Israel’s peace deal: a historic breakthrough?
For once, President Trump wasn’t exaggerating when he tweeted last week about a “HUGE breakthrough”, said Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. The peace agreement his administration had just brokered between the United Arab Emirates and Israel really is a historic achievement. The deal fully normalises relations between the two states, in return for Israel foregoing, for now, its proposed annexations on the West Bank. And it’s only the third peace deal Israel has ever struck with an Arab government, said Einat Wilf in The Daily Telegraph. The others were its pacts with Egypt in 1979, and with Jordan in 1994. But while those were “little more than mutual nonaggression pacts”, this one opens the way to full economic cooperation, tourism and cultural exchange. It’s the first that “holds the prospect of being and feeling like true peace”.
The deal will enable the Emirates to “marry their financial capital with Israel’s world-class technology”, said The Times. Other Gulf states such as Bahrain and Oman are expected to follow the UAE’s lead, spurred on by trade hopes and the mutual enmity of these predominantly Sunni nations and Israel towards Shia Iran. This peace deal demonstrates Iran’s self-defeating ability to “goad others into forging alliances”, said David Gardner in the FT. It’s good news for Israel and its embattled PM, Benjamin Netanyahu. It won’t, however, help resolve the Middle East’s most intractable problem: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Progress on that front now looks further away than ever, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. For decades, Arab nations have insisted that they’ll only normalise relations with Israel when it delivers justice for the Palestinians. But now they’re doing so in return for Israel merely suspending the plan (which Netanyahu insists is still “on the table”) to enlarge its borders. “Netanyahu is the man who picks your pocket, then expects a prize for agreeing not to hit you over the head.” The ambiguity over what has been agreed in this deal – Trump said annexation was now totally “off the table” – hardly inspires confidence, said The Observer. By rewarding Netanyahu for something he may not even honour, the UAE’s de facto leader Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan – MBZ to his friends – has weakened Israel’s incentive to negotiate an equitable twostate solution. The authors of this deal have selfinterested reasons for hailing it as a “historic” breakthrough. “Yet any rapprochement built on the ruins of Palestinian hopes of an independent state is suspect and fragile.”