The Kingdom of Morocco has come full circle in its relations with Israel and its stance on the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence. It has revived its 1990s approach by recognising the Jewish state and normalising relations with it, while stressing its continued support for the Palestinian cause.
The main silver lining for the kingdom this time is that the outgoing US administration has endorsed Morocco’s sovereignty over the long-disputed territory of Western Sahara. Rabat has sought to cut it both ways, but it has ultimately beefed up the increasing number of Arab states giving priority to their self-interests.
Morocco has traditionally followed a middle-of-the-road foreign policy. As a state having inherited a rich civilisation, acted as a linchpin within the Arab world and experienced French colonial rule, with close proximity to Europe and intimate linkages to western Africa, it has valued the politics of dialogue, peacemaking and cooperative foreign relations as critical to its political, economic and security priorities.
In recent times, its rulers, including the current king, Mohammed VI, who succeeded his father Hassan II in July 1999, have projected themselves as promoters of a moderate Islam and as savvy reformers, and conducted a foreign policy that could enable them to cut through the internal and external binaries confronting them. In this context, Rabat has broadly been a multilateralist conciliator in its foreign policy dispositions, barring its dispute with Algeria over Western Sahara, where the Polisario Front independence movement has rejected Morocco’s claim of sovereignty with the backing of Algeria and UN support.
Read the article by Amin Saikal in The Strategist.