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.
No comments:
Post a Comment