For Palestinians, deal swaps one nightmare for another
Israel-UAE agreement called ‘very damaging to the cause of peace’
JERUSALEM — When the unmarked United Arab Emirates plane touched down on the tarmac in Tel Aviv one night in May, carrying 16 tons of unsolicited medical aid for the Palestinians, it was rejected by the Palestinian leadership, which said nobody had coordinated with them about the shipment.
That was just a prelude to a greater humiliation. Palestinian officials maintain nobody consulted with them before Thursday’s surprise announcement by President Donald Trump that Israel and the UAE had agreed to “full normalization of relations” in exchange for Israel suspending annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank.
If the pullback from annexation was presented as some kind of a balm for the Palestinians, many of them considered it, instead, a stab in the back. The deal was a diplomatic coup for Israel, but it ruptured decades of professed Arab unity around the Palestinian cause. It swapped one Palestinian nightmare — annexation, which many world leaders had warned would be an illegal land grab — for another, perhaps even bleaker prospect of not being counted at all. “This agreement is very damaging to the cause of peace,” said Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian mission to the United Kingdom, speaking from London, “because it takes away one of the key incentives for Israel to end its occupation — normalization with the Arab world.”
“It basically tells Israel it can have peace with an Arab country,” he added, “in return for postponing illegal theft of Palestinian land.”
Friday’s front pages blared out the disconnect. Israel’s popular Yediot Ahronot celebrated the “historic agreement” and the cutprice deal of “Peace in Exchange for Annexation.” But the Palestinian government-run Al-Hayat al-Jadida went with “Tripartite Aggression against the Rights of the Palestinian People,” in angry red letters.
The emerging Israeli-Emirati relationship is the most prominent achievement yet of what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has called an outside-in approach. That has entailed courting the Gulf States — including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman as well as the UAE — to quietly come to terms with Israel and then bring along the Palestinians, rather than dealing with the Palestinians first.
The conservative-led Israeli government has long viewed the Palestinians as intransigent and unwilling, or unable, to compromise on long-held principles that
Israel sees as inflated demands, casting them as serial quitters of peace talks.
The deal between Israel and the UAE also reverses the order of diplomatic steps envisioned by the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, a proposal endorsed by the Arab League. That proposal called for Israel to withdraw from occupied territories to the boundaries that existed before the 1967 Middle East war, and in return, the Arab and Islamic nations in the region would commit to normalizing relations with Israel.
Mocking old predictions that Israel would become increasingly isolated and face a diplomatic “tsunami” for failing to resolve the Palestinian conflict, Netanyahu has instead touted economic peace and what he calls TTP — terrorism, technology and peace. Other countries, including Arab ones, he has argued, see Israel as an ally in fighting Islamist terrorism, a source of technological innovation and not as the obstacle to peace of old.