More to UAE-Israel deal than meets the eye

Vappala Balachandran

Ex-Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was the first Indian leader to bluntly tell Isi Leibler, Chairman, Governing Board of the World Jewish Congress, why her country could not have full diplomatic relations with Israel. She told him on December 21, 1981, that India was ‘deeply economically dependent on petrodollars’ of the Arab countries, especially the Emirates, which were pressing her to ‘break all relations’ with Israel, including closing down their Bombay consulate. Thirty-nine years later, the Emirates have become the third Arab country to officially recognise Israel.

Leibler also records that Mrs Gandhi told him of the ‘crisis’ that took place in New Delhi during PM Jawaharlal Nehru’s era when Saudi monarch Ibn Saud went ‘berserk’ seeing legendary Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin at a reception in his honour as the personal guest of her father.

Mrs Gandhi’s strategy was adopted by all governments, including the Janata Party coalition led by Morarji Desai, when AB Vajpayee had made his well-known ‘secret visit’ to Israel. Although Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao was given credit for raising diplomatic relations in January 1992, the grounds were prepared by the previous PMs.

During this period, our intelligence services were conducting all relations of strategic importance. This relationship became much closer during the Rajiv Gandhi era (1984-89) after he met Israel’s PM Shimon Peres in New York in 1985. Following this, he took a decision to invite the Israeli table tennis team for the February 1987 World Table Tennis championship in New Delhi.

However, it did not happen that way, causing a lot of embarrassment to us when we visited Tel Aviv a few days before the event in 1987. At Tel Aviv, we were told that visas for their players were not granted although they were invited. We also met Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir during our visit when he asked us to convey to our PM that even Yasser Arafat would not object if we upgraded our diplomatic relations. During this meeting, he also mentioned appreciatively King Hassan II of Morocco who would soon establish full diplomatic relations with Israel.

Strangely, even in 2020, Morocco has not established full diplomatic relations, indicating how kaleidoscopic Arab-Israel relations could be. Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Morocco and till recently the UAE, were comfortable in maintaining good relations through secret channels while Turkey, the first Muslim country to recognise Israel in 1949, has a frosty relationship with it.

It was Egyptian President Anwar Sadat who courageously cut the Gordian knot by announcing a change in his policy towards Israel while speaking to the legendary American broadcaster Walter Cronkite on November 9, 1977. He told him that he was serious about visiting Jerusalem to talk peace to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The highly influential Cronkite organised this with American help on November 20, 1977.

In that process, Sadat also dismantled the 1948 Arab Coalition (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia) which had invaded Israel to help the local Palestinians combat the Israeli militia following its unilateral declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, after the UN ‘partition resolution’ on November 29, 1947.

It was sheer domestic pressure which forced Sadat. The Egyptian economy was in a shambles with a major portion of its budget going to the army. General el-Gamasy, Defence Minister, had warned him that Egypt would not be able to withstand another Israeli attack. Above all, he was disgusted with the policy of Arab nations in fighting Israel ‘to the last Egyptian’. In this, he was helped by US President Jimmy Carter who catalysed the 13-day Sadat-Menachem Begin Camp David talks with evangelical perseverance to accomplish the Egypt-Israel treaty in September 1978. It took another 16 years for Jordan to conclude its formal peace treaty on October 26, 1994, although both countries were doing business with each other.

There are some imponderables that make it difficult to assess what benefits the Palestinians would derive from the August 13, 2020, treaty. This decision, called ‘Abraham Accord’, which was suddenly announced by US President Donald Trump four days before the 2020 Democratic National Convention at Milwaukee, was interpreted to showcase his only US foreign policy success before the November elections.

Our media has not mentioned an important op-ed piece by UAE ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba in Washington DC in Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth on June 12, which might appear that this recognition could even be conditional. He said that annexation would be an unmistakable signal whether Israel desired normalisation with the Arab world: “Normal is not annexation. Instead, annexation is a misguided provocation of another order. And continued talk of normalisation would be just mistaken hope for better relations with the Arab states.”

However, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) said that the wording of announcements from Jersusalem and Abu Dhabi was different. The UAE claimed that the accord ‘immediately’ stopped Israel’s plans to ‘annex’ parts of West Bank. It claimed that this would provide an opportunity for both to renew negotiations. Trump also concurred by saying that ‘annexation was off the table’. However, Benjamin Netanyahu did not want that impression in a deeply divided Israel. Hence, Jerusalem had used the word ‘suspend’ in their release.

Netanyahu, the longest serving and most unpopular PM — according to Israeli media — is a worried man. His ultra-right supporters are upset for missing ‘a one-in-a-century opportunity to formally bring the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria into Israel.’ Despite public polls indicating that a majority of the public support the agreement, demonstrations against him — outside his residence — on for eight consecutive weeks, have not waned. The placards were ‘No flights to the Gulf, jobs in Israel.’ For Abu Dhabi, the worry should be Iran’s warning that the UAE ruler would meet the same fate as that of Anwar Sadat, the threat that the ‘Crystal Palace in Emirates’ could be hit and hostile activities in the disputed islands in the Strait of Hormuz would continue.

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