The promise of the Israel-UAE deal

Despite decades-old peace agreements, Egyptian and Jordanian relations with Israel resemble a loveless but functioning marriage: There is little warmth but somehow the bills get paid.

The new normalization agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the first Israeli peace accord with an Arab country in 26 years, could upend that model.

On the heels of the first direct commercial flight between Israel and the UAE on Monday, a cordial union is unfolding. Israel and Gulf leaders have for years been laying a foundation for a genial peace with state visits and, more recently, overtures to the Israeli and Arab streets.

Egyptian judokas refuse to shake hands with Israeli opponents in international competitions. The UAE has opened its borders to Israeli athletes for regional sports events.

Jordan’s King Abdullah often publicly clashes with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, in contrast, met in Oman two years ago with then-Sultan Qaboos bin Said at the Omani leader’s invitation.

The groundwork for the Israel-UAE peace agreement is being set not just on athletic fields or in government corridors, but on the street.

In June, UAE Ambassador to the U.S. Yousef al Otaiba addressed the Israeli public with a front-page Hebrew op-ed in the Israeli Yedioth Ahronoth daily that was as notable for his outreach method as his appeal that Israel not extend sovereignty over parts of the West Bank.

Similarly, the UAE has shown its Jewish residents it rejects the anti-Semitism prevalent in most of the Arab world. Many UAE Jews are expats who have come for business.

Alex Peterfreund left Belgium seven years ago for the UAE’s diamond industry. There weren’t enough UAE Jews to make a minyan, the 10-man quorum needed for prayer. Now the Dubai resident is cantor to the UAE’s several hundred Jews and co-founder of the Jewish Council of the Emirates, an umbrella group for Jewish communities.

“I feel much more comfortable and much more safe as a Jew here than as a Jew walking around in Paris or Brussels,” Peterfreund told me.

The UAE declared 2019 “the Year of Tolerance.” An “Abrahamic Family House” comprising a church, mosque and synagogue is planned. And UAE’s Jews contributed to a government-sponsored book, “Celebrating Tolerance,” with the history of each local religious minority.

Peterfreund says the book is sold in malls in the Emirates, giving Emiratis a fairer appraisal of Jews than found in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a czarist Russia-era forgery purporting to spotlight Jews plotting world rule. Yet Egyptian booksellers hawked “Protocols” at last year’s International Cairo Book Fair.

The UAE does not carry what Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs think tank, tells me is the “ideological baggage” of extremism straining relations with Israel’s immediate neighbors.

Still palpable in Egypt is the nationalism of the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser that led the Arab world into the 1967 Six-Day War with Israel. The disdain for Israel packaged with Nasserism was “never fully expunged,” Gold says, while Jordan carries the burden of the ideological legacy of extremist groups.

The new accord, and the promise of such deals with other Sunni Gulf states, is driven by mutual enemy Shia Iran’s nuclear aspirations and regional muscle-flexing.

But the Israel-UAE accord is more than strategic. Phone lines opened almost immediately after the agreement was announced.

For a durable, warm and replicable peace, an engaged Israeli and Arab public could prove as essential as high-level ambassadors.

Allan Richter is a journalist who lives in Smithtown.