“Do you know what you’re looking at?” asks an American sitting on a restaurant balcony in the heart of Abu Dhabi, gesturing toward the towering skyline. He quickly answers himself: “Three trillion dollars in investments. We’re sitting in the richest five square miles in the world—oil money flowing into the most exciting ventures the globe has to offer.”
The vast conference hall at the city’s Mandarin Hotel, enormous and opulent even by local standards, was bustling with conversations between foreigners. Even four and a half years after the Abraham Accords, the scene at this week’s MEAD conference still felt surreal: Lebanese, Israelis, Emiratis, Qataris, Malaysians—all mingling together. This is Shimon Peres’ “New Middle East”—minus the Palestinians.
Abu Dhabi is the Arab version of Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland: a thoroughly Western bubble in the heart of the Middle East—multinational and ultra-modern. Well, not entirely. Recently, WhatsApp voice calls were blocked, presumably because it’s difficult for the authorities to monitor them. In Abu Dhabi, you don’t need to lock your doors at night, but you also can’t access many popular apps.
It’s astonishing to think that we’re only a two-hour flight from Damascus and three hours from Gaza. Just a few weeks ago, I visited the Israeli-controlled region near Syria, where partially clothed children without school to go to ran through fields after IDF soldiers, begging for energy bars. There’s no running water, electricity only comes from generators, and a typical monthly wage is around 30 dollars—about the price of breakfast in Abu Dhabi.
The Emiratis generously support Syrians and Gazans, yet they hardly protest Israel’s military presence in these regions. Senior Emirati officials carefully avoided openly criticizing Trump’s plans for Gaza or potential Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, sufficing with the comment, “You’ll have issues with other countries.”
The path to UAE-Israel normalization was paved by an op-ed published in Yedioth Ahronoth in June 2020 by the UAE’s ambassador in Washington, Yousef Al-Otaiba. It urged Israel to abandon annexation plans in exchange for normalization. At the time, Israel’s real intention was to annex Ma’ale Adumim, then concede the rest for a peace agreement with moderate Sunni states. However, the article accelerated this process. After a year and a half of war, there’s a scent of further normalization in the air. If I were the editor of that newspaper, I’d reserve space on the front page for another groundbreaking op-ed.
The above is an excerpt from my Shabbat column in Yedioth Ahronoth.
