A senior diplomat who is privy to high-level contacts between Israel and the United Arab Emirates told Kan News this morning that the UAE expects Israel neither to intervene nor to oppose any arms deal or other form of agreement reached between it and the United States, just as Israel did not oppose the deal that involved the sale of F16 jets to the UAE at the time.
The diplomat added that the normalization agreement between Israel and the UAE does not include any clause related to arms sales, but nonetheless, the understanding was that Israel "had expressed its willingness not to prevent" any such deal from occurring, if and when such a proposal appears on the agenda. He noted that the UAE sees a confluence of military interests between itself and Israel in that they share the same threats to their existence, and that therefore they perceive a strengthening of the UAE military as "an Israeli as well as a regional interest."