Israel-UAE deal, who's to thank and what will it lead to? – opinion

It is very important that in the current discourse we get our facts straight.

By SUSAN HATTIS ROLEF
Trump announces UAE-Israel agreement, flanked by US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and advisor Jared Kushner. (photo credit: REUTERS/KEVIN LAMARQUE)
Trump announces UAE-Israel agreement, flanked by US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and advisor Jared Kushner.
(photo credit: REUTERS/KEVIN LAMARQUE)
In the eyes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supporters, the agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, that they hope will be signed at the White House in Washington before the November US presidential election, has become the litmus test to measure the patriotism and allegiance to Israel of the likes of me: left-wingers, who believe that it is high time that Netanyahu depart from the official Prime Minister’s Residence on Balfour Street.
Needless to say, they believe that we are destined to fail the test, simply because for them the approaching agreement is not only something that has some intrinsic value of its own, which is of the highest value to Israel, but because it is (in their eyes) the brilliant product of Netanyahu’s genius, which places him in one line with former prime minister Menachem Begin (who in 1979 signed a peace treaty with Egypt), and with former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (who in 1994 signed a peace treaty with Jordan). But, unlike the former treaties, In this case Israel is not asked to relinquish any territory in return for the agreement. According to Netanyahu supporters, it is inconceivable that the likes of me would admit that anything done by Netanyahu might be worthy of praise.
Well, I full-heartedly hope that the agreement will materialize, and believe that this agreement will greatly improve Israel’s geopolitical situation in the Middle East, especially if it will be followed by similar agreements with additional Arab states, such as Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. It will also be of vast value to the Israeli economy, and might help Israel extricate itself from its current economic woes.
Furthermore, there is no denial that Netanyahu deserves much of the credit for this approaching agreement, even though it should be noted that unofficial relations and trade with the UAE started to develop in Rabin’s days, after the signing of the Oslo Accords. What Netanyahu has added is the formalization of the relations, and their “coming out of the closet.”
However, it is very important that in the current discourse we get our facts straight.
First, one should put the record straight with regard to the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan, for which Rabin receives the credit. As in the case of the UAE today, so in the case of Jordan, informal relations had existed much before the treaty was signed.
What enabled the signing of the peace treaty were the Oslo Accords, which in 1994 still left room for optimism regarding the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations. One should remember that also the October/November 1991 Madrid Conference on Peace in the Middle East, in which Yitzhak Shamir’s government participated (despite its reservations – Netanyahu knows all about that, since he was deputy minister of foreign affairs at the time, and served as Israel’s official spokesman at the conference), created a positive atmosphere that resulted in dozens of countries, which had previously refused to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, opening embassies in Tel Aviv (including China and India) and ending their surrender to the Arab boycott of Israel (especially noteworthy was Japan).
But in the agreement with the UAE, we are talking of “the normalization of relations” not of “a peace agreement.” Peace agreements are signed with states with which one was formerly in a state of war. It should be noted that the UAE was never on Israel’s list of enemy states, and the two were never engaged in war. Since the UAE and Israel have no common border, they have no territorial claims against each other, though as we shall see below, the freezing of Netanyahu’s plans for annexing territories in the West Bank was a UAE precondition.
WE HAVE NOT yet seen a draft of the agreement that will be signed, though we can predict that its title will not include the words “Peace Agreement,” and that it will deal primarily with the issue of formal diplomatic relations, trade and financial issues, technology, tourism, education and culture. What will not be mentioned in the agreement are security issues, including military cooperation, or bilateral understandings reached between the UAE and the US, or the exact conditions that Israel is being required to fulfill by the US for the agreement to materialize.
One thing is absolutely clear: Despite Netanyahu’s genius, if it weren’t for Donald Trump there would be no agreement, and the reason Trump is so eager to get the agreement signed before the presidential elections is that it is destined to serve as the diamond on the crown of his rather erratic foreign policy in the last four years. If he loses the November election, the agreement will survive, but it is not clear what will come of the informal provisions.
As far as we know these informal provisions include a demand that Israel avoid engaging in plans to unilaterally annex parts of the West Bank in the foreseeable future, a US promise to the UAE to consider selling it F-35 stealth multi-role combat planes and other sophisticated weapons, and probably additional provisions of which we might never be informed.
Netanyahu has made it clear that there is no Israeli commitment to give up the annexation plans, which he has been promoting since January, and that he did not give his OK to the US to sell F-35s to the UAE or any other Middle Eastern country.
However, as part of his uncontrolled and boastful blabber, Netanyahu did state in an interview to the Dubai based Sky News Arabia TV channel that Israel and the UAE “are both advanced democracies.” While the Israeli democracy is still standing steadfast against Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken it for his personal purposes, the UAE is a state in which only 10% of the residents are citizens, and of the remaining 90% (mostly foreign workers) the vast majority have no human and civil rights, and many are employed under conditions that are tantamount to slavery.
In fact, the UAE scores very low on all international measures of freedom and human rights. Inter alia, it is accused of arbitrary arrests, torture and the unaccounted for disappearance of detainees. In the UAE, criticism of the regime is an offense; domestic violence against women is permitted; sex outside marriage is forbidden to the extent that women have been imprisoned after reporting rape because it amounted to sex outside marriage. A video of Netanyahu’s interview was removed from his official Twitter feed after the extent of the embarrassment was understood (it can still be seen elsewhere on the web).
Of course, the fact that the UAE is not a democracy does not belittle the achievement of reaching an agreement with it. Neither Egypt nor Jordan are democracies. However, the fact that Netanyahu doesn’t appear to count to 10 before he decides what to say and what to avoid saying, is worrying. Already all the blabber about the possibility of agreements being reached with additional Arab states has resulted in formal denials by some of them, including a declaration by the Saudi foreign minister last Wednesday, to the effect that in accordance with the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, Riyadh will not normalize relations with Israel before an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord is reached.