Turning over a new leaf
There was a sense of déjà vu for the Indians who watched history being made in the Gulf on Thursday when leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Israel and the United States of America, after tripartite talks, announced the “full normalisation of relations” between the UAE and Israel.
Twenty-eight years ago, there was similar excitement in New Delhi and Tel Aviv when India established full diplomatic relations with Israel. It was the end of an era in Indian foreign policy.
It is simplistic to dismiss Thursday’s momentous occasion in Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv as a gimmick by US President Donald Trump to extinguish the limelight on his rival in the November election, 36 hours after Joe Biden picked a charismatic, articulate vote-getter with a solid Black constituency, Senator Kamala Harris, as his running mate.
In their anxiety to downplay anything that Trump does between now and November, America’s liberal media has begun a disinformation campaign that the White House ceremony at which the detailed breakthrough was announced was nothing new, but merely the formalisation of what was an existing reality: where the Arab Gulf states have had contacts with Israel for several decades now.
As was the case with India 28 years ago, when Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, put his name to a joint statement along with Trump and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, detailing the new normal in the Gulf, he was acknowledging realities over illusions and turning a new leaf by harnessing those realities for the common good.
Managing the relationship with Israel carefully and with strategic balancing, as India has done for almost three decades, there can be positive results covering every aspect of life for Gulf countries, with more among them likely to follow the UAE’s lead in having a rapprochement with Israel.
Within living memory of the contemporary generation in the UAE, Coca Cola was not available in the Emirates because the soft drink was banned under an Israeli boycott, orchestrated by the 22-nation Arab League. As in the case of Coca Cola, when the boycott of Ford motor cars was ended in the 1980s, such was the rush to purchase the American-made vehicles, that a Dubai family which got the Ford agency, made a fortune from public demand for Ford cars.
India did not go that far when there were no diplomatic relations with Israel, but there were consequences even then. For example, Indian farmers were deprived for many decades of Israel’s irrigation systems and technologies, especially in food producing states such as Punjab and for sugarcane cultivation in Maharashtra. That was why Balram Jakhar, as Agriculture Minister between 1991 and 1996, was one of the first members of PV Narasimha Rao’s cabinet to visit Israel.
So did then Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, along with the Chief Ministers of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Nagaland in 2006. During that visit, a Work Plan for Cooperation in the Field of Agriculture was signed with Israel. Till this day, it is one of the most productive bilateral agreements that India has signed with any country.
The UAE stands to benefit from the opening of relations with Israel in many more ways than just in agriculture or irrigation. The Gulf state has a visionary leadership, younger than most of their contemporaries in the Arab world. To tap the future potential of technology, the UAE has set up the first full-fledged Ministry of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the world. It is headed by one of the youngest members of a cabinet anywhere and the use of AI is already in evidence in some walks of life in the UAE.
Similarly, the UAE has a roadmap for taking the country right to the top of the most food secure states in the world. This, when its primary resource is oil and most of its food supply is imported. In all this, cooperation with Israel will be handy.
Again, Israel is known the world over as the ‘start-up nation’ because of the worldwide impact its start-ups have made. The UAE is among the leading nations encouraging private sector start-ups. UAE-Israel cooperation in such areas will help Indians: a very large number of successful start-ups in Dubai and Abu Dhabi are owned and run by young Indian entrepreneurs.
In the euphoria following full diplomatic relations with India, Israel made it clear to New Delhi that the sky is the limit in offers of technology, research and certain types of funding for Indian industry, especially medium and small industry using the latest advances made in science. But lethargy, red tape and the ways of the bureaucracy meant many of these potential joint initiatives with Tel Aviv were stalled and eventually fell by the wayside.
With the UPA government, there was an additional problem. It did not mind going all the way with Israel, but on condition that most of it should be under wraps, lest such initiatives compromised the UPA’s secular and minority-driven sensitivities. This changed after Narendra Modi became PM, but the problem is that opportunities once spurned or missed do not offer themselves again.
Between the UAE and Israel, such problems will not occur. The culture in doing business in the UAE is that what can be done today must be done yesterday. Additionally, the UAE has been in the forefront of supporting the Palestinians in every possible way since the federation of seven emirates was welded into a single nation in 1971. The present leadership has inherited the legacy of the federation’s founding father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, in offering unwavering support to the cause of Palestine.
It is such a commitment which extracted a landmark concession from Netanyahu in Thursday’s joint statement to “suspend declaring sovereignty over areas outlined in the (US) Presiden’s Vision for Peace,” meaning Palestinian territories under illegal Israeli occupation. The attraction of formal diplomatic relations for the first time with a Gulf country was strong enough for Israel to pay that price.
The path to normalising relations with Israel will come up with challenges for the UAE. There will be carping criticism, most notably from Qatar and Turkey, which are attempting to create an axis in the region rivalling the bloc led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. But because Qatar was the first Gulf state to hobnob secretly with Israel, because Turkey’s ties with Israel are open and well known, their hypocrisy in attacking Thursday’s tripartite peace move is unlikely to find many takers in the Muslim or Arab world.
