UAE calls for increased cooperation with Israel

ISLAMABAD: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash has called for increased cooperation with Israel and explained his country’s ongoing rapprochement with Israel, saying it wanted to separate disagreements over the Palestinian issue from the mutual benefits of cooperation in other fields.

He has pleaded for “open lines of communications” and increased liaison with Israel in various areas, such as technology and health. Addressing a major US-Jewish online conference, the minister reiterated his view that the decades-long Arab boycott of Israel has not yielded the desired results. 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 Emirates airliner 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 normalise 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.