A Geopolitical Earthquake Just Hit the Mideast
The
Israel-United Arab Emirates deal will be felt throughout the region.
Opinion
Columnist
· Aug. 13, 2020
For once, I am going to agree with
President Trump in his use of his favorite adjective: “huge.”
The agreement brokered by the Trump
administration for the United Arab Emirates to establish full normalization of
relations with Israel, in return for the Jewish state forgoing, for now, any
annexation of the West Bank, was exactly what Trump said it was in his tweet: a
“HUGE breakthrough.”
It is not Anwar el-Sadat going to
Jerusalem — nothing could match that first big opening between Arabs and
Israelis. It is not Yasir Arafat shaking Yitzhak Rabin’s hand on the White
House lawn — nothing could match that first moment of public reconciliation
between Israelis and Palestinians.
But it is close. Just go down the
scorecard, and you see how this deal affects every major party in the region —
with those in the pro-American, pro-moderate Islam,
pro-ending-the-conflict-with-Israel-once-and-for-all camp benefiting the most
and those in the radical pro-Iran, anti-American, pro-Islamist
permanent-struggle-with-Israel camp all becoming more isolated and left behind.
It’s a geopolitical earthquake.
To fully appreciate
why, you need to start with the internal dynamics of the deal. It was Trump’s
peace plan drawn up by Jared Kushner, and their willingness to stick with it,
that actually created the raw material for this breakthrough. Here is how.
The Kushner plan basically called for
Israel and the Palestinians to make peace, with Israel being able to annex some
30 percent of the West Bank, where most of its settlers were, and the
Palestinians getting to establish a demilitarized, patchwork state on the other
70 percent, along with some land swaps from Israel.
The Palestinians rejected the deal
outright as unbalanced and unjust. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who basically helped to write the very
pro-Israel plan, said he intended to proceed with the annexation part of the
plan by July 1 — without agreeing to the part that his political base of Jewish
settlers rejected: Palestinians later getting a state on the other 70 percent.
(I wonder if Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, a pro-settler
extremist himself, encouraged Bibi to think he could get away with this.)
It didn’t work, because Kushner, who
was hearing regularly from Egypt, Jordan and the gulf Arabs that such a
unilateral Israeli annexation would be a total deal-breaker for them, told
Bibi, “Not so fast.” Kushner persuaded Trump to block Bibi’s cherry-picking of
the plan by taking annexation now.
This was causing Netanyahu to lose
support from the settlers — and, at a time when he is on trial on corruption
charges and facing daily protests outside his home over his poor performance in
leading Israel out of the coronavirus epidemic, left him sinking in the polls.
So what Trump,
Kushner, Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto leader of the Emirates, and
Netanyahu did was turn lemons into lemonade, explained Itamar Rabinovich, one
of Israel’s leading Middle East historians and a former ambassador to
Washington.
“Instead of Israeli annexation for a
Palestinian state, they made it Israeli non-annexation in return for peace
with the U.A.E.,” said Rabinovich in an interview. Kushner, he added,
“basically generated an asset out of nothing, which Israel could then trade for
peace with the U.A.E. It was peace for peace, not land for peace.”
This process apparently started after
the U.A.E.’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, published a letter in Hebrew in the Israeli
newspaper Yediot Ahronot in June directly warning that Israeli annexation of
the West Bank would undermine the quiet progress Israel had made with the gulf
Arabs.
The U.A.E. had been mulling going for
more open diplomatic ties with Israel for a while, but it was the discussions
over how to stop annexation that created a framework where the U.A.E. could be
seen as getting something for the Palestinians in return for its normalization
with Israel.
The Netanyahu dynamics here are fascinating, or as Israeli writer Ari Shavit remarked to me: “Netanyahu is trying to get out of his own personal Watergate by going to China. He’s like Nixon in reverse.”
What he meant was that Netanyahu had
been doing everything he could to appease the right-wing forces in Israel —
with shiny objects like annexation — so they would side with him in his
corruption trial against Israel’s court system and attorney general.
