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By Robin Wright
In 1982, a Palestinian fighter told me a dark joke the day the Israeli invasion of Lebanon forced 6,000 P.L.O. guerrillas to retreat on ships to remote lands. The story began when God told President Ronald Reagan, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, and the P.L.O. leader, Yasir Arafat, who would answer a query from each of them. Reagan was the first. “How long will it be before capitalism regulates the global?” Asked. God answered, “A hundred years.” Reagan started crying. Did I say why?” God said. “Because it probably wouldn’t happen in my life, ” replied the president. Brezhnev then asked, “How long will it be before the overall total is communist?” God said, “Two hundred years.” Brezhnev burst into tears because it wouldn’t happen in his life either. Then Arafat asked, “God, how long will it be before there is a state for my other people in Palestine?” And God wept.
On Thursday, the White House announced a historic agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, oil-rich sheikhs, and longtime best friends of Palestinians, to normalize diplomatic relations. The wonderful agreement, which is expected to be signed in a White House rite in the coming weeks, will include the opening of embassies, industry and technology, direct flights and tourism, and cooperation in energy, security and intelligence. In Tel Aviv, the City Council was illuminated with appearance flags of Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Israeli challenger Reuven Rivlin invited Abu Dhabi’s crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed to him.
There are still many important points to come. In what would possibly turn out to be unwelcome speculation, the White House described the agreement as “a first step forward for Muslims around the world who wish to come in peace to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque” in Jerusalem because they will be able to do so. Fly. Directly from Abu Dhabi to Tel Aviv and ‘welcome’. The concept that Israel will factor a large number of Visas for Muslims in countries long hostile to prayer at a mosque on the Temple Mount, The Holiest Site of Judaism, is perhaps an illusion. In a briefing for journalists, Jared Kushner also predicted that the agreement would undermine jihadist extremism. Again, unlikely.
Dubbed the Abrahamic Accords, this agreement is only the third time Israel has been identified through one of the twenty-two Arab states. The first was the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. The moment with Jordan in 1994. The new deal represents a diplomatic breakthrough for President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as both face developing political obstacles at home. Bipartisan support is available in the United States. Joe Biden, the so-called Democratic presidential candidate, praised the deal as “a historic step to save deep divisions in the Middle East.” He praised the U.A.E. for an “act of courage and sense of the indispensable state.”
However, the agreement also highlights how, for the Palestinians, a state – and a broader peace – remains difficult to reach more than a quarter of a century after the Oslo Accords explained the principles for the creation of their own country. After decades of dominant and decisive tensions in the Middle East, the Palestinians are no longer an urgent priority; they also seem to be less and less fit the trend lines of the region. Their brothers abandon them. “The shock is less vital to the leaders of the region,” Natan Sachs, director of the Middle East Policy Center at the Brookings Institution, told me. The agreement is “a visual demonstration of the fatigue of some Arab leaders in the United Arab Emirates.” and Saudi Arabia in particular, with the Palestinian leadership and its cause. They no longer need to be held back for what they see as a Palestinian rejection. »
The main dividing line in the Middle East has also moved from Arab-Israeli confrontation to tensions between Arabs and predominantly Persian Iran. As enmities have changed, diplomatic power has evolved. And, in an example of the old adage that your enemy’s enemy is your friend, the conservative Muslim kingdoms of the Gulf have discovered an unusual cause with Israel’s Jewish leaders. The agreement may simply sign the formal creation of an anti-Iranian bloc that has been quietly building for years, perhaps with more states to unite.
“This agreement is a vital step toward building a rich, more peaceful, safe and disgusting Middle East,” Trump told reporters after a verbal three-way exchange with Netanyahu and bin Zayed. He said the relationship between the two leaders of the secret negotiations, who took up position for more than six weeks, “was like love.” He predicted, “Now that the ice has been broken, I hope that more Arab and Muslim countries will follow the example of the United Arab Emirates.” Kushner, who oversaw Trump’s Middle East peace plan, said some other countries were “frustrated that they weren’t the first.” Bahrain, another Gulf sheikh, without delay congratulated the United Arab Emirates. to “take steps to build the possibilities of peace in the Middle East.” There have long been hypotheses about possible links between Israel and Morocco. In 2018, the former sultan of Oman welcomed Netanyahu. Qatar allowed Israel to open a short-term industrial workplace there in the 1990s and has hosted Israelis in meetings ever since, even though it financially supports the Palestinians.
In exchange for formal recognition, Netanyahu agreed to “suspend” his plan – a central detail of his re-election attempt this year – to annex parts of the West Bank. Instead, Israel will focus on “expanding ties with other countries in the Arab and Muslim world,” the White House said. The reason for the United Arab Emirates was to prevent it from annexing and a “lethal blow” to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, according to Anwar Gargash, its Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. “The United Arab Emirates. It uses its gravity, its promise of relationship, to check and unscrew a time bomb that threatens the two-state solution,” he said. But the Israeli radical leader said he had not defected from the annexation. “I am committed to sovereignty,” Netanyahu said after the agreement was announced. There is no “change” in his promise to annex parts of the West Bank. “I didn’t leave the colonies.”
Palestinians feel deeply betrayed. The Palestinian Authority condemned Israel-United Arab Emirates. agreement as an “aggression against the Palestinian people,” recalled its ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, and demanded an urgent Arab League summit. “The leaders say that the United Arab Emirates, or elsewhere, has the right to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people,” he said in a statement. In a tweet, Palestinian veteran Hanan Ashrawi bitterly commented, “Never be blindfolded through your ‘friends’.”
The emirate of the Gulf has not abandoned the Palestinians at all, daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, told me. Instead, he “abandoned hope that the Palestinian leadership will be saved.” The two Palestinian territories, the West Bank and Gaza, have been ruled by rival factions since 2007, when their militias fought for control. Hamas, an Islamist party, took hold in Gaza, while the Fatah Wing of the P.L.O. under President Mahmoud Abbas ruled the West Bank. Repeated attempts to reconcile them have failed, making negotiations for lasting or credible peace with Israel almost impossible. Abbas, who is eighty-four, was elected to a four-year term in 2005, and the new elections have been postponed several times since. “Leadership is now sclerotic and lacks international or political artistic relations,” Kurtzer said. “If I were Palestinian, I would be incredibly frustrated with my leadership. They have done a bad job in translating victimization into a positive policy.” The Palestinians will have to resolve their own political turmoil before the Arab world, once back, devotes a lot of political influence to helping their cause.
Unlike Israel’s agreements with Egypt and Jordan, its agreement with the United Arab Emirates. adjusts a basic premise of peace, Sachs noted. For decades, the framework of international relations between countries was based on “land for peace”: Israel abandoned the lands it had conquered in wars with the Arabs in exchange for Arabs not promising long-term aggression. The new premise is “Peace for Peace,” a popular choir among right-wing Israelis, Sachs said. It is not based on the exchange of land, and only on the temporary suspension of a promise to proclaim sovereignty over more Arab lands, in exchange for a pact of non-aggression and formal relations. The question is how the formal alliance between Israel and a small but influential Gulf country will lead to the development of tensions with Iran. “If you’re looking for an organizational concept that has moved the needle as much as it has in the Middle East for the last six or seven years, Iran is the starting point,” Kurtzer told me. “That’s what brought the Gulf states and Israel to the same place.” Israel now has a best friend on the front line with the Islamic Republic, which is only thirty-three miles from the United Arab Emirates.
It will be used in accordance with our policy.
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