Calev’s newsroom: Building bridges between UAE and Israel

Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, famously remarked: “If you don’t believe in miracles, you’re not a realist.’’ Certainly Ben-Gurion’s personal odyssey – from arriving as a Polish-Jewish immigrant in the Middle East backwaters of the Ottoman Empire, to being the founding father of the first Jewish state in 2,000 years – provided plenty of justification for that belief. So was his claim that Israel would one day establish peaceful relations with its Arab neighbours, a vision he never lived to see.

The Camp David Accords, the peace treaty with Jordan, and especially the Abraham Accords that established full relations between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain (later adding Morocco and Sudan), only provides more evidence to the far-seeing nature of Ben-Gurion’s vision. But if the Abraham Accords had a touch of the miraculous to them due to the seeming suddenness of their announcement and speed with which they have been fulfilled, seasoned Middle East observers may view the new ties between Israel and the UAE as a natural, if not pre-ordained, affinity.

Like Israel, the creation and rise of the UAE appears to defy realistic expectations. That seven emirates under British colonial rule could unite politically under the visionary leadership of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the UAE’s founding father, and within decades diversify its economy to become a global trading, tourism and technology powerhouse, is a trajectory well beyond the normative paths of nation-building.

One could draw all sorts of parallels with Israel’s surge of development in recent years; indeed, another famed Ben-Gurion maxim – “If we do not conquer the desert, it will conquer us” – appears to apply equally, if not even more so, to the Emirati experience. Of course, the establishment and strengthening of ties between Israel and the UAE has been supercharged by several factors, including geo-political shits and economic cooperation.

In 2021, the first full year later the Abraham Accords, trade between Israel and the UAE surged to an astonishing $900m. With the establishment of a free trade agreement between the countries this year that covers 95 per cent of the products traded between them, that figure is expected to more than double by the end of 2022.

As a journalist for i24NEWS, I’ve had the privilege of both covering that unprecedented business story, and being part of it. Moving quickly on the announcement of the Abraham Accords, i24NEWS became the first Israel-based media outlet to sign cooperation agreements with leading companies in Dubai’s media sector, including Dubai Media Inc (DMI), Dubai Media City, Abu Dhabi Media, Etisalat, DU and Motivate Media Group.

Along with opening an i24NEWS bureau in Dubai, this has enabled our journalists to cover the developing business and financial ties between Israel and the Gulf. In future columns, I look forward to focusing more specifically on some of the more fascinating and promising angles of that story. But the real headline of the fast-developing relationship between Israel and the UAE has not been its primarily economic or political aspects – it is the human side.

The eagerness I have found among Israelis and Emiratis to build new bridges of all kind between their societies, has been expressed with an enthusiasm that has caught even this veteran Mideast reporter by surprise. This is especially so among the younger generation of Israelis and Emiratis, who via social media and now personal contacts, are already outpacing their elders in forging ahead to create new modes of coexistence and cooperation for this region, moving beyond the outmoded paradigms that for so many decades had frozen Israel-Arab ties in a fruitless stasis.

This then, is the true promise of the Abraham Accords, beyond its purely economic or diplomatic potentialities. A new generation of Israelis and Emiratis are forging pathways toward a new Middle East, one that can hopefully help light the way toward the resolution of conflicts that have for too long held back this entire region. And this time, it won’t take a miracle – just a belief, and acceptance, of a new reality already in the throes of creation.

Calev Ben-David is the anchor of the nightly news programme, The Rundown, on i24NEWS