El Al flight over Saudi sign of hope
It’s big news that an El Al flight carrying Israeli officials, Jared Kushner and his negotiating team flew from Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi in three hours and forty minutes. The reason it didn’t take seven hours is that Saudi Arabia allowed the Israeli flight to go through its airspace — the first time that has ever happened.
On its own, the overflight is a signal that the Saudi kingdom is prepared to give some more-than-passive validation to the Israel-United Arab Emirates peace deal that is close to being inked. On a deeper level, the subtle Saudi signal raises two all-important questions about the peace deal: Will other Arab states sign on? And will the Gulf States’ willingness to consider peace with Israel without movement toward an Israel-Palestine peace agreement lead to changes in the Palestinian strategy for trying to get a functioning state?
To be clear, the Israel-UAE deal is a meaningful foreign policy achievement even if no other Arab state follows the lead of the Gulf confederation. This is the first peace deal between Israel and any Arab state in a diplomatic generation. Achieving it took skill and persistence, especially against the backdrop of the constant drumbeat of criticism that Kushner’s initiative in the region would never bear fruit.
Yet it is also true that the UAE is uniquely positioned to make a deal with Israel. Roughly 10 million people live spread out across the seven members of the confederated monarchy, and of these perhaps as few 1.4 million are citizens. That means that Emirati citizens aren’t a cohesive popular force capable of exerting significant influence on the rulership. Put more simply, the rulers can do pretty much what they want regarding Israel without worrying about it making them too unpopular. The conditions in other Arab states, even Saudi Arabia, require rulers to be more attuned to public opinion, which tends to favor the Palestinian cause.
For this reason, it is far from clear that any other Arab states will join the UAE. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is still consolidating power and needs to be at least a little bit cautious about alienating support from key constituencies. True, in the eyes of some, a deal with Israel would go a long way toward cleansing MBS of the taint of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Nevertheless, MBS’s cost-benefit analysis likely doesn’t yet sway to the peace side.
That leaves Bahrain and Qatar as potential Gulf addons. Both spend a lot of their time trying to figure out how to maintain security against Iranian hegemony in the region, so both would gain substantially by deepening their partnership with Israel. Qatar spent much of the last three years in a diplomatic struggle with Saudi Arabia, and it could recoup much of its closeness to Washington in one fell swoop by joining the deal. At the same time, the major U.S. Air Force base in the country already assures a strategic partnership with the U.S. Bahrain, for its part, may be a better bet because it has more to gain by deepening ties to the U.S. via Israel.
Whether any other states sign on to the deal necessarily influences the second major question, which is whether any of this will change the Palestinian strategy in a way that might increase the odds of an eventual peace deal with Israel. Since Trump took office and announced his plans to try and solve Middle East peace, the Palestinian approach has been basically to reject any potential plan as fundamentally unfair — and to insist that no Arab state would make peace with Israel in the absence of significant progress toward a two-state solution.
Given the weakness of the Palestinians’ negotiating position while Trump is president of the U.S. and Benjamin Netanyahu prime minister of Israel, the rejectionist/blocking approach was certainly understandable. The problem is, it failed, at least with respect to the UAE. Arguably, the old rules are being rewritten: An Arab state is making peace with Israel over Palestinian objections, and Saudi Arabia is signaling approval.
The takeaway for future Palestinian leadership is to find a new strategy. It will never be easy for Palestinian leaders to convince their public to acquiesce to a peace deal that provides something less than a genuinely functioning state. But the leadership ultimately may have no other choice but to try. The Israel-UAE deal represents a disaster from the standpoint of the Palestinians, who could have gained billions and perhaps trillions of dollars of aid by getting on-board, and who are now measurably worse off than they were before the deal was struck.
Of course, it remains possible that the Palestinians will stay the course. Desperation can beget more desperation rather than pragmatism. But if there is a slow generational movement among Palestinian leaders toward a different approach, the Israel-UAE deal will likely turn out to have been one of its contributing causes.