2020 has seen a significant shift towards normalisation with the Israeli state. In just over two months, recognition agreements were announced between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan. Where previously the end to the occupation of Palestine had been held up as a precursor to forming any such relations, these agreements have bypassed and undermined the Palestinian liberation struggle; Palestine’s false friends in the region are showing their true colours. WESAM KHALED reports.
The first normalisation agreement, between the UAE and Israel, was announced on 13 August 2020. This was followed by agreements with Bahrain and Sudan on 11 September and 23 October respectively. These states broke with a decades-long stance held by most Arab nations to refuse to recognise the Israeli state until a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict’ had been reached. Of the other Arab states, only Egypt and Jordan had previously formed diplomatic relations with Israel. Israel hopes that this will encourage other states to follow suit.
These agreements signify an outright betrayal of the Palestinian liberation struggle by those who had ostensibly supported it. While their true motives were always dubious – the UAE and Bahrain were already integrated into the US imperialist regional bloc that included Israel – the Palestinian cause carried enough significance that these states would not dare openly recognise Israel for fear of popular backlash. The recently increasing isolation of the Palestinian movement has changed that equation.
The UAE tried to frame its agreement as a win for the Palestinians, claiming that it won a halt to Israel’splan to annex the occupied West Bank in exchange for recognition. This is simply not true. Israel had already been forced by international pressure to halt its annexation plan, and the text of theagreement made no mention of it. In any case, the Zionists have made it clear that annexation has been paused rather than abandoned; in a televised address announcing the agreement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he remained ‘committed to’ annexation. Most importantly, the de facto annexation of Palestinian territory in the form of Israeli settlement expansion and the destruction of Palestinian villages has continued unabated, a fact of which the UAE is well aware. On 3 November, while international attention was focused on the US election, the Israeli army razed the Palestinian village of Khirbet Humsa in the West Bank, demolished homes, water containers and solar panels. 74 people, mostly children,were left homeless. Almost 800 Palestinians have been similarly displaced by Israel in 2020 alone.
Israel has sacrificed nothing for the agreement and has gained a long-standing goal: to openly normalise relations with other regional states. These acts of normalisation legitimise the existence of the Zionist state and push the question of Israel’s inherently racist character, whose continuation necessitates the oppression of the Palestinian people, off the agenda. The Palestinians, conversely, have gained nothing; the de facto annexation continues unabated and whatever leverage they held in the form of non-recognition of Israel by its neighbours has been undermined. The ongoing violations of Palestinian rights will not trouble the leaders of the Gulf States in the least; theirtrue aim in these agreements is to more deeply integrate themselves into the US imperialist alliance and to set the stage for a wider regional conflict with Iran.
US imperialism, always keen to prop up the interests of its Zionist ally, played a major part in brokering the agreements. The US’s anti-Palestinian policies are unlikely to change in any significant way with the election of Joe Biden to the US presidency. Biden is an avowed supporter of Israel who has a history of facilitating its violations of Palestinian rights. In a notably frank statement of US imperialist policy, Biden told the US Senate in 1986 that ‘were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region’ and that annual US aid to Israel is ‘the best $3 billion investment we make.’ Biden has committed to maintaining the US Embassy in Jerusalem when he assumes the presidency, upholding Trump’s decision to relocate the embassy there and signifying US assent to further conquest of Palestinian land.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has been completely left in the lurch by these agreements. That these agreements have circumvented any real consideration of Palestine is both the culmination and condemnation of the PA’s decades-long strategy: collaborate with Israel in crushing grassroots Palestinian dissent while hitching the Palestinian cause to the wagons of other Arab states, particularly the Gulf monarchies. That these states, with their deep ties to US imperialism, would eventually betray the Palestinian cause was inevitable and predictable; one need only look at the massacre being wrought on the people of Yemen to see how little regard a state like the UAE has for the oppressed peoples of the region. Even in the midst of these normalisation agreements the PA’s response has been feeble; despite strong words of condemnation, the PA leadership announced in November that it would resume formal security cooperation with Israel, which it had suspended in May in response to Israeli moves towards West Bank annexation. The international isolation of the Palestinian movement and the attempts to criminalise support for the Palestinian people as anti-Semitic must become a spur to solidarity action.
