Wednesday, June 17, 2020

UAE says “not speaking to Israel is not getting us anywhere”


By RAPHAEL AHREN 17.6.2020 1:01 am  
A senior official from the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday called for increased cooperation with Israel and explained his country’s ongoing rapprochement with Jerusalem, saying it wanted to separate disagreements over the Palestinian issue from the mutual benefits of cooperation in other fields.

Addressing a major US-Jewish online conference, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash reiterated his view that the decades-long Arab boycott of Israel has not yielded the desired results and advocated for “open lines of communications” and increased liaison with Jerusalem in various areas, such as technology and health.

His statements appeared to mark a significant turnaround from just days earlier, when a senior Emirati diplomat warned in an Israeli newspaper that annexation would spell the end of any rapprochement between Israel and the Gulf.

Gargash reiterated Abu Dhabi’s opposition to Israel’s planned unilateral annexation of parts of the West Bank, but underlined his country’s policy of “decoupling the political from the non-political.”

“Can I have a political disagreement with Israel but at the same time try and bridge other areas of the relationship? I think I can. I think that is fundamentally where we are,” Gargash said during an interview for the American Jewish Committee Virtual Global Forum.
Egypt, Jordan and Turkey already have formal relations with Israel, and Qatar and other Gulf states “led the way on having more normal relations with Israel,” he went on.

Gargash, a member of the UAE’s federal cabinet, said there was no reason not to cooperate with Israel on efforts to bring medical aid to Palestinians suffering from the coronavirus pandemic. Such collaboration, which last week led to the second of two Emirati airliners landing in Tel Aviv, does not affect his country’s opposition to Israel’s planned annexation, he stressed.

The Palestinians oppose any attempts by the Arab world to normalize ties with Israel before a peace deal is signed. The Palestinian Authority has refused to accept the UAE supplies on the planes.

Gargash noted that decades of Arab hostility toward Israel has only bred animosity that now makes it harder to work together for the common good.

“The UAE is clearly against any annexation as is being proposed by the current Israeli government. Having said that, that is the political domain. Do I have to really look at all the other domains and make them almost static because of the political domain? We have tried that, as a group of Arab countries, over many years, and I don’t think it has really led to what we want in terms of bringing stability to the region,” he told the interviewer.

The Emirates wants to promote stability in the Middle East,  “What we see today is that negotiations, and having lines of communications open, actually will yield better results for us and for the Israelis,” he said.

The traditional Arab policy of “stonewalling and closed lines of communications” has only radicalized the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the senior diplomat added.

During the 45-minute interview, which the AJC hailed as “a historic public appearance by a senior Arab government official before a global Jewish organization,” Gargash referred to Israel’s much-maligned plan to apply sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and all settlements in the West Bank three times.

As opposed to the UAE ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, Gargash did not explicitly warn that annexation would spell the death of the recent rapprochement between Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi.

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