Alliance of convenience: the Israeli-Emirati peace
The peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates is not all that it seems - and as usual, it’s the Palestinians who lose out.
The recent announcement of a full normalisation of ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates seems to have come out of nowhere. It violates a principle that has governed Israel’s relations with the Arab world since 1948; that full diplomatic relations are impossible without a solution to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After all, the Palestinians – lacking wealth or military power – have long used the Arab world’s withholding of diplomatic relations with Israel as a bargaining chip. Aside from desperate forays into political violence, it was the only leverage they could afford.
Hence when the UAE announced that it would hand over that chip without the slightest meaningful benefit to the Palestinians, they reacted with fury and indignation. It confirmed their greatest fears of slipping into insignificance; of losing their voice amidst the tussle of regional powers. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called the announcement a “stab in the back” which Palestinians “absolutely reject.” Meanwhile, the right-wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has been emboldened to continue its occupation of Palestinian land.
Granted, the UAE is not the first Arab state to breach that diplomatic wall. The first was Egypt in 1979, followed by Jordan in 1994. However, this time seems different. Unlike the UAE, Egypt and Jordan share borders with Israel and have felt first-hand the power of its military. The present-day occupation of the Palestinians is a reminder of the devastating onslaught of June 1967, when in the space of six days Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria and the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. The peace deals struck in 1979 and 1994 could therefore be interpreted as gambits for national security borne out of painful experience.
The Emiratis do not share that kind of vulnerability or bloody history vis-à-vis Israel. Yet similarly to Egypt and Jordan, it is national security that pushes them into Israel’s embrace. At the heart of this calculus is Iran. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are engaged against Iran in a cold war that has dominated the dynamics of the Middle East for the last four decades. At this moment, it manifests itself in a number of flashpoints around the region in which actors such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE work to roll back Iranian influence by attacking its allies and proxy forces. Thus, the UAE finds in Israel a partner of convenience.
In Yemen, a Saudi-led air campaign against the Iran-aligned Houthi militia has for five years been augmented by an Emirati ground presence. Despite a phased withdrawal earlier this year, the UAE retains “control over several non-state armed groups, thought to total around 90,000 fighters … which it supports by providing direct training, capacity building, logistics assistance and salaries.” These groups in turn check the influence of Iran in the Arabian peninsula.
Meanwhile in Syria, Iran’s ambitions are constantly being challenged by the activities of the Israel Defense Forces. When the civil war erupted in 2011, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards deployed to Syria in force to prop up the government of Iran’s closest Arab ally. Since then, the Iranians have maintained a steady presence in Syria, in spite of a neighbour that has vowed to purge them from its borders. Indeed, since 2011, the IDF has launched hundreds of strikes in Syria against Syrian government troops, Revolutionary Guards, and militants allied to Iran, including the Lebanese group Hezbollah. As recently as August 4, the IDF conducted airstrikes against Syrian military targets near Damascus in retaliation for a purported Hezbollah bombing attempt at the Israeli border. So it is not for nothing that former Israeli Defence Minister Naftali Bennett threatened, “if the Iranians continue with their miserable moves, they will find out fast enough that Syria has become their Vietnam.”
This long-standing opposition between Israel and Hezbollah is significant due to the sheer importance of Hezbollah to Iran’s foreign policy. This Lebanese militia was the first and arguably most successful proxy force developed by Revolutionary Iran. Formed in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Hezbollah is now the most powerful military and political force in the country, possessing a militia stronger than the Lebanese army and a network of social services that constitute a “state within a state.” It is thus Iran’s most successful instance of what could be considered its most successful strategy: the use of proxy forces abroad.
Recent news regarding Iran has focused predominantly on its nuclear programme and the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration after it withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear deal in May 2018. However, the administration’s oft-repeated reason for dropping the deal is that it does not address two other pillars of Iranian power: its ballistic missile programme and its network of proxy forces. The latter may prove to be the most important.
