The Emirati-Israeli Agreement: Breaking the Barriers of Illusion

 Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, London, August 14

Put simply and succinctly, the United Arab Emirates achieved a major political, psychological and security breakthrough in the Middle East with the announcement of its historic agreement to normalize ties with Israel. This agreement not only protected the Palestinians’ right to establish their own independent and sovereign state, but also preserved the sanctity of all Muslim sites in Israel.

Above all, it strengthened the moderate Arab world and united it against the Muslim Brotherhood, the mullahs and the Arab nationalists who have been rearing their heads in the Middle East. The UAE reaped a tangible gain for the Palestinian cause, not by words but by deeds: It brought to an immediate and unequivocal end the Israeli encroachment of West Bank territory, an achievement explicitly outlined in the tripartite statement released by the UAE, the US and Israel. We all know what to expect next.

The well-oiled propaganda machines in Turkey, Iran and Qatar, alongside radical groups like al-Qaida, Islamic State and the Houthis, will all rush to attack the emirates. They will describe the UAE as a “traitor” and as “weak.” But the truth is far from that. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was vehemently attacked after signing a peace treaty with Israel. But the fact of the matter remains that in historic perspective, he liberated Egyptian lands and prevented a bleak future for his country. He was a true hero of war and peace, and Egypt is still reaping the fruits of the peace he created.

The great king of Jordan, Hussein bin Talal, was also attacked after reaching an agreement with the Israelis but he refused to submit to these accusations. This led his country to the great Wadi Araba Treaty, which ensured Jordan’s territorial integrity and water rights with Israel. Therefore – and because he is a realistic and responsible Arab leader – Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi took the initiative to commend this development.

Most ironically, those very countries that responded with criticism – Turkey and Qatar – are also those maintaining the most extensive covert trade and tourism ties with Israel. Whether one supports it or not, the Emirati-Israeli agreement will not come at the expense of the Palestinians, but rather in their favor. Like it or not, Israel is one of the countries of the region.

Like it or not, most of the harm to Arabs has been carried out by the hands of Iran and Turkey. According to a joint Emirati, American and Israeli statement, this historic diplomatic achievement will enhance peace in the Middle East and preserve the two-state solution on the ground, not in imagination. This is a historic agreement that brings back memories of great leaders who dared take risks to bring about peace. – Mishary Al-Dayidi (translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)

Social Revolution of Arab Women in Israel

 The status of Arab women in Israel is improving significantly. Hadas Fuchs, a researcher at the Taub Institute, published a study in 2018 on the integration of Arab women in the labor market in Israel. 

The most striking detail of her research relates to a revolution in the education of Arab women: 15% of students in higher education in Israel are Arab women, even though the proportion of Arab women among the general population is only 10%. In fact, the number of female Arab students in higher education has doubled since the beginning of 2000. 

As a result, women in Arab society are much more educated than men. Female students at Arab high schools comprise 52% of students studying computer programming and sciences, 55% in electronics, 59% in mathematics, and 70% in chemistry. The employment rate of Arab women jumped from 35% to 40% in the past year alone.

Israeli-Arab captain of women’s basketball team. 

Shahd Abboud, who plays for the Hapoel Petah Tikvah women’s basketball team in Israel, opened the 2018/19 season as their new captain, making history as the first female Arab captain of a professional Israeli basketball team in the top league. 

Bedouin woman joins Israeli police rescue unit. 

Rana Jaboua, a resident of the Bedouin Negev village of al-Fara’a has become the first female Bedouin in Israel to join the Israel Police Rescue team, Jaboua is part of a unit that helps hikers in the Judean Desert if they become lost or injured.

 Rana Jaboua

Israeli Bedouin Policewoman Blazing Trail  

Recently, Israel dedicated new police stations in the Arab villages of Jisr azZarqa and Kafr Kanna. Four days later, a short video on Facebook showed Sabrin Saadi, a young and also the first policewoman from the Bedouin village of Basmat Tabun, making her way to the Kafr Kanna station in her uniform wearing a hijab, walking past a group of Arab demonstrators. 

