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Leading Saudi Journalist Defends the UAE-Israel Agreement (Part 2)

Aug 25, 2020 10:00 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

In yesterday’s article about Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, we saw that the senior Saudi journalist believes that the Palestinians should be free of attempts by Arab states to dictate what they “must” do. Similarly, he thinks that the policies of Arab states should not be held in thrall to what the Palestinians want, but should be based squarely on each state’s national interest.

Continuing from yesterday’s post about the senior Saudi journalist Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed:

The second point [by Al-Rashed] is that every Arab country is equally entitled to handle its international relations, including its relations with Israel. Every state makes its own sovereign decisions according to its own interests, not according to what the Palestinians or other Arabs desire. Every Arab state has its own individual circumstances. When Sudanese President ‘Abd Al-Fattah Al-Burhan was asked why he established relations with Israel after the ouster of the regime of [‘Omar] Al-Bashir, he said that it was a supreme Sudanese interest. The UAE likewise has its supreme interests, in light of the current severe crises.

Just as the Palestinians should be free to make their own decisions in dealing with the Jewish state, every Arab country is equally entitled to a similar freedom in making decisions about its own relations with Israel. Al-Rashed refers to the UAE as having its “supreme interests, in light of the current severe crises.” He is alluding to, with no need to spell it out for his Arab audience, the threat from an aggressive Iran, which through its allies and proxies – the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Shi’a militias in Iraq, the army of Bashar Assad in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon – threatens the UAE as it does other Sunni Arab states of the Gulf. The UAE, having weighed the threats to its well-being, has decided that Israel is a valuable, even indispensable, ally in the conflict with Iran. Furthermore, Israel also offers the UAE the possibility of cooperation in technology, trade, tourism, agriculture, solar energy, cybersecurity, medicine, and many other areas, including the most important of all, defense. Why should the UAE not act to further its own interests in all those areas by collaborating with Israel?

Why did Qatar open its gates to Israel early on, in 1996, receiving [then-Israeli deputy prime minister] Shimon Peres in Doha and opening an [Israeli] trade office [there]? This came three months after [Qatari Emir] Hamad bin Khalifa staged a coup against his father and took the throne. The reason is clear – he wanted to strengthen his status as ruler. In the larger strategic framework, the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat decided [to sign] a peace agreement with Israel.

Al-Rashed notes that long before the UAE pursued its new agreement with Israel to further its own objectives – as it has every right to do – other Arab states had been pursuing their own arrangements with the Jewish state. Hamad bin Khalifa, who, following a coup, had been on the throne of Qatar for only three months, thought he could win support in Washington (Al-Rashed does not name the country Al Khalifa wished to win over, but it is clearly the U.S.) by allowing Israel to open a trade office in Doha and receiving Shimon Peres in the Qatari capital.

Similarly, Anwar Sadat had only Egypt’s interests in mind when he signed a peace treaty in 1979 with Israel, which provided for the return, in three tranches, of the entire Sinai to Egypt. And the UAE is now doing the same thing: making an agreement with Israel that will further its own national interests, an agreement whose terms the Palestinians have no business trying to dictate.

The Arabs have already gotten over the stage of establishing relations with Israel, and doing so is no longer shocking – it is considered old hat. The Israelis have already landed at every airport in the Arab capitals, and have been officially received there as diplomats, athletes, security officials, or journalists. Those who have lost out throughout all these years are the Palestinians. Things are done in their name and they are not benefiting from them: There is no return of territory, no recognition as a [Palestinian] state, and no services or help provided to the residents. This is the choice made by the Palestinian Authority; it is satisfied with watching the news from the sidelines and reacting negatively to it. Since the Palestinian Authority cannot prevent these developments, it can [at least] benefit from them, and advance in all areas that serve its interests or the needs of its residents.

It is true that the Israelis have all sorts of unofficial contacts with many Arab states. And they are indeed suddenly welcome – as diplomats, athletes, security officials – in at least a half-dozen Arab countries. Meanwhile, what have the Palestinians achieved? The Israelis have not given up any territory. Israel has expressed a willingness to comply with the Trump Plan, by which it would give 70% of the West Bank, as well as two large Israeli enclaves in the Negev, to form a Palestinian state. The Palestinians would have to agree to that territorial swap, and further agree to having their new state demilitarized. The Palestinians refuse even to begin discussions of the Trump Peace Plan. They refused even to attend the meeting in Manama, where a $50 billion dollar aid package — the most generous aid package offered to a single country in history — for a future Palestinian state was to be discussed. As Al-Rashed says, the Palestinians are “satisfied with watching the news from the sidelines and reacting negatively to it.” They could behave differently: instead of refusing to take part in any talks, no matter how potentially beneficial, they could choose instead to engage in negotiations, to see what further concessions they might obtain from the Israelis. This is something their leadership, stuck in a rut of its own making, resolutely refuses to do. That endless negativism of the Palestinians should not be allowed to scuttle the UAE’s very different plans for developing mutually beneficial relations with the Jewish state.

