial, or inherently illegitimate inside Saudi discourse, then the kingdom is not prepared for Abraham Accords-style peace and prosperity.
Why Israel-UAE normalization works
The Accords had to be undermined precisely because they worked and the results were measurable. Israel-UAE trade rose from near-zero to $2.56 billion in 2022, to $2.95 billion in 2023, and to about $3.2 billion in 2024, an 11% year-over-year increase even under wartime pressure.
Israeli tourism to the UAE rose from 113,000 visitors in 2021 to almost 270,000 in 2022. The UAE-Israel Comprehensive Economic Partnership (CEPA) aims to increase bilateral trade to more than $10 billion within five years.
What made this integration process durable was not the signature alone, because the UAE did not just normalize on paper; it legitimized Jewish sovereignty. Years before normalization, it laid cultural groundwork designed to recalibrate public consciousness. It launched the Year of Tolerance in 2019, signed the Document on Human Fraternity, and built interfaith infrastructure that treated Jewish presence not as an anomaly, but as a civilizational fact of the region.
Emirati public messaging did something unprecedented in the Arab world: It refused to erase Zionism for convenience.
It began to explain and contextualize it. It revised the national curriculum, removed the phrase “Zionist entity” from media usage, dismantled Arab League-aligned boycott laws, and presented Zionism as what it is, a national movement rooted in Jewish history, trauma, and the universal right to self-determination.
Visible Jewish life was not hidden or outsourced to diplomacy; it was supported openly, signaling that Israel’s existence was real, permanent, and legitimate, not tactical or conditional. An Emirati friend told me, “If anyone has a problem with your Jewish identity, report them to the police immediately.” That investment in Jewish life and safety, plus the UAE’s economic resilience, is why the Accords held under pressure.
That is also why, as the Israel-Hamas War entered a pause and attention shifted, the real target of incitement is no longer Israel. It is the UAE, the most resilient Arab partner of the Abraham Accords, and a state still delivering economic breakthroughs, including surpassing the $1 trillion milestone in non-oil foreign trade.
The UAE represents a living counterargument to rejectionist orthodoxy. It demonstrates that normalization with Israel can endure pressure, survive crises, and strengthen sovereignty for peace partners rather than erode it. For actors still invested in weaponizing Jewish sovereignty for domestic gain, the UAE is not just an outlier; it is a mirror.
AFTER OCTOBER 7, while much of the region descended into performative radicalism, the UAE behaved like a post-ideological state. It did not sever ties with Israel. It maintained diplomatic and economic continuity. Even on Palestinian solidarity, it outperformed its accusers. By tonnage alone, the UAE has delivered over 100,000 tonnes of aid to Gaza, roughly 13 times Saudi Arabia’s reported 7,700 tonnes delivered via its air and sea bridge.
That restraint, in defiance of the region’s morality police, revealed Emirati leadership and sovereignty, and the predictable resentful response was incitement. The campaign was coordinated because it had to be; it was an attempt to reverse the psychological permission the Accords created before anti-Zionism lost the last of its capital.
But Zionism is not an insult. It is Jewish sovereignty.
The inability to see Jewish and indigenous sovereignty as a pillar for stability in the region is the source of the rift between Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Saudi Arabia often frames Syria, Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia through the language of territorial integrity and the avoidance of state fragmentation. That’s understandable. A vast kingdom with internal diversity and a large Shi’ite population concentrated in the Eastern Province, which is the richest in oil reserves, will naturally be anxious about secessionist movements.
The UAE, like Israel, operates from a different premise. It treats sovereignty as the organizing principle of regional order, and it rejects transnational Islamist movements that exploit local populations and convert grievance into permanent instability.
Islamists abuse indigenous communities on their own land, then turn the wreckage into forever wars, and that cycle is precisely what keeps the region weak, poor, and governable by chaos. The UAE’s alignment with Israel on this is not a curious alliance; it is a shared belief that sovereignty and good governance, not ideological militancy, are the only path to durable peace and economic integration.
What Saudi leaders should understand, particularly Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is that if the kingdom wants deep cooperation with Jews, whether the financiers in New York or the political hawks in Washington, it must accept Israel as a sovereign, permanent state. You cannot build lasting integration by engaging the Jewish Diaspora on one hand and treating Jewish sovereignty as evil on the other.
Israelis must also internalize that peace is not a reward Israel grants Saudi Arabia. That era is over. Peace and prosperity are dividends Saudi Arabia can earn only if it accepts Jewish sovereignty as a civilizational engine, not a bargaining chip.
If the UAE is punished and abandoned for having defended that premise, the lesson transmitted across the region will be corrosive. It will teach that choosing peace with Jews is a liability rather than a foundation for progress.
If Israelis and Americans do not stand publicly and decisively with the UAE now, they will reinforce that lesson, and they will invite the next campaign to target not just a partner, but the possibility of peace itself for decades to come, everywhere.
The author is a writer and policy advisor pioneering the bottom-up movement of the Abraham Accords. She leads initiatives that turn the Accords from a diplomatic framework into a living ecosystem of cultural collaboration, de-radicalization, and regional integration.