Welcome to a Brand-New Middle East

It’s a brand-new Middle East. Within the span of only a month, the United States has brokered peace between Israel and two Arab countries—first the United Arab Emirates, then Bahrain. Both deals are revolutionary in scope: By normalizing ties and focusing on business, trade, and travel, these “warm peace” agreements go beyond the often tenuous “cold peace” that Egypt and Jordan made with the Jewish state decades ago. Not only do the UAE and Bahrain deals set the stage for a sea change in Arab-Israeli relations, but they might even present a novel opportunity to finally solve the most intractable conflict between the two sides: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ties between Israel and the Gulf have grown exponentially in recent years. Underpinned by the common threat from Iran, what began as whispers of covert intelligence cooperation gradually transformed to increasingly public signs of amity. Gulf leaders have acknowledged Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, Israel’s flag has flown at sporting events, and Israeli officials have been allowed to visit. This process culminated in last month’s UAE-Israel deal, which seeks to break a major taboo in Arab-Israeli relations by establishing deep bilateral ties not just between Israeli and Emirati officialdom or security establishments, but between their peoples. That deal provides the necessary cover for other Gulf states to follow suit.

Critically, because the UAE and Bahrain are regional business hubs, the two peace deals will facilitate people-to-people interactions between growing numbers of Israeli visitors and hundreds of thousands of expatriate workers from across the Arab and Islamic world—including Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians—whose home countries have hostile relations with Israel, if any. Even if the process will be incremental, creating a space for these populations to interact with each other for the first time as real human beings—away from hostilities, mutual recriminations, and governmental propaganda—will have a revolutionary impact on all sides, and on regional peace.

The new peace deals thus remedy a critical deficiency of Israel’s earlier agreements with Egypt and Jordan. To be sure, Israel’s historic 1979 peace agreement with Egypt remains an unassailable benchmark for ending Arab-Israeli wars by removing the Arab world’s most populous and powerful nation from the conflict. Without that critical change, no subsequent agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors might have been possible. But that peace—and its 1994 successor with Jordan—remains a cold one, confined to strong security coordination and a smattering of economic deals. Dependent on the survival of regimes of questionable longevity, such a peace is perpetually vulnerable to regional and domestic vicissitudes.

The new peace deals remedy a critical deficiency of Israel’s earlier agreements with Egypt and Jordan.

This was most obvious during the brief Arab Spring in 2011, when the Egyptian revolutionaries who deposed Hosni Mubarak labeled him an “agent of the Jews”—and later stormed Israel’s embassy in Cairo after Israeli forces mistakenly killed three Egyptian soldiers during a border clash with Islamist militants.

Israel’s peace deal with Jordan—which, like the UAE deal, formalized decades long clandestine ties—has experienced similar volatility. The July 2017 attack on the Israeli Embassy in Amman, and the case of Ahmed Daqamseh, the Jordanian soldier who shot and killed seven Israeli schoolgirls in 1997, are two of the more tragic examples. Popular calls to annul the treaty are routine, and official relations ebb and flow in tandem with Israeli-Palestinian tensions. In 2019, Amman terminated an Israeli lease of a Jordanian border enclave due to lack of progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace, and this year even it mulled canceling their peace treaty altogether if Israel annexed West Bank territories.

The new normalization deals are different. Anwar Gargash, the UAE’s minister of state for foreign affairs, said that his country wants a “warm”—and therefore more durable—peace with Israel, which he said should be a “two-way street” with “people-to-people movement.” He was echoed by Ali al-Nuaimi, another senior Emirati official, who said the deal is a “peace message, not a political treaty.” He stressed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not hinder Emirati-Israeli peace—not “even a war with Gaza.”

Demonstrating their seriousness, the Emiratis have followed through with a flurry of steps to deepen relations with Israel. They have concluded an agreement on medical research and development related to COVID-19, signed an Israeli player for Dubai’s Al-Nasr soccer team, inked a film and television cooperation agreement that plans to establish a regional film festival, sent direct flights to Tel Aviv, and allowed open visits by Israeli journalists. There is great interest in expanding tourism, but that will depend on Israel lifting its coronavirus-related travel restrictions. Gargash said that these kinds of mutual exchange will interlink the two countries and permanently end the “belligerent state of affairs” between them.

Bahrain sounded a similar note, casting its normalization decision as something that would “strengthen Bahrainis’ security and their economic stability.” Bahrain’s normalization announcement is particularly important because such a decision likely would have needed Saudi Arabia’s approval, indicating tacit acceptance of normalization even if Riyadh’s public support has been muted. Bahrain’s deal also raises the possibility that Saudi Arabia might be persuaded to sign one of its own, even with the political sensitivities and constraints that Riyadh faces due to public hostility toward Israel.

This dramatic break with the old pan-Arab consensus reflects a sea change in the Gulf states’ approach to the Palestinian issue.

This dramatic break with the old pan-Arab consensus—which predicated any normalization of relations on a final peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians—reflects a sea change in the Gulf states’ approach to the Palestinian issue. No longer is the Palestinian cause at the center of Arab countries’ politics, as was reflected in the Arab League’s refusal of a demand by the Palestinian Authority to condemn the UAE-Israeli deal. Despite continued concern for the Palestinians, some Gulf states seem to have tired of the Palestinian Authority’s obstinacy and rejectionism in its dealings with Israel, and now they’re opting to flip the old equation: Normalization with Israel is seen as the first step to secure Palestinian rights.