A Year after Normalization, Israel and the UAE Are Enjoying the Dividends of Peace

A year ago this Friday, Israel, the U.S., and the United Emirates announced the peace agreement known as the Abraham Accords. Zev Stub takes stock of the economic benefits the agreement has brought.

During 2020 and the first six months of 2021, Israel exported $197 million of goods and services to the UAE, and imported about $372 million. Trade could reach $1 billion for the whole of 2021, and could exceed $3 billion within three years, according to the UAE-Israel Business Council.

[These figures don’t] include tourism or investments between the countries. The largest commercial agreement so far between the two countries was Delek Drilling’s sale of its 22-percent share in the offshore Tamar natural-gas field to Abu Dhabi’s Mubdala Petroleum Company for $1.1 billion in April.

Israeli companies are starting to recognize the potential offered by the UAE’s economic ecosystem, said Dorian Barak, an investor and the co-founder of the UAE-Israel Business Council. “Israelis are always looking for ways to do business in South Asia, East Africa, India, and Bangladesh,” Barak said. “These are markets with two billion people, and you can’t work with them from Tel Aviv. The UAE is the place where everyone congregates to do business, and Israel has finally been admitted to that club.”

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Abraham Accords, Israeli economy, United Arab Emirates

 

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