Saadi's father, Ali Saadi, said, "We are part of this society, so we should serve it. The people attacking her are a gang of wild kids with nothing better to do with their lives. They should go find themselves and think about what, if anything, they have actually done on behalf of their community." 

Arabs and Jews Celebrate Ramadan Together

Sodastream, an Israeli company, is using its employment model to

show that coexistence between Jews and Arabs is possible in the region.

Co-Existence in Haifa

In an exhilarating display of unity and brotherhood, thousands of Israelis, including Jews, Arabs and Christians, gathered in Haifa to sing together in harmony.

A group called Koolulam organized the event at which 3,000 people who had never before met learned to sing “One Day” by Matisyahu in English, Hebrew and Arabic.

The event is part of an effort to create more unity and cultivate a feeling of togetherness by sharing “communal experiences.”

Listen to the fantastic results and share with your friends. It’s incredibly beautiful–everyone will want to hear this!

The True Palestinian ‘Nakba’

 Philip Carl Salzman  Sept 3, 2017 

 

 https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/09/03/the-true-palestinian-nakba/

Seventy years ago today, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) introduced a detailed proposal to the UN General Assembly for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, approved less than three months later by a vote of 33 to 13. Not for the last time, however, a concerted international effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict foundered on the shoals of Arab rejectionism.

Arab Muslims roundly condemned UN partition — and more broadly the very principle of a Jewish state anywhere in Palestine — striving instead for complete victory. 

The Arabs acted according to their tradition, refusing compromise with inferiors. For over a millennium, Islamic empires had spread by the sword from Arabia across the Middle East and North Africa to much of Europe and as far east as India. God bestowed upon Muslims a right — no, a duty — to dominate Dar al-Islam (the house of Islam) forevermore. Not only did Jews, long a subservient and despised minority in Dar al-Islam, lack the right to have an independent state in Palestine, but the Arab residents of Palestine had no right to concede it to them.

The Arabs in Palestine thought that the Jews could not and would not stand up to them, and they acted on that well-established cultural principle. However, the thousand-year-old conditions were  not achieved this time around. The Jews they faced were not a dhimma, and they did not cower. Against the odds, and with little outside help, they fought and won. Again and again.

While maintaining their uncompromising rejection of any Jewish state in the Holy Land, the Arabs eventually abandoned their triumphalist rhetoric in favor of a more useful narrative. In this retelling, Israel is responsible for seven decades of mayhem, not the victim of unremitting hostility. That role would now be played by the Arab residents of Palestine, now called “Palestinians” — indeed, they would be forced to play it by the refusal of Arab states to naturalize, or even provide humane accommodations, to the so-called “refugees.”

Arab states marshalled their collective influence to sell this narrative to the rest of the world, with much success. Most Europeans and their governments, including the European Union, and many Americans risk apoplexy in their violent denunciations of Israel, while tripping over themselves offering sympathy and money to the Palestinians. The United Nations has established a complex bureaucracy devoted solely to their needs.

This narrative has received a particularly warm reception in the academic world, where Western imperialism, rationalized by disparaging “Orientalist” stereotypes of Middle Easterners, is seen as the single greatest cause of the region’s ills.

Of course, blaming all Palestinian problems on Israel makes even less sense than attributing the Arab-Islamic world’s economic, political, and cultural decline in recent centuries to relatively brief and limited Western interventions.

Though the narrative has grown more and more fantastical over the years, its acceptance remains disturbingly widespread. In the end, of course, the Palestinian victimization narrative hurts Palestinians by obscuring the actual sources of their misery — their failed supremacist ideology, despotic and corrupt leaders, and irrational hate of Jews — preventing the emergence of genuine solutions to a tragic, festering problem.