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A senior official
from the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday called for increased cooperation with
Israel and explained his country’s ongoing rapprochement with Jerusalem, saying
it wanted to separate disagreements over the Palestinian issue from the mutual
benefits of cooperation in other fields.
Addressing a major
US-Jewish online conference, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar
Gargash reiterated his view that the decades-long Arab boycott of Israel has
not yielded the desired results and advocated for “open lines of
communications” and increased liaison with Jerusalem in various areas, such as
technology and health.
His statements
appeared to mark a significant turnaround from just days earlier, when a senior
Emirati diplomat warned in an Israeli newspaper that annexation would spell the
end of any rapprochement between Israel and the Gulf.
Gargash reiterated
Abu Dhabi’s opposition to Israel’s planned unilateral annexation of parts of
the West Bank, but underlined his country’s policy of “decoupling the political
from the non-political.”
“Can I have a
political disagreement with Israel but at the same time try and bridge other
areas of the relationship? I think I can. I think that is fundamentally where
we are,” Gargash said during an interview for the American Jewish Committee Virtual
Global Forum.
Egypt, Jordan and
Turkey already have formal relations with Israel, and Qatar and other Gulf
states “led the way on having more normal relations with Israel,” he went on.
Gargash, a member of
the UAE’s federal cabinet, said there was no reason not to cooperate with
Israel on efforts to bring medical aid to Palestinians suffering from the
coronavirus pandemic. Such collaboration, which last week led to the second of
two Emirati airliners landing in Tel Aviv, does not affect his
country’s opposition to Israel’s planned annexation, he stressed.
The Palestinians
oppose any attempts by the Arab world to normalize ties with Israel before a
peace deal is signed. The Palestinian Authority has refused to accept the UAE supplies on
the planes.
Gargash noted that
decades of Arab hostility toward Israel has only bred animosity that now makes
it harder to work together for the common good.
“The UAE is clearly
against any annexation as is being proposed by the current Israeli government.
Having said that, that is the political domain. Do I have to really look at all
the other domains and make them almost static because of the political domain?
We have tried that, as a group of Arab countries, over many years, and I don’t
think it has really led to what we want in terms of bringing stability to the
region,” he told the interviewer.
The Emirates wants
to promote stability in the Middle East,
“What we see today is that negotiations, and having lines of
communications open, actually will yield better results for us and for the
Israelis,” he said.
The traditional Arab
policy of “stonewalling and closed lines of communications” has only
radicalized the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the senior diplomat added.
During the 45-minute
interview, which the AJC hailed as “a historic public appearance by a senior
Arab government official before a global Jewish organization,” Gargash referred
to Israel’s much-maligned plan to apply sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and
all settlements in the West Bank three times.
As opposed to the
UAE ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, Gargash did not explicitly warn
that annexation would spell the death of the recent rapprochement between
Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi.