According to an International Institute for Strategic Studies dossier: “in the contemporary Middle East a third Iranian strategic capability is proving the determinant of strategic advantage: the ability to fight by, with and through third parties … its potency and significance has [by November 2019] risen sharply in the past decade, to the point where it has brought Iran more regional influence and status than either its nuclear or ballistic missile programme.”
Since its formation, a large component of Hezbollah’s identity has been its role as a resistance movement against Israel within Lebanon. The IDF and Hezbollah have been engaged in various degrees of warfare since the early 1980s, and the recurrent clashes this year remind us that the conflict is far from over. By holding the attention of its most important proxy force – whether it is by launching attacks or absorbing them – Israel thus makes itself a useful security partner for any actor looking to orient itself against Iran.
On the other hand, the Gulf Arabs’ traditional ally – the United States – is being seen as increasingly unreliable. One component of this is the so-called “Pivot to Asia” - the American strategic reorientation toward the Asia-Pacific region and away from the Middle East. Soon after beginning his first term, Barack Obama branded himself “America’s first Pacific president,” promising to engage the region as no president had before. Today, it is a dynamic that finds its apotheosis in the twin figures of Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, both of which have brought an assertiveness to the Pacific rarely seen in recent times. When officials such as U.S. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, Attorney General William Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo all point to China as the greatest long-term threat to the United States, it would seem natural for the Emiratis to question the American commitment to the Middle East.
Add to this the intrinsic unpredictability of the Trump administration. In June 2019, Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for the shooting down of a U.S. surveillance drone then abruptly pulled back, apparently with only 10 minutes to spare. Not only did this episode show Trump to be callous and indecisive; Emirati officials were also dismayed by the fact that he did not even inform them of the attack in advance. Then in September 2019, despite the U.S. pointing the finger squarely at Iran for drone attacks on Saudi oil installations, there was no resolute American response. This American reluctance spurred the Saudis to explore a reduction of tensions vis-à-vis Iran, with the Iraqis acting as a go-between. In fact, Major General Qassem Soleimani – responsible for managing Iran’s proxy forces – was in Iraq this January to deliver a message intended for the Saudis, before he was assassinated by a U.S. drone strike.
Trump’s antics very clearly raised the spectre of war in the region, and as to the consequences, Elizabeth Dickinson remarks, “the stakes for the UAE are stupendously high. An attack that hit Emirati soil or damaged their critical infrastructure would … symbolically compromise the reputation of one of the region’s most economically dynamic countries.” The UAE’s glass towers are fragile indeed, so could they really afford to rely on Trump’s dangerously turbulent Iran policy?
Seen this way, the UAE’s alignment with Israel is at least partially in reaction to an enduring security issue. Israel, on the other hand, has its own reasons. Long-standing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dreams of annexing large portions of the West Bank, under Israeli military occupation since 1967. However, his plans were thrown into question after a series of inconclusive elections landed Israel with a coalition government, in which Netanyahu is due to hand over the prime ministership to political rival Benny Gantz in October 2021. Unlike Netanyahu, Gantz is reluctant to begin annexing occupied territory in the face of opposition from the international community.
The UAE gave Netanyahu the opportunity to pull back from his promises by agreeing to suspend annexation plans in return for peace. Yet the long-term consequences may in fact be beneficial for Netanyahu and his right-wing support base, some of whom also felt “stab[bed] in the back” by the recent deal. For him, the Israeli-Emirati peace is but one stepping stone along his “outside-in” approach to the Palestinian issue. As Raphael Ahren explains, “for years, Netanyahu has argued that bilateral talks between [the Palestinians and Israel] are unlikely to yield a final-status peace deal. Instead, he insists, the Sunni Arab world, which sees in Israel a vital ally against their common foe Iran, will eventually convince the Palestinians to make the concessions necessary for a peace agreement.” In other words, using the Iran issue to gradually whittle away their ultimate bargaining chip.
In this endeavour they are likely to succeed. As a strong, dynamic country with a burgeoning technology sector, it seems inevitable that Israel will be able to convince the Arab world that it has more to offer them than do the Palestinians. Just how this will affect the Palestinian people going forward is left to be decided by an uncertain future.
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