Arab nations are still shunning Israel
Prediction in wake of historic UAE deal yet to happen
WASHINGTON — When he announced a potentially historic deal last month in which Persian Gulf nation United Arab Emirates said it was preparing to recognize Israel, President Donald Trump predicted other Arab states would quickly follow suit.
But after two trips through the region by senior Trump advisers to build on what they hoped would be momentum from the UAE deal, no other Arab nation has said it is willing to take the long-shunned leap to accept and recognize Israel as a legitimate Mideast neighbor — at least not until Israel resolves its conflict with Palestinians.
They may be waiting to see what happens with the U.S. election in November, as well as the final details of an Israeli-UAE deal, expected to be signed this month or next.
But their hesitance also reflects decades of political and religious tension, in which most of the Arab world steadfastly pretends Israel does not exist.
The UAE would become only the third Arab country in history to recognize Israel, after Egypt and Jordan. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner traveled Monday on the first publicly acknowledged direct flight from Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi, the main city of the UAE, aboard the Israeli airliner El Al.
Kushner used his fourday trip through the Middle East to try to entice additional Arab countries to join the UAE in moving to normalize relations with Israel. That follows a similar sojourn last month by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who traveled to five countries in the region. Both officials came up emptyhanded. One obstacle is the 2decade-old Arab-sponsored peace plan in which countries of the region vowed not to recognize Israel until it resolved its conflict with Palestinians over land claimed by both sides, including some of the world’s holiest sites in Jerusalem.
Negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians broke down years ago, and relations only worsened under Trump. Earlier this year, Trump unveiled a plan that would clear the way for Israel to permanently annex part of the West Bank land it seized during the 1967 Mideast War, while providing only a sketchy pathway for a viable, independent Palestinian state. Palestinian leaders rejected the plan, as did much of the international community, which views any annexation of occupied West Bank land as illegal.
The UAE deal, urged by Trump, violates the promise in the so-called 2002 Arab Peace Initiative to link diplomatic normalization with Israel to the resolution of the Palestinian conflict. It does, however, include a commitment by Israel to at least temporarily suspend any annexation of land in the West Bank.
The question now is whether the UAE’s breaking of that covenant with the Palestinians will lead other nations to follow. Decades ago, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominated the region, but more recently it has been overshadowed by turmoil in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
“It is not just the IsraeliPalestinian issue” anymore, said Eliav Benjamin, a senior official with the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “It’s the Middle East at large.”
UAE has been partly motivated by its desire to buy some of the most sophisticated fighter jets in the U.S. arsenal. An undisclosed number of F-35 fighter jets will reportedly be sold to the UAE, despite Israeli objections.
Palestinians voiced outrage over the UAE move, calling it a betrayal of their fight for statehood.
“It must be quite demeaning for Arab leaders to be asked to join a meaningless WH spectacle to serve as a backdrop/prop to help a white supremacist Islamophobe win elections,” Hanan Ashrawi, a veteran Palestinian politician, said on Twitter.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the UAE move as “nonsense.”
The Emiratis “have turned their backs on everything: the rights of the Palestinian people, the Palestinian state, the two-state solution, and the holy city of Jerusalem,” Abbas said at a rare meeting of feuding factions in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia — despite its close relationship with the Trump administration — reiterated it would not recognize Israel without an agreement with the Palestinians. The Saudis see themselves as leaders of the Sunni Arab world, with custody of Islam’s most important religious shrines, and have to tread carefully.
Morocco and Bahrain echoed Saudi Arabia. Morocco is a unique case because it quietly enjoys tolerant relations with Israel. Moroccan Jews make up the second-largest immigrant population in Israel, after Russians, and there are cultural, travel and other connections between the two countries.
The official Bahrain New Agency reported that King Hamad bin Isa Khalifa told Pompeo he would only countenance the two-state solution.
Sudan, receiving Pompeo on Aug. 25, hinted it might come on board but only if it was removed from the State
Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Qatar rebuffed Kushner, telling him upon his arrival there on Wednesday that only a two-state solution — recognition of an independent Palestinian country alongside Israel — was acceptable.
In U.S.-friendly Kuwait, legislators are pushing through a law that would prohibit normalization and impose a boycott on Israeli goods.
“Kuwait has not changed its position, and it will be the last country to normalize with Israel,” an unnamed government official was quoted as saying in the daily newspaper Al-Qabas.
These realities on the ground did not seem to deter Kushner or Pompeo, although their timeline for additional Arab countries joining seemed to be shifting.
Trump, in announcing the UAE-Israel agreement on Aug. 13, said, “Now that the ice has been broken, I expect more Arab and Muslim countries will follow the United Arab Emirates.”
Trump’s close ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed those remarks that day: “There is a good chance we will soon see more Arab countries joining this expanding circle of peace,” he said.
But Kushner last week referred to countries joining “in months,” and State Department officials spoke of news by the end of the year. Kushner told reporters he was “100%” certain that additional nations would relent.
Pompeo predicted that the administration’s opposition to Iran would attract Sunni Arab states in conflict with Tehran to join the coalition recognizing Israel. But there is no evidence of that yet.
“This may be it for now,” said Michael Koplow, policy director of the Israel Policy Forum, a pro-Israel advocacy organization that supports the two-state solution.