The Accord Between Israel and the United Arab Emirates Will Preserve the Endless Wars

On August 31, the first commercial flight from Israel to the United Arab Emirates in history landed in Abu Dhabi. Among those on board were Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, U.S. envoy for Iran Brian Hook, and Israeli National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat. 

While the UAE has kept terrorism at bay, it has also cultivated a highly trained and elaborately armed military—thanks in large part to U.S. arms deals—and significantly expanded its hard and soft power. 

The plane landed less than three weeks after the announcement of a major diplomatic agreement between the UAE and Israel, marking the sheikhdom’s first formal recognition of Israel since the establishment of the Emirates as an independent federation in December, 1971. This agreement abruptly broke from the cold shoulder protocol by which most Arab states (other than Egypt and Jordan) abide. For decades, the Arab consensus has conditioned diplomacy with Israel on concessions of land and freedom to the Palestinians. 

The American-brokered accord opens the floodgates on numerous fronts—tourism, investment, security, health care, and technology. Most notably, it halts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bold plans for annexing parts of the West Bank, though it’s unclear for how long.

Hours before the historic El Al Airlines flight took off from Tel Aviv, Netanyahu tweeted, “This is what peace for peace looks like.” 

But is it really?

While the accord benefits Israeli, Emirati, and American governments and companies, it also embraces a Middle East roiled by foreign intervention and widespread violence. It capitalizes on geopolitical conditions that are now firmly in all three countries’ favor. And it neglects diplomacy and reform on the regional fronts most urgently in need of them (conditions for which the signatories bear varying degrees of responsibility): Palestine, Yemen, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia. 

I grew up in the United Arab Emirates. I remember the word “Israel” being blacked out of the dictionaries we bought at local bookstores. The Jewish teachers at the American school I attended were quietly elusive about their cultural backgrounds. Israeli news sites were blocked on the Internet, and telephone numbers with the +972 country code could not be connected. 

This was not uncommon for a country on the Arabian Peninsula. Still, the sheikhdom was a haven for tourists and expatriates in the Middle East during the 1990s and early 2000s. Unruffled by the tumult nearby—wars, bombings, occupations—the Emirates remained fairly inconspicuous on the global stage while attracting impressive international investment at home. 

But much has changed since I left Dubai. While the UAE has kept terrorism at bay, it has also cultivated a highly trained and elaborately armed military—thanks in large part to U.S. arms deals—and significantly expanded its hard and soft power. 

Bent on neutralizing Islamist threats to the wider region, the UAE has partnered with Saudi Arabia in fighting Houthi rebels in Yemen, suppressing anti-government demonstrations in Bahrain, backing a coup in Egypt, and isolating Qatar. It conducts military operations in Libya, Syria, and Somalia. It complies with the crushing sanctions on Iran, while stopping short of U.S.-style antagonisms. (“We just want Iran to behave like a normal nation,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said earlier this year. “Just be like Norway. Alright?”)

Israel, meanwhile, has long held a reputation for hawkishness. Today, it regularly carries out airstrikes in Syria. Its intelligence agency, Mossad, conducts covert operations in a wide array of countries, including a 2010 assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai. 

Israel’s enduring occupation of Palestine has been emboldened by the conspicuously pro-Israel Trump Administration. It has reportedly bombed Gaza almost every day since August 6, showing no signs of invalidating the United Nations’ 2012 prediction that the Gaza Strip would be “unlivable” for its two million inhabitants by 2020. 

In global coverage of the diplomatic breakthrough, we see some acknowledgment of the UAE’s adventurism and a great deal of attention paid to Israel’s flagrant encroachments on Palestinian lands. But even as Palestinian, Iranian, and Turkish officials bristled at the announcement, much of the Arab and Western worlds responded either neutrally or with enthusiasm. 

American security analysts heralded the “new phase of Israeli diplomacy” and unity against “Iran’s long-term threat.” Kushner celebrated “a new sense of optimism” and Secretary Pompeo called it “the most significant step toward peace in the Middle East in over twenty-five years.”

There seems, however, to be less commentary on the extent to which a long tradition of American (not to mention British) imperialism has shaped the complex realities and enmities that modern Middle Eastern governments now accept at face value. Security threats, civil wars, and the looming specters of “Islamists” and “militants” are so frequently treated without context that history occasionally appears to go back only so far as 2001. 

Foreign powers have, of course, for centuries meddled in the region with colonial aplomb. They’ve occupied the land, drawn and redrawn borders, and juggled alliances. The United States may have reportedly deployed special operations forces to 138 different countries in 2016, but a sizable chunk of its firepower and capital has for decades been administered to the Middle East. 

While last week’s agreement is historic and will surely stimulate diplomacy between two wealthy, well-armed states, it also rebuffs Palestinians, who are already routinely disparaged by a U.S. administration whose point person on a “peace deal” is Netanyahu’s old family friend. 

“We’re not going to chase the Palestinian leadership,” Kushner said shortly after the announcement. “You can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves.”

The agreement also further isolates Iran, whose citizens are suffering the effects of relentless American economic pressure. It sends a grim message to Shia Muslims living under Sunni governments. Most significantly, in strengthening the regimes of a bold monarch (Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed) and an evidently invincible strongman (Netanyahu), the accord takes the status quo of Western-sown Arab discord and dysfunction, and runs with it. 

Yemeni civilians continue bearing what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis (courtesy of U.S. munitions). Libya remains a chaotic war zone (after a U.S.-led invasion in 2011), as do both Iraq (a 2003 U.S. invasion) and Syria (a U.S.-aided proxy war). 

Somalia is bombed at the whims of a U.S. military that needs to do something with its multi-billion dollar budget, amounting to what Amnesty International calls a “secret air war . . . with no justice or reparation for the victims of possible violations of international humanitarian law.”

Neither Israel nor the UAE seems intent on scaling back their operations, let alone pressuring the United States to retreat from its omnipresence and break an endless cycle of instigation and retribution. Instead, fresh multibillion-dollar arms deals for highly advanced equipment are already being floated. Neighboring countries, such as Bahrain, Sudan, and Oman, are being pressured to follow suit with similar agreements in a series of carefully orchestrated trips by Secretary Pompeo. 

With all this in mind, last month’s momentous bilateral agreement seems less a diplomatic feat than a normalization, even preservation, of a tumultuous Middle East—one of Shia marginalization, civilian death and deprivation, and a revolving door of proxy wars. 

Perhaps Prime Minister Netanyahu got one thing right in his joint statement with Jared Kushner at the end of August. 

“You will see how the sparks fly on this,” he said. “It’s already happening.”