Leaders of Israel and Emirates stage historic meeting

ISRAEL’S PRESIDENT has met the crown prince of Abu Dhabi on the first official visit to the United Arab Emirates by the country’s head of state.

The meeting was hailed as the latest sign of deepening ties between the two nations, as tensions rise in the region, and comes 18 months after relations between Israel and the UAE were normalised as part of a series of US-brokered diplomatic deals.

A number of Arab states have historically avoided formal relations with Israel over its decades-old conflict with the Palestinians, but this weekend President Isaac Herzog, inset, met top Emirati officials including Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the de facto Emirati leader.

The UAE’s state-run WAM news agency described a royal welcome for the Israeli leader at the palace, with the Israeli national anthem played. Mr Herzog is today due to visit Expo 2020, the world’s fair in Dubai, where Israel has hosted a series of events at its national pavilion.

While Mr Herzog’s role is largely ceremonial, the trip follows last month’s first official visit to the Gulf Arab sheikhdom by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett where he discussed strengthening relations with Sheikh Mohammed.

Media coverage of both Mr Herzog and Mr Bennett’s trips to the autocratic UAE has been tightly controlled. Emirati authorities have not invited journalists to the palace where meetings are held, nor planned any press conferences. News from the visits surfaces only through careful statements on state-run media. Israel, a parliamentary democracy, has not brought Israel-based journalists to join the trips of either leader.

However, Mr Herzog said he was hoping on his visit to take “the message of peace from Israel to the United Arab Emirates, and to all the peoples in the region”. The show of Israel-Emirati co-operation comes at a delicate time for the Middle East. Fighting in Yemen’s seven-year civil war has intensified, widening to reach Emirati soil for the first time this month.

The Iran-backed Houthi rebels fighting the Saudi-led coalition claimed responsibility for aerial attacks against Abu Dhabi – one that killed three workers in an industrial area, and another that was intercepted and scattered missile shards over the capital – and have threatened further strikes this week.