Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hailed the agreement normalising relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates—which the two countries will sign at a White House ceremony today—as a historic step that equals Israel’s previous peace deals with Egypt and Jordan. The Israeli leader also boasted that the agreement with the UAE vindicated his ‘Netanyahu doctrine’ of peace for peace, rather than land for peace.
But even peace with a country with which Israel doesn’t share a border and has never fought a war required Netanyahu to give up his plans to annex large parts of the West Bank. So, there was a ‘land for peace’ aspect to the deal after all.
More important, Netanyahu’s ‘doctrine’ practically buries the concept underlying the 2002 Arab peace initiative: that an Israeli–Palestinian peace should be the precondition for normalisation of Arab states’ relations with Israel. The Arab League itself has rejected the Palestinians’ request to condemn the Israel–UAE deal, and the pact also signals the defeat of the Israeli left’s vision of Palestine as the key to peace with the Arab world.
Throughout the many decades of Arab–Israeli antagonism, Arab states have betrayed the Palestinians no less than Israel has. In his 1979 peace agreement with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin made far-reaching commitments on the Palestinian question. But both leaders knew that theirs was a separate peace driven by vital strategic needs—as shown by its survival despite Israel’s ever deepening occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands.
Read the article by Shlomo Ben-Ami on The Strategist.