https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/BJXexxHFu
While Gaza fighting threatens to put any future agreements on hold for now, some are reassured that commerce with Emirati and Bahraini companies will progress as usual, citing relatively lukewarm reaction to violence.
With justified festivity, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed normalization agreements and established full diplomatic relations in 2020, with the aid of American mediation. They were the first peace accords signed between the Jewish state and an Arab country since 1994, when relations were cemented with Jordan. Importantly, and in opposition to the cold nature of relations with Israel’s neighbor to the east, the ties between it and its new Gulf friends were expected to be warm and friendly in nature. And indeed, tourism and business relations between the countries soon flourished for all to see.
However, the agreements signed did not include a solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which had been the barrier preventing an earlier establishment of relations. Now, with fighting between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza erupting on May 10, relations between the Jewish state and its new Arab allies were put to a test.
“The latest conflagration between Israel and Hamas, and especially the events in Jerusalem which preceded it, constituted the first significant test of the normalization agreements and the resilience of the growing relations with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan,” Dr. Yoel Guzansky, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University and a specialist on Gulf politics, told The Media Line. Morocco and Sudan also set on a path of normalization agreements with Israel under the wider umbrella named the Abraham Accords.
Guzansky is referencing the violent clashes between Israeli police and Israeli Arabs, which first began outside Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, and later escalated and spread to Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
Police actions on the compound, especially entering one of the mosques there, were perceived as a grave insult to Muslim sensitivities by believers in Israel, the Palestinian territories, and throughout the world. Rising tensions in Jerusalem, tied also to a legal deliberation that threatened to evict Palestinians from several houses in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, were ultimately seized as justification by Hamas to fire rockets at Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. Israel retaliated and exchanges of fire commenced.
