By Dan Williams
TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Top advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday sent the United Arab Emirates despite a pact buildinging open relations between the Gulf force and Israel.
Even before the start of the talks in Abu Dhabi, delegates will have written the history of aviation by carrying an Israeli trade plane, the word “peace” published in Arabic, English and Hebrew on a window of the Boeing 737 cockpit in El Al – from Tel Aviv to the capital of the United Arab Emirates in Saudi Arabia.
“This is peace for peace,” Netanyahu tweeted, praising what he called a historic theft and describing a formal bonding agreement with an Arab state that does not imply the surrender of land that Israel captured in the 1967 war.
Announced on August 13, the “normalization” agreement is the first such agreement between an Arab country and Israel in more than 20 years and has been catalyzed largely by Iran’s unusual fears.
The Palestinians were dismayed by the decision of the United Arab Emirates, fearing that it would weaken a long-standing pan-Arab position calling for the Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territory, and the acceptance of the Palestinian state, in exchange for a general with Arab countries.
Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and national security adviser Robert O’Brien lead the U.S. delegation. The Israeli team is led by O’Brien’s counterpart, Meir Ben-Shabbat. Officials will explore bilateral cooperation in areas such as industry and tourism, and Israeli defence envoys will head to the UAE separately.
Israeli officials expect the two days to give a date for a rite of signature in Washington, in all likelihood as early as September, between Netanyahu and Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan.
That can give Trump a foreign policy touch before he is re-elected in November. On Sunday in Jerusalem, Kushner said the agreement was a “big step forward.”
The Trump administration has tried to involve other Sunni Arab countries over Iran to interact with Israel, but as much as Saudi Arabia said it is not ready.
But as far as Riyadh’s most comfortable stance can foreshadow, El Al’s plane will be able to fly over Saudi territory on Monday until flight time.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization committee, said Kushner and his team were “trying to convince as many Arab and Muslim leaders as possible” to give Trump electoral momentum.
“They will be the backdrop of an insignificant spectacle for a ridiculous agreement that will bring peace to the region,” he said.
(Report through Dan Williams; Additional report through Rami Ayyub; Written through Dan Williams; Edited through Peter Cooney and Tothrough Chopra)