Peace deals fade from view
The videos from East Jerusalem showing Israeli police violently arresting Palestinian protesters were galvanising the Arab world, evoking sympathy and long-standing anger over injustice, dispossession and unequal treatment.
But the newly arrived ambassador to Israel from the United Arab Emirates, writing for an Israeli news website last week as the images circulated, narrated a rosier version of life in his new home. He described a place where cultures and religions easily coexisted, in a Middle East made placid by diplomatic accords normalising relations between Israel and the UAE and other Arab states.
His views have seemed perilously out of touch in recent days, during the deadliest conflagration in years between Israel and the Palestinians.
The bloodshed has prompted fresh doubts about the dividends of the diplomatic agreements signed by the UAE and others, known as the Abraham Accords, and raised questions about whether other Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia will strike similar deals with Israel.
Proponents of the accords promised that they would usher in a new era of peace for the Middle East. Instead, the region in recent days has been riven by protests, as well as an outpouring of revulsion over social media, at the spiralling Palestinian death toll, images of Israeli police storming the revered al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and Israeli warplanes levelling apartment blocks in Gaza.
Eight children and two women from an extended family were killed last night in the deadliest single air raid on Gaza since violence erupted. At least 139 people have been killed in Gaza, including 39 children and 22 women; in Israel, seven people have been killed, including a 6-year-old boy and a soldier.
The anger across the Middle East, analysts say, has badly undermined an assumption at the centre of the accords: that the Arab world no longer cared about Palestinian suffering and was content to let its governments embrace Israel based on other mutual interests.
The accords, which were signed last year under the Trump Administration, were ‘‘predicated on a sense that Palestinians aren’t mobilising,’’ which allowed signatories to conclude agreements that might otherwise have sparked a public backlash, said Tareq Baconi, an analyst with the International Crisis Group. But this had since changed.
Demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians have been held across the region, including in
Bahrain and Morocco, two of the countries that signed diplomatic deals with Israel.
In Saudi Arabia, which has recently hinted at warming relations with Israel, there was a sudden shift of tone in progovernment newspapers. An opinion piece this week in AlJazirah accused Israel of ‘‘criminal acts’’ toward Palestinians.
In the closing months of the Trump Administration, Israel signed agreements establishing full or partial normalisation of relations with the UAE, Bahrain,
Sudan and Morocco.
Critics noted that some of the deals were concluded only after inducements provided by the US that some likened to bribery.
Even so, there was a sense among international observers and people in the region that the UAE would be able to use its agreement to advance Palestinian interests, Baconi said. But such sentiments were ‘‘exaggerated’’.
‘‘This wasn’t about the Palestinians. It was a military, economic and diplomatic deal between the two powers in the region. The Palestinians were collateral damage.’’
Days after the publication of the optimistic article by the UAE’s ambassador to Israel, Mohamed al-Khaja, his government struck a much harsher tone.
The about-face ‘‘shows that the Palestinian question is not off the agenda in the region – it’s very much an issue’’, Baconi said.
❚ Well-placed Israeli military commentators said an announcement of a ground invasion of Gaza on Friday used the media as part of an elaborate ruse to lure Hamas militants into a deadly trap that may have killed dozens of fighters.
When Israel called up reservists and told reporters that an incursion was under way, Hamas fighters rushed to take up defensive positions in a tunnel system, which Israel then bombed from the air.
‘‘They didn’t lie,’’ said Or Heller, a veteran military correspondent on Israel’s Channel 13 TV. ‘‘It was a manipulation. It was smart and it was successful.’’