Arab Israelis Are Reaping the Benefits of the Abraham Accords

For Arab citizens of the Jewish state, the opening of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to travel and commerce brings a specific set of new opportunities, write Marc Sievers and Jonathan Ferziger:

The large number of Arab Israelis who also are eager to enjoy the sights and sounds of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Manama have largely been overlooked. Besides the ease of sharing language and culture, the fact is that they are able to circulate in Israel’s new Abraham Accords partner countries more freely than in, say, Egypt, where they are generally subjected to scrutiny and sometimes harassment. As for the evolving business connections, they should have a significant economic impact that may eventually even spread to the West Bank, given the many extended family ties between Israeli Arabs and West Bank Palestinians.

Israeli Arabs have an emerging professional class concentrated heavily in the medical sector. Arab-owned businesses, which figure prominently in Israel’s construction and trucking industries, are increasingly moving into the realm of technology start-ups, which have become the country’s calling card.

That’s what took Mayor Adel Badir from Kafr Qasim, a satellite town east of Tel Aviv, to the Cybertech Global conference in the UAE this month. . . . “As Arabs in Israel, we’ve always been a bridge to encourage peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” Badir said, fresh from his maiden venture into the Gulf. “We are happy to play that role now with Arab countries that have opened to us through the Gulf accords.”

Read more at Foreign Policy

More about: Abraham Accords, Israeli Arabs, Israeli economy, Palestinians

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF