The United Arab Emirates Agreement From Mohammed to Mohammed to Mohammed

In the little time that has passed since the announcement of a peace accord between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (and Bahrain), we have been hearing a lot of similar stories. The predominantly Moslem European country of Kosova is going to establish relations with Israel and put its Israeli embassy in Jerusalem. Serbia, which already had relations with Israel, will likely be moving its embassy to Jerusalem, and there is a chance that the Czech Republic and perhaps even Austria will be moving their embassies to Jerusalem as well.

Amongst Arab countries, at the beginning of September Saudi Arabia opened its air space to El Al jets flying over that country. Israeli retail chains are planning to open branches in the United Arab Emirates, and ties, as least business ties, are developing between Israel and Qatar. Oman will probably be joining soon as well. In Africa, Sudan may join, followed by still other countries.

In my book, the man most responsible for these breakthroughs is Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been advancing such processes since before his first term in 1996, and who more than any other man on earth stressed the point that Iran was a menace to the whole world, turning peace with Israel into a vital interest for any Arab country that understood Netanyahu’s point. Donald Trump undid eight bad years of Obama non-leadership that had rewarded bullies and extremists and destroyed seven Arab countries. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair played a role, as did the amazing Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan, Crown Prince of the United Arab Emirates, who, according to my Kiryat Arba friend, is a decent, wise human being.

Some of the burgeoning peace is brand new, and some of it has been developing for years. And it all seems to be happening without any major “peace process” being rammed down Israel’s throat. You can go on the internet and see a young Saudi Arabian singer, named Mohammed, singing the popular Hebrew song “Anachnu ma’aminim bnei ma’aminim” with a big happy smile on his face, in tandem with an Israeli religious singer. A friend of mine, an American resident of Kiryat Arba who has a website, is in contact with a number of Muslim journalists and thinkers from UAE. He showed me a Friday Whatsapp video he received from one of them, in which a Moslem friend encourages a young nephew of his to wish my friend a “Shabbat Shalom.”

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Some of us recall the 10-sentence “Arab Peace Initiative,” also called the “Saudi Initiative,” endorsed by the Arab League back in 2002, and re-endorsed in 2007 and then in 2017 at Arab-League summits. That plan called for “normalizing relations” between the Arab World and Israel in exchange for a “full withdrawal from all occupied territories” (i.e., Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem). For many years, that plan was the official Arab plan and the darling of the Israeli Left. Israeli Leftist intellectuals, without blinking, expressed as a sane idea the thought (the wish?) that Israel should take six or seven hundred thousand Jews and expel them from their homes, sacrificing them for the sake of that monstrous “peace.”

Well, right now everything we could hope to gain from those “normalized relations” is being achieved without anyone even coming to the table to discuss Israel withdrawing from anywhere. You rub your eyes in disbelief and you ask yourself, “What’s going on? Is all of this real? Is there a catch?

A month ago, I was asked by an American cousin whether I thought the UAE deal was a trick, and at the time I responded that I thought it was a trick, a booby prize to compensate for Israel’s having had “annexation” snatched out of its hands by the Trump Administration. The UAE peace deal was a way of saying, “See? You haven’t lost annexation; you’ve gained UAE.” I compared the UAE peace deal to the 1994 Jordanian-Israel Peace Deal, which also seemed like a trick to me.

After all the deaths and terror resulting from the Oslo Accords, it looked to me, and to many others, as though Clinton had pulled the Jordanian peace accord out of a hat, recycling it like Thursday-night cholent to make it look like Israel had gained something from Oslo, when in reality Israel had already had peace with Jordan for almost 30 years, since the day after the 1967 Six Day War, and arguably before that. The Jordanians even worked successfully to make sure that Arab terrorists did not try to cross over into Israel. 

In the case of UAE as well, it was an open secret that wealthy Jewish-Israeli businessmen have been flying to the Gulf States for years. Perhaps they were not flying on El Al. Perhaps they were concealing their Israeli nationality or their Jewishness, but they were doing business there. So, I asked myself, what did a peace treaty add? Didn’t it just create further pressure on Israel not to annex (they don’t want to ruin the peace with UAE, do they?), or, G-d forbid, pressure for something worse?

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My response could be called a “knee-jerk reaction.” I, and many friends in Judea and Samaria, have been analyzing reality in Israel for almost 40 years based on visceral intuition. After all, my very relationship to Israel is an emotional love relationship. It is not based on intellect. I have gotten used to analyzing what happens here in these terms, and the truth is that I am mostly right. I was right about Oslo, about the Disengagement and about settlements, much more right than the “secular hawks” or Leftist intellectuals. To play it safe, each night I would look myself in the mirror and ask myself, “Am I still right?” and there I would allow logic to rear its head.

In this particular case, I decided after a few weeks that, to a certain extent, despite the importance of constant vigilance, I was wrong about UAE. The flurry of recognitions was valuable and even blessed. All this business cooperation had to be good for the country and good for the world. Just to have a growing number of countries willing to live and cooperate with Israel without demanding in return that Israel hurt itself by giving up land was itself extremely valuable.

The best proof that the present peace agreements and warming are a valuable phenomenon is the reaction of Mohammed Shtayyeh, “Prime Minister of the State of Palestine.” A few days ago, before the UAE signing, he said, “Tomorrow will be a black day for the Palestinians.” If it’s bad for him….

Forty years ago, Israelis used to say, “The Arab countries nearest to us are relatively normal. It’s the distant countries like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Kaddafi’s Libya that allow themselves to express what the Arabs are really thinking.” Today, somehow, it’s the opposite. The nut-jobs are right there with us: the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The UAE peace signings weaken those nut-jobs.

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Will I personally benefit from the agreement? I don’t think so. I have no interest in flying outside of Israel to see tall buildings or interesting beaches, and I don’t think the people in Abu Dhabi are interested in my Torah translations. But that doesn’t disqualify the agreement. King Solomon sent ships to bring ivory and monkeys from abroad, so there is precedent for such activities.

Could a time come when all the Arab countries that made peace with us turn against us? Yes, but it won’t be worse than what they have been doing every day until now without the accord.