On Monday morning a historic event took place in Israel’s relations with Arab countries when a chartered El-Al plane took off from Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv and flew over Saudi Arabia to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
Onboard of the plane were large delegations of the Israeli and American governments and many Israeli journalists.
The Israeli delegation was led by Meir Ben-Shabbat, Israel’s national security adviser, while the American delegation included Jared Kushner, who is according to Times Magazine the most influential adviser to US President Donald Trump and US National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien.
Ben Shabbat didn’t hide his excitement about the historical event and made the following statement regarding the trip:
"I am excited and proud to head the Israeli delegation to the talks in Abu Dhabi. We are leaving today for talks pursuant to the declaration by the three leaders – President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed – on the establishment of peaceful relations. Our goal is to achieve a joint working plan to advance relations in a very broad range of areas: Tourism, aviation, innovation, science, technology, health, economic matters, and many others. This morning, the traditional blessing 'go in peace' receives special meaning for us. Thank you very much to everyone."
In Israel, the pro-peace camp wasn’t equally excited, and this has everything to do with the fact that it was the government of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the Administration of US President Donald J. Trump who achieved the normalization with the UAE.
Jared Kushner, in particular, was the main architect of the deal with the Sunni Arab Gulf State together with former Trump official Jason Greenblatt.
Another argument against the deal that opponents of Trump and Netanyahu make is that the full normalization of relations with the United Arab Emirates make is that it doesn’t solve the century-long Palestinian Israel conflict.
PLO chairman and former Palestinian Authority chief negotiator Saeb Erekat retorted to his usual rhetoric against the peace deal between Israel and the UAE when he wrote the following on his Twitter account:
"Peace is not an empty word used to normalize crimes and oppression. Peace is the outcome of justice. Peace is not made by denying Palestine's right to exist and imposing an apartheid regime. Apartheid is what Netanyahu means by 'peace for peace."
In the Arab world, many leaders take Ererkat’s statements with a grain of salt, however, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed Palestinian intransigence in his remarks after his meeting with Kushner and O’Brien.
After predicting that other Arab countries would now follow suit Netanyahu said that today’s breakthroughs will become tomorrow’s norms and that the old paradigms won’t work anymore.
“For far too long, the Palestinians have had a veto on peace, not only between the Palestinians and Israel, but between Israel and the broader Arab world. And if it were up to some of these Palestinians, Israel would have to withdraw to the indefensible '67 lines, expel over 100,000 Jews from their homes in own ancestral homeland, divide our capital, Jerusalem, flood Israel with descendants of refugees, put our country at risk, while still refusing to recognize the one and only Jewish state,” Netanyahu told the press.
He then continued “this has been a long-held position on them. I told Jared and the delegation that, on the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration three years ago, they were suing Britain, they planned to sue Britain for the Balfour Declaration.”
“So if we have to wait for the Palestinians, we would have to wait forever. Well, no longer,” the Israeli prime minister said while referring to the Balfour declaration of the British government from 1917 which formed the beginning of the process that led to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.
Proponents of a Palestinian state in Israel’s peace camp also spoke out against the peace deal between Israel and the UAE arguing that the road to peace goes not via the Emirates but should go through Ramallah.
Professor Eli Podeh from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem pointed out that “Israel is wrong to seek agreement with Arab states while circumventing the Palestinians.”
“Its attempt to isolate and weaken the Palestinians could end in the Palestinians being pushed towards violent struggle as a last resort. Israel will then claim that the Palestinians have reverted to violence once again, ignoring its own role in this deterioration,” Podeh wrote in Ha’aretz.
This line of thinking of Israel pushing the Palestinian Arabs towards violent struggle again is flawed to the core.
Before the Six-Day-War of 1967 Palestinian Arabs weren’t striving for a state of their own nor were they opposing the illegal Jordanian occupation of the so-called West Bank (Judea and Samaria).
Relationships with Israelis living in Judea and Samaria as well as with the Israeli military became only violent after the PLO intervened and incited the Palestinian masses.
This pattern continued after former PLO chief Yasser Arafat was allowed into Israel, established the Palestinian Authority and began to prepare for war with Israel as Daniel Polisar pointed out in an article for Azure Magazine in the summer of 2002.
Palestinian Arab violence and intransigence not the Israeli refusal to negotiate a peace agreement led to the collapse of the peace process which already died in the months before and after the signing of the Oslo accords when Palestinian terror groups literally blew up the process by starting a wave of suicide attacks against Jews and IDF soldiers.
In short, the UAE Israel peace agreement has blown up the concept that Israel first needs to make peace with the Palestinian Arabs before it can fully normalize relations with the Arab countries.