Israel remakes Mideast diplomatic map

Israel is making steady progress in wooing its former Arab foes. The latest to announce a normalisation of relations is Morocco. This will mean the establishment of full diplomatic relations and normal trade ties.

The deal was brokered by US President Donald Trump during a phone call with King Mohammed VI of Morocco. The quid pro quo for Morocco was to get the US to support the kingdom’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara. Morocco’s claim to the former Spanish colony is disputed by many countries, including the African Union, which recognises the Polisario Front’s struggle for the region’s self-determination.

Morocco now becomes the fourth Arab country to normalise ties with Israel in recent months. The first to do so were Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Again, the Trump administration had a direct role to play. Not long after, Sudan signalled its willingness to follow suit.

Bahrain and the UAE have an obsessive fear of nearby Iran and share an interest to align with Israel because of the latter’s long-standing enmity with the Islamic state. As for Sudan, the motivation was to have the US remove her from its list of so-called sponsors of terrorism, which has affected Sudan’s conduct of normal diplomacy and access to international financial markets.

Human rights

The most watched country in the Arab countries' moves to normalise ties with Israel is Saudi Arabia. The country is close to Bahrain and UAE and all three often act in tandem in matters of foreign policy, especially as regards Iran.

Analysts consider Saudi Arabia’s hesitation to join the Arab bandwagon establishing diplomatic ties with Israel to be temporary. It is believed to be first assessing the incoming US administration of Joe Biden, which has expressed reservations about Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights and has openly indicated it will re-assess the US relationship with the Saudi state.

It is believed that once the Biden administration has settled in, Saudi Arabia will announce diplomatic recognition of Israel both as a bargaining chip and to neutralise the expected pressure from Washington.

All in all, Trump has been very, very good for Israel. He is the first US President to recognise Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel, hence trashing the Palestinian claim to the city. He also recognised the Israeli occupation of disputed Palestinian land where the Jewish state has built settlements the international community considers illegal.

What is more, Trump accepted as a fait accompli the Israeli occupation of the Golan heights, a territory captured from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War. In fact, the most recent Jewish settlement Israel has put up in the Golan was named after Trump.

The first Arab country to make peace with Israel was Egypt as part of the Camp David Accords of 1979. Later Jordan took the same step. But the common feature of these peace deals is that there is almost zero enthusiasm for them from ordinary Arab people. In fact the Egyptian-Israeli pact has been characterised as the “Cold Peace”.

The situation is no different with the recent moves by Bahrain, UAE and Sudan. The rulers pushed the deals, but the ordinary citizens of these Arab states don’t seem to be with them.

The latest developments in the Arab world place Israel in a highly favourable position. But the majority of Arab states are still reluctant to open ties with the Jewish state. These include Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria. The latter has an ongoing brutal civil war in which Israel has meddled.

Then there’s Iran, which is not Arab but Persian, though it shares the same neighbourhood, and remains Israel's most implacable foe. Officially, Iran does not refer to Israel by name; it calls it the “Zionist entity”.

The Sunni Gulf states, led by the Saudi kingdom, are terrified of Iran because they think it will export its brand of Shia revolution to their conservative societies. A place like Bahrain, which has a Shia majority ruled by a Sunni minority Establishment, feels particularly vulnerable. Same case with Saudi Arabia, whose eastern provinces, where most of the kingdom’s oil is drilled, have a restive Shia population.

Awkward position

Trump clearly wants to make a diplomatic splash in the Middle East before he exits office next month. But he doesn’t seem to have consulted Biden’s people, or America’s Western allies for that matter, in his unilateral deal with Morocco.

This of course places Biden in an awkward position, because previous US policy has not supported Morocco's claim to Western Sahara.

Biden will probably try to live with Trump’s one-sided deals favouring Israel, though he is likely to be uncomfortable with the total trashing of Palestinian aspirations which typified Trump’s Middle East policy.

In the usual Trumpian fashion, the US President announced the Moroccan deal with an effusive tweet laden with superlatives: “Another HISTORIC breakthrough today! Our two GREAT friends Israel and the Kingdom of Morocco have agreed to full diplomatic relations – a massive breakthrough for peace in the Middle East!" The same kind of breathlessness was communicated by Trump – not to mention Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – when the deals with Bahrain, UAE and Sudan were secured.

@GitauWarigi