Those ties reached a new peak last week when Netanyahu announced that Israel and the UAE were launching “a new cooperative effort” against COVID-19 resulting from “extensive and intensive contacts in recent months.”
Openly cooperating in fighting COVID-19 may seem a simple, rational step to take. But it assumes a different significance in light of the long history of Arab enmity toward Israel.
Compared to that failure, Netanyahu’s gradual, realistic, mostly behind-the-scenes work in developing Arab-Israeli ties is a shining success. If, despite all that, he lacks the image of a peacemaker, the reasons are not hard to find.
On the Israeli left — a shrinking contingent still heavily overrepresented in Israeli media and academia — a demonization of Netanyahu that began in the 1990s prevails. Incapable of rational assessment and essentially uninterested in it, the Israeli chattering classes cast him as a dark, retrograde force no matter what he actually does.
And that view holds sway in the worldwide mainstream media as well. For them, it’s enough to know that Netanyahu is on the right-hand side of the Israeli political map to portray him as a “hard-liner” with no positive contribution to make.
It’s not, of course, that Netanyahu has created Shangri-La in the Middle East — nor tried to or thought it was possible. Hatred of Israel and Jews is still dominant — though less and less monolithic — in Arab countries, including those whose governments are closest to Israel. Netanyahu, though, has wisely based his peace efforts on pragmatism and common interests without aiming too high — unlike the Israeli left in the Oslo era, which believed it was achieving a utopian peace with arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat and his PLO.