🌹🌹🌹Middle East
‘peace’ deal is all about Iran
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/middle-east-peace-deal-is-all-about-iran/
25 Sep 2020|Amin Saikal
The normalisation of relations with Israel by Bahrain and the United
Arab Emirates was choreographed to help the domestically embattled Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump.
It essentially cements Netanyahu’s long-standing
dictum of ‘peace for peace’ not ‘land for peace’, and Trump’s efforts to shore
up a US–Israel–Arab front against Iran and its allies.
These developments are set to seriously harm the Palestinian cause and
push Iran further into Russian and Chinese arms, and they are unlikely to bring
stability and security to the turbulent Persian Gulf.
The
Arab–Israeli conflict has led to three wars and the expansion of the Jewish
state to a size three times larger than the area allocated under a UN partition
plan 73 years ago.
The
likelihood of a sovereign Palestinian state materialising along the lines of
the 1967 borders has never been slimmer.
And a
deeper and wider barrier has been created that will prevent meaningful
cooperation for regional stability between Iran and the Arab kingdoms, except
Qatar, which has been under a Saudi-led blockade since 2016 partly because of
its desire to have a good working relationship with Iran.
Neither the UAE nor Bahrain has extracted anything from Israel that will
help bring the Palestinians self-determination.
They have
effectively ended the Arab League’s approval at its 2002 Beirut summit of Saudi
Arabian initiatives that offered recognition and peace to Israel in exchange
for its withdrawal from occupied Arab lands, including the West Bank, the Gaza
Strip and East Jerusalem, for a Palestinian state.
The
initiatives basically reflected UN Security Council resolution 242, adopted
shortly after the 1967 Arab–Israeli War.
The UAE, under
the leadership of its founder and avowed supporter of the Palestinian cause,
the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and Bahrain under its reigning
monarch, Emir Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, were signatories to the initiatives,
which were subsequently endorsed by two other Arab League summits.
Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, from the right-wing Likud Party, rejected the
initiatives with a resolute stance against land for peace.
However,
Israel’s position changed under Sharon’s successor, Yitzhak Rabin, from the
centre-left Labor Party.
The
signing of the Oslo Accords by Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in
the presence of US President Bill Clinton on the lawns of the White House in
September 1993 essentially affirmed the Arab stance of ‘land for peace’.
The accords
were to lead to a final settlement with the creation of an independent
Palestinian state.
Most Arab
states and the international community hailed the accords as the dawn of a new
era for peace in the Middle East.
Sharon
and Netanyahu vehemently opposed them and advocated ‘peace for peace’,
successfully rendering the accords defunct.
Netanyahu
also later extinguished the ‘two-state solution’, which was promoted by the
George W. Bush administration and endorsed universally, by promising that there
would be no Palestinian state under his watch.
The UAE and
Bahrain leaderships, who are not driven by Arab nationalist causes and feel
more domestically and regionally vulnerable than their traditional
predecessors, have found it expedient to opt for Netanyahu’s peacemaking
paradigm, and to sign up to Trump’s policy of ‘divide and rule’ to forge a
US–Arab–Israeli regional alliance against Iran as the main enemy.
Trump’s policy
is not new. It has been a centrepiece of the American approach to containing
the Iranian Islamic regime since its advent 40 years ago, but none of his
predecessors pursued it with as much gusto as he has.
The latest
deals are set to generate exchanges between the signatories in many fields,
including security and intelligence, but they also appear to be timed to assist
Netanyahu and Trump out of their domestic predicaments.
The
Israeli leader faces a trial on corruption and fraud charges, and Trump faces
the November election amid widespread criticism of his management of the
Covid-19 crisis, the consequent deteriorating economy, and the savagery of
climate change.
The deals,
which are likely to be followed by agreements with Saudi Arabia and the
Sultanate of Oman, were timed to coincide with the American troop withdrawal
from Afghanistan under the US–Taliban peace deal and Washington’s announcement
that it will withdraw 2,000 of the 5,200 troops it has in Iraq.
Trump is now in a position to present himself as a
peacemaker on the world stage and a leader who ended America’s entanglement in
the costly Afghan and Iraqi conflicts.
Whatever the
outcome for Netanyahu and Trump, the growing Israeli–Arab rapprochement
certainly strikes a serious blow to the cause of the Palestinians, who are now
increasingly left behind by their Arab counterparts.
The only
ray of hope they have is if Netanyahu fails to win his legal battle, if Trump
loses the elections, and if a Joe Biden administration adopts an approach
similar to that of his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, who upheld the
internationally backed two-state solution as the best option for settling the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Concurrently, the developments are set to prompt Tehran to deepen its
strategic ties with Moscow and Beijing, thus making the Gulf vulnerable to
wider rivalries and potential conflicts.
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