Another major Arab state makes peace with Israel.
Today’s announcement that Israel and the United Arab Emirates have agreed to establish full diplomatic relations is a milestone for peace in the Middle East. The U.A.E. is the most powerful of America’s allies in the Persian Gulf, after Saudi Arabia. And it does nothing significant on the diplomatic front without closely coordinating with the Saudis. That means that a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia could be next, and coming soon.
To put it in perspective, let’s dial the clock back to the Six-Day War of 1967. After Israel simultaneously shattered the armies of half a dozen Arab states massing on its borders, the Arab League met in Sudan to adopt “The Three No’s”: No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. That war left Israel in possession of most of what we now call the “occupied territories” (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) in addition to the whole of the Sinai peninsula.
The half century since then has been filled with war and turmoil, and the vast majority of Arab states have stuck doggedly to the Three No’s of Khartoum. But there have been a few major milestones for peace — each of them quite similar to today’s.
The first came with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s brilliant diplomacy in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which further strengthened Israel’s hand and made the U.S. the Middle East’s preeminent power. Their diplomacy laid the groundwork for the Camp David Accords of 1978, which brought full diplomatic relations between Egypt and Israel — and the return of the Sinai peninsula to Egypt.
No coalition of Arab states can hope to defeat Israel without Egypt. Making peace between those two countries thereby ended forever the era of major state-on-state wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Turmoil continued, of course, but a single week of fighting between major armies can kill many times the total number of people who have died in all the Palestinian intifadas and terror campaigns since the 1980s.
The next major milestone for peace was the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Jordan in 1994. That, too, was largely the result of American diplomacy cashing in on another war (the Persian Gulf War) that dramatically strengthened both Israel’s position and that of the United States. Its security concerns satisfied, Israel again made lasting concessions for peace, this time with a neighbor whose population is majority Palestinian Arabs. For a time, it even seemed that an end to Israel’s occupation of the territories seized in 1967 might be at hand, and the Oslo “peace process” began.
The peace process did not fare well, chiefly because Israel made the mistake of bringing the unreformed terrorist Yasser Arafat back from exile to negotiate on the Palestinian side. It came to a complete halt during the Obama administration because Obama totally misunderstood what makes the U.S. so indispensable to the peace process. Tempted to think that his own sense of justice was the missing link, Obama tried to be an impartial arbiter. But the Arabs and Israelis couldn’t care less what Obama thought was fair. That’s not why they talk to the United States.
Read the rest of the story HERE and follow link below to a related story:
WSJ: Israel, U.A.E. Agree to Establish Formal Diplomatic Ties
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