Israel-UAE peace deal may not be perfect, but it’s better than bloodshed | Opinion

The ceremony next week at the White House, where Israel and the United Arab Emirates normalize their relations, is good news to anyone who believes that Arabs and Jews can live in peace in the Middle East, moving the region away from bloodshed into prosperity.

Opponents of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were quick to criticize the move, claiming that actually, it was no more than an outing of relations between Israel and the UAE that had been going on for a long time, under the radar. Indeed, Netanyahu grossly exaggerated when he boasted that “his” peace with the UAE was better than the one prime ministers Menachem Begin had signed with Egypt, or Yitzhak Rabin with Jordan.

This is sheer nonsense. Israel fought bloody wars against Egypt and Jordan, its next-door neighbors, while the UAE is some 1,300 miles away. Still, we should welcome any progress towards peace with an Arab country.

Other critics pointed out to the possibility of the UAE getting, as part of the deal, the advanced stealth F-35 fighter jets that only Israel has in the region. That is a serious threat, not so much because Israelis fear an UAE attack in the foreseeable future, but because the shifting sands in the Middle East might cause this advanced technology to fall into the hands of militant Islamic regimes or Iran. No disrespect, but although Netanyahu reiterated his objection to selling F-35 aircraft to the UAE, in this case I tend to believe and trust the U.S. Congress, which in 2017 passed a bipartisan act defending Israel’s qualitative military edge (QME).

Furthermore, people criticize the Israel-UAE move because it has allegedly been engineered by Jared Kushner to help his father-in-law get reelected. With no serious achievement on the international arena, President Trump might presumably gain some points by presiding over a festive ceremony just before Election Day, where Arabs and Israelis would hug each other amicably. I don’t know if Americans, being divided over almost everything and suffering under COVID-19, would be impressed by this, but I don’t really care: Let Kushner broker more peace deals between Israelis and Arabs, for whatever reasons he chooses.

Finally, people criticize the fact that the UAE-Israel deal leaves out the people who have historically been the cornerstone of the Arab-Israeli conflict: Palestinians. Indeed, the conventional wisdom after Israel was established in 1948 stipulated that peace between the Jewish state and the Arab world could only be achieved if the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians was resolved first. When Egypt, under the leadership of the great Anwar Sadat, broke that taboo and signed peace with Israel, it was unanimously banished by the Arab League for a decade, accused of betraying the Palestinian cause. And Jordan dared to make peace with Israel in 1994 only after Prime Minister Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat had signed the Oslo Accords a year before.

Now comes Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed (known as MBZ), Crown Prince of the Emirates, and by openly normalizing relations with Israel he signals to the rest of the Sunni Arab world that the days of the Palestinian veto are over. Arabs and Israelis should reconcile, he reasons, so they can benefit from the prosperity of peace, and the Palestinians better stop being the stubborn naysayers and jump on the bandwagon as well.

Not surprisingly, Palestinians’ immediate reaction was that of anger at allegedly being betrayed, once again, by fellow Arabs. However, it is in the best interest of Israelis not to gloat over this temporary defeat of the Palestinians, but rather to use the UAE deal as an incentive to encourage them to reevaluate their traditional position. After all, even the imperfect Trump’s Deal of the Century offers them a Palestinian state and a lot of economic perks, and the UAE-Israel deal took off the table any annexation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank.

Peace between Israelis and Palestinians is critical, no matter if it precedes peace between Israel and Arab countries or follows it.

Uri Dromi was the spokesman of the Rabin and Peres governments, 1992-1996.