By taking this deal,
Netanyahu, as Nixon did with China, abandoned his natural ideological allies —
the settlers who supported him because they thought he would deliver annexation
— “and this will force Netanyahu to become more dependent on the center and
center-right in Israel going forward,” said Shavit. “This deal may help save
Israeli democracy by now depriving Bibi” of the full army of right-wing forces
“he needed to destroy the Israeli Supreme Court.”
The Palestinian Authority, led by
Mahmoud Abbas, was also stripped of something by this deal, which may force him
to the negotiating table. It stripped him of his biggest ace in the hole — the
idea that the gulf Arabs would normalize with Israel only after the Israelis
satisfied the demands of the Palestinian Authority with a state to its liking.
(Free advice for Abbas: Come back to
the table now and say you view the Trump plan as a “floor,” not a “ceiling” for
Palestinian aspirations. You will find a lot of support from Trump, the
Europeans and the Arabs for that position. You still have leverage. Israel still
has to deal with you, because your people in the West Bank are not going to
just disappear, no matter what happens with the U.A.E. and Israel.)
This deal will certainly encourage the
other gulf sheikhdoms — Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — all of
which have had covert and overt business and intelligence dealings with Israel,
to follow the Emirates’ lead. They will not want to let the U.A.E. have a leg
up in being able to marry its financial capital with Israel’s cybertechnology,
agriculture technology and health care technology, with the potential to make
both countries stronger and more prosperous.
Three other big winners here are: 1)
King Abdullah of Jordan. He feared that Israeli annexation would energize
efforts to turn Jordan into the Palestinian state. That threat is for the
moment defused. 2) The American Jewish community. If Israel had annexed part of
the West Bank, it would have divided every synagogue and Jewish community in
America, between hard-line annexationists and liberal anti-annexationists. This
was a looming disaster. Gone for now. And 3) Joe Biden. Biden, if he succeeds
Trump, will not have to worry about the thorny issue of annexation, and he
should have a much stronger pro-American alliance in the region to work with.
The big geopolitical losers are Iran
and all of its proxies: Hezbollah, the Iraqi militias, Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis in Yemen and Turkey. This is for a
number of reasons. Up to now, the U.A.E. has kept up a delicate balance between
Iran and Israel, not looking to provoke Iran, and dealing with Israel covertly.
But this deal is right in Iran’s face.
The tacit message is: “We now have Israel on our side, so don’t mess with us.”
The vast damage Israel inflicted on Iran through apparent cyberwarfare in
recent months may have even given the U.A.E. more breathing room to do this
deal.
But there is another
message, deeper, more psychological. This was the U.A.E. telling the Iranians
and all their proxies: There are really two coalitions in the region today —
those who want to let the future bury the past and those who want to let the
past keep burying the future. The U.A.E. is taking the helm of the first, and
it is leaving Iran to be the leader of the second.
When the Trump administration
assassinated Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, the
foreign-operations branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in
January, I wrote a column saying that America had just
killed “the dumbest man in Iran.”
Why? Because what was Suleimani’s
business model, which became Shiite Iran’s business model? It was to hire Arab
and other Shiites to fight Arab Sunnis in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria — to
project Iran’s power. And what was the result of all this? Iran has helped to
turn all four into failed states. Iran’s clerical leadership has become the
largest facilitator of state failure in the Middle East — including its own —
which is why so many Lebanese blame it and Hezbollah for their country’s
mismanagement that led to the devastating explosion last week in Beirut’s port.
I have followed the Middle East for too
long to ever write the sentence “the region will never be the same again.” The
forces of sectarianism, tribalism, corruption and anti-pluralism run deep
there. But there are other currents — young men and women who are just so tired
of the old game, the old fights, the old wounds being stoked over and over
again. You could see them demonstrating all over the streets of Beirut last
week demanding good governance and a chance to realize their full potential.
The U.A.E. and Israel and the U.S. on
Thursday showed — at least for one brief shining moment — that the past does
not always have to bury the future, that the haters and dividers don’t always
have to win.
It was a breath of fresh air. May it
one day soon turn into a howling wind of change that spreads across the whole
region.