To that end, in November the country announced a major liberalization of its Islamic personal laws - allowing unmarried couples to cohabitate, which, among other things, makes the U.A.E. The U.A.E.’s growth strategy for the 21st century - of which the opening to Israel is a key part - is to become THE Arab model for modernity, a diversified economy, globalization and intra-religious tolerance. The U.A.E.’s population consists of one million citizens and nine million foreigners, most of them low-wage, non-unionized laborers from India and other parts of South Asia and the rest professionals largely from America, Europe, India and the Arab world. The U.A.E., by contrast, is transitioning from decades of oil abundance to an era of oil scarcity by building its own ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship in the same fields as Israel. “So, over the years, Israel learned to go from isolation and scarcity to abundance and global influence by developing its own explosive innovation economy in areas such as water, solar, cyber, military, medical, finance and agriculture.”
Israel is a society that for many years faced hostility from its neighbors and had no oil. With Israel and the U.A.E., “what you are seeing are two ecosystems fusing together,” says Gidi Grinstein, head of Reut, the Israeli strategy institute. And because the U.A.E.-Israel axis brings together the most successful Arab state with the most successful non-Arab state, it’s radiating a lot of energy. It’s the interactions of these three axes, says Rabinovich, that are really driving Middle East politics today. Those three axes, Rabinovich explains, are Turkey with Qatar and their proxy Hamas Iran with Syria and Iran’s proxies running Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen and Israel with the U.A.E., Bahrain and tacitly Saudi Arabia and Oman.
Today, “there are three powerful non-Arab actors in the region - Iran, Turkey and Israel - and they have each constructed their own regional axis,” argues Itamar Rabinovich, the Israeli Middle East historian, who just co-wrote “Syrian Requiem,” a smart history of the Syrian civil war. If the Abraham Accords do thrive and broaden to include normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, we are talking about one of the most significant realignments in modern Middle East history, which for many decades was largely shaped by Great Power interventions and Arab-Israeli dynamics. … Last year, Kriel launched Kosherati, which sells kosher-certified Emirati cuisine, as well as fusion Jewish-Emirati dishes.” And, by the way, those 130,000 Israeli visitors helped to save the U.A.E.’s tourist industry from being crushed by the pandemic during the crucial holiday season.
The Times of Israel recently ran an article about Elli Kriel in Dubai, who “has become the go-to kosher chef in the U.A.E. Israel’s Mekorot National Water Company just finalized a deal to provide Bahrain with desalination technology for brackish water. Unlike the peace breakthroughs between Israel and Egypt, Israel and Lebanon’s Christians and Israel and Jordan, which were driven from the top and largely confined there, the openings between Israel and the Gulf States - while initiated from the top to build an alliance against Iran - are now being driven even more from the bottom, by tourists, students and businesses.Ī new Hebrew language school that holds classes in Dubai and Abu Dhabi has been swamped with Emiratis wanting to study in Israel or do business there. That caveat aside, something big seems to be stirring. We are still in the early phase, though, and having lived through the shotgun marriage and divorce of Israelis and Lebanese Christians in the 1980s, I will wait a bit before sending wedding gifts. I believed from the start that the openings between Israel and the U.A.E., Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan - forged by Jared Kushner and Donald Trump - could be game-changing. Jumping Jehoshaphat, Batman! In the middle of a global pandemic, at least 130,000 Israeli tourists and investors have flown to Dubai and Abu Dhabi since commercial air travel was established in mid-October!
I was Googling around the other day for a factoid: how many Israelis had visited the United Arab Emirates since the signing of their normalization agreement, known as the Abraham Accords.