The following article has been published in The Aus­trali­an by ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin.

The White House has announced that Israel and the United Arab Emirates have agreed to sign a peace agreement which will see the two nations establish full dip­lo­mat­ic relations, and “the exchange of ambas­sad­ors and cooper­a­tion on a broad range of areas, including tourism, education, health­care, trade, and security.” The agreement is the most sig­ni­fic­ant dip­lo­mat­ic devel­op­ment in the Middle East since Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994 and it form­al­ises a major regional realign­ment that has been occurring clandes­tinely for decades.

It is difficult to overstate the historic nature of the agreement and its implic­a­tions for the politics of the region. Since Israel declared inde­pend­ence in 1948 pursuant to the United Nations General Assembly partition plan to turn Palestine from a former Ottoman colonial pos­ses­sion into two new nation-states, one Arab and one Jewish, a permanent state of war has existed between Israel and its Arab neigh­bours. This has mani­fes­ted in invasions of Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973 by the combined armies of the Arab states on Israel’s borders, and endless skir­mishes in the United Nations and inter­na­tion­al forums often to the discredit of those insti­tu­tions and at the expense of far more pressing human rights and conflict issues.

This modus vivendi arose from an absolute rejection by the Arab world of Jewish claims to self-determ­in­a­tion in any part of the land to which the Jews traced their origins and with which they main­tained an unbroken physical con­nec­tion for over 3,000 years. The permanent state of war was form­al­ised in an emergency session of the Arab League held in Khartoum, Sudan in the wake of Israel’s lightning victory in the 1967 (Six Day) War, at which the member states agreed to what came to be known as the “three no’s” – no peace with Israel, no recog­ni­tion of Israel and no nego­ti­ations with Israel.

The United Nations offered a different path. Security Council Res­ol­u­tion 242 called for the cessation of war and conflict in the region through a mechanism known as “land for peace” by which the defeated Arab states would make peace with Israel in exchange for Israel’s with­draw­al from part or all of the ter­rit­or­ies Israel’s occupied in the 1967 War. This formula was suc­cess­fully applied to reach landmark agree­ments with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in 1994.

Though Res­ol­u­tion 242 was intended to govern the rela­tion­ship between sovereign states in the region and did not con­tem­plate an Israeli agreement with the stateless Palestini­ans, the under­ly­ing prin­ciples of 242 – mutual recog­ni­tion, ter­rit­ori­al con­ces­sions and an end to war, were applied by the Palestini­ans and Israel in 1993. This resulted in the signing of the Oslo Accords which led to mul­ti­fa­ceted cooper­a­tion and the pursuit of a final status agreement to end the conflict.

But even while appearing to pursue its own bargain with Israel, the Palestini­ans demanded Arab solid­ar­ity against Israel through a strict doctrine of anti-nor­m­al­isa­tion – that is, Israel was to be treated as a pariah, an unwanted, temporary inter­loper in the region of Islam and Arab nation­al­ism, until it capit­u­lated to Palestini­an demands, including the set­tle­ment of up to seven million Palestini­ans in Israel, whose land area is roughly equi­val­ent to Tasmania’s.

But while Arab leaders mouthed plat­it­udes about solid­ar­ity against the Jewish State, the cartel of rejec­tion­ism and anti-nor­m­al­isa­tion was gradually being broken not only by the major peace agree­ments but by small, though highly potent gestures that evidenced a major awakening.

In March 2018, Israeli passenger planes were permitted to fly over Saudi airspace for the first time. In October of that year, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu made a visit to the Omani capital, Muscat while his sports minister flew to Abu Dhabi where Israel’s judo team was permitted to compete in a major tour­na­ment, breaking a long­stand­ing sports embargo that fre­quently saw athletes from Islamic countries withdraw from events when drawn against Israeli opponents. Netanyahu’s meeting with the Sudanese leader earlier this year was par­tic­u­larly rich with symbolism given it was in the Sudanese capital that the anti-nor­m­al­isa­tion policy had been adopted.

The process by which Arab nations have come to find peace with a sworn enemy is a remark­able one – a mix of power politics and prag­mat­ism. For the Gulf States, Iran has long been the chief adversary, spawning tit-for-tat strikes and reprisals and enormous blood­let­ting through proxy wars in Yemen and Syria. The Sunni States were spooked by the Obama Administration’s signing of the nuclear deal with Iran which resulted in a $150 billion sanctions relief windfall for the regime allowing it to salvage its economy, expand its weapons testing programs and deepen spon­sor­ship of Hezbollah, the Assad regime and the Houthis.

For the Gulf States, seeing US and European leaders literally throwing their arms around the grinning Iranian foreign minister rather than exerting maximum pressure on the regime, or better still, facil­it­at­ing its collapse, left them feeling utterly exposed. They observed that the world leader most outspoken and fearless in opposing the Iran Deal, and the only one who seemed to truly share their under­stand­ing of the brutal malevol­ence of the Iranian Mullahs, was the Israeli prime minister.

Israel’s rapid trans­form­a­tion from a largely agrarian economy built on socialist ideals to super-charged cap­it­al­ism from which new tech­no­logy in medicine, cyber­se­cur­ity and water man­age­ment pours forth like the waters of the Jordan, made the Jewish State far harder to ignore, much less boycott. This has meant that world leaders now visit Israel less to hector on behalf of the Palestini­ans and more to sign agree­ments to transform their own economies and improve the lives of their citizens.

The self-defeating and baffling Palestini­an approach of rejecting three offers of statehood since 2000 and now refusing to even negotiate to end the conflict with Israel has turned wider Arab fatigue with the Palestini­an issue into exas­per­a­tion bordering on total apathy. The perpetual talk of the “Arab street” being alight with pro-Palestini­an feeling has been proven hollow enabling Arab leaders to make peace with Israel with no downside.

The decision of the UAE to find peace with Israel will con­ceiv­ably pave the way for similar treaties with Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, further isolating the Iranian axis. It will also increase Israel’s regional integ­ra­tion and the ful­fil­ment of the vision contained in its Declar­a­tion of Inde­pend­ence of achieving “peace and good neigh­bour­li­ness” with the peoples of the region. This peace treaty has also revealed the realities of Middle East poli­cy­mak­ing, vin­dic­at­ing the Israeli Prime Minister in his long-held belief that peace comes through strength and economic utility and not simply by pleading with one’s adversar­ies for accept­ance.

Alex Ryvchin is Co-Chief Executive Officer of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry and the author of Zionism – The Concise History.