At the same time, it truly saddens us to see senior Palestinian officials allow themselves to be kicked around like a ball in the court of Qatar or Turkey in their disputes with others. The Palestinian losses have never stopped, because of their failure to deal with reality and their refusal to understand the circumstances of the Arab countries that establish relations with Israel, that can [actually] be of great help to [the Palestinians].

The failure of the Palestinians to deal with reality is seen most obviously in their inability to recognize that their former Arab backers no longer see the “cause of Palestine” as central, but have many other things to worry about that take precedence. There are the civil wars in Yemen, Libya, and Syria; the financial collapse of Lebanon and Hezbollah’s malign role as a state-within-the-state; the tremendous decrease in income from oil sales in the Gulf Arab states, the attempt by Iran to build a “Shia crescent” from Libya to Lebanon that could threaten Sunni states in the Middle East, the disastrous economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic. These are all of much greater consequence than that endless Palestinian-Israeli conflict in which Arab states now are ever less interested. When the Saudi Crown Prince MBS told Mahmoud Abbas to “take whatever deal the Americans offer,” he was expressing his exasperation with the whole Palestinian business, an exasperation shared by others in the Gulf, including many in the UAE.

For Al-Rashed, those who are now attacking the UAE forget that Arab and Muslim states have had ties with Israel for many decades. These include Turkey, which until the rise of Erdogan was a close military ally of Israel. Qatar encouraged Israel to open a trade office in Doha as far back as 1996. Egypt and Jordan both signed peace treaties with Israel. Israel is known to have close security ties to Saudi Arabia. Prime Minister Netanyahu met in Oman with Sultan Qaboos in 2018, re-established relations with Chad in 2019, and met in Uganda with the head of Sudan’s Sovereignty Council in 2020. Oman, Morocco, and Sudan are all rumored to be about to follow the UAE’s example and to normalize relations with Israel. The UAE’s agreement with Israel – its normalizing of relations — should be seen in light of that history and those recent developments.

Furthermore, just as no one should be telling the Palestinians what kind of relations they should have with Israel, Al-Rashed admonishes the Palestinians that neither they, nor anyone else, should be telling an Arab state what its relations with Israel should be. Each state will make such decisions on the basis of its own national interest, and nothing else. And that’s exactly what, an approving Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed wants us to understand, the UAE has just done.

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Filed Under: Featured, Israel, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates Tagged With: Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed


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Comments

  1. mortimer says

    Aug 25, 2020 at 10:18 am

    It’s obvious that the countries of the Middle East have many common interests and they need to discuss and resolve them. They have been doing so since the founding of Israel. The main obstacle is Islam’s inherent anti-Semitism which complicates the issues of trade and managing resources.

    Perhaps the Arab powers are finally realizing that the Pally situation is a hoax perpetrated on an unsuspecting world by the KGB inspired by Nicolai Ceausescu.

  2. Mike Stevens says

    Aug 25, 2020 at 10:24 am

    At a time when countries in the Arab world are turning their backs on Palestinians and instead forming closer ties with Israel, it’s strange to think that there is an AMERICAN citizen who is more vehemently pro-Palestinian than almost anyone in that Arab world. And a member of Congress at that. One who is calling for an end to US aid to Israel and a boycott of everything Israeli.

    Yes, Rashida Tlaib, come on down!

  3. Michael Copeland says

    Aug 25, 2020 at 11:30 am

    Failure to deal with reality…..
    Yes, that sums up the “Palestinian” leadership.
    They have not failed, though, to “deal with” those nice sums of foreign aid.

  4. The Political Oracle says

    Aug 25, 2020 at 11:50 am

    Palestine can move forward by removing the terrorist hamas-supporting dictator running and ruining Palestine’s future.

  5. gravenimage says

    Aug 25, 2020 at 9:38 pm

    Leading Saudi Journalist Defends the UAE-Israel Agreement (Part 2)
    ………………………

    Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed has said that

    “Saudi journalist suggests ties with Israel improve if Israeli Arabs come work in Saudi Arabia”

    https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4890656,00.html

    Of course, this is really bizarre, since Israelis are not even allowed in Saudi Arabia because they are Jews:

    “Despite approval in Israel, Saudi Arabia says Israelis can’t visit country”

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/despite-approval-in-israel-saudi-arabia-says-israelis-cant-visit-country/

    I hate to say it, but I still think that Israel needs to be *very* cautious with all of this.

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