It was only last month that the world first heard the dramatic announcement that the United States had mediated an agreement, normalizing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. “Historic peace agreement between our two GREAT friends,” tweeted US President Donald Trump on Aug. 13. Trump also described it as a “HUGE breakthrough,” a term Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later applied to a corollary of the deal. UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed announced that his country had decided that it would be “setting a roadmap towards establishing a bilateral relationship” between the two countries in exchange for a halt to Israeli annexation of Palestinian lands.
Moreover, within just a couple of weeks, an Israeli delegation led by the head of the National Security Council, Meir Ben Shabbat, left for Abu Dhabi with an American delegation on the first commercial flight from Tel Aviv to the UAE. Shortly afterward, Saudi Arabia announced that it would allow flights between Israel and the UAE to fly over its airspace. Then Bahrain seconded this, saying it would also allow these flights to fly over it.
With one announcement coming right after the other, the mood in Israel is celebratory, at least for the country’s Jewish population. Almost all Israeli Jews support the normalization of relations with the UAE.
In contrast, the response among the Arab population is mixed, and the polemics have just begun. Those opposed to the agreement argue that it will shunt the Palestinian issue off to the side and remove it from the agenda. They worry that this agreement will lead to further agreements with other Arab states, and that these will fail to consider the Palestinians. But there are also those who speak of a unique opportunity, which will never present itself again, to build ties and connect with the Arab world, not to mention the economic and tourism benefits of the agreement. This leads to the question: Which of the Israeli Arab community’s two identities will be the decider when it comes to the agreement: its Israeli identity or its Palestinian identity?
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