Israel is preparing to start negotiating the deal for normalization with the United Arab Emirates, and one of Israel's main requests is that Abu Dhabi secure the approval of Saudi Arabia for Israeli aircraft to use its airspace.
Israel Hayom has also learned that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might meet with Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Mohammad bin Zayed prior to the signing ceremony.
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Israel hopes that direct talks with the Emiratis will kick off this week. Both sides have held preliminary talks, but most of the contact is still being handled through Washington. In Israel, a steering committee will coordinate all contacts, and the committee will include the members of a forum that met last week at the National Security Council to prepare for the start of direct negotiations.
That forum includes NSC head Meir Ben-Shabbat, Foreign Minister Director-General Alon Ushpiz, and senior officials from other government ministries. Israel and the Emirates have agreed to have teams of experts from each country discuss each of the areas included in the deal to establish bilateral relations.
One possibility difficulty will be to secure Saudi approval for Israeli use of its airspace. Israel plans to insist that any direct air route between Israel and the UAE will be open to Israeli airlines as well as Emirati ones, and expects the Emirates to pursued the Saudis to allow Israeli airlines to fly over it en route to the UAE.
At this point, Israel does not expect talks with the Emiratis to drag out, and hopes to see the deal signed, sealed, and delivered within a month.
One senior Israeli official noted that the US political timeline, with presidential elections at the start of November, demanded that agreements be reached quickly.
Another high-ranking official in Israel said that, unlike Israel's treaties with Egypt and Jordan, whose goal was to sign off on a shared vision for peace; when it comes to the United Arab Emirates the purpose of the agreement is to "create a process that will lead to broader and deeper bilateral relations and to cooperation in a number of fields. Then, [with Egypt and Jordan] the goal was the deal, whereas here the goal is normalization."
To help expedite the process, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is slated to visit Israel and the UAE this week, according to a report from the Al-Arabiyya news outlet.
Meanwhile, Suha Arafat, the widow of former PLO leader Yasser Arafat, published an apology to the Emirati people for the offense caused when Palestinian demonstrators in Jerusalem burned an Emirati flag and a picture of Crown Prince Bin Zayid during a protest against the agreement in Jerusalem.
The vandalism of the Emirati symbols, as well as the harsh criticism the Palestinians directed at the UAE leadership, as well as their calls for a boycott of an international expo scheduled to be held in Dubai next year, have infuriated the Emiratis, who see them as an example of ingratitude on the part of the Palestinians.
Arafat, who lives in Malta with her daughter, published the apology on her official Instagram account. Alongside a picture of the late Yasser with the founder of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed, she wrote: "In the name of the honorable people among the Palestinian people, I want to apologize to the Emirate people and their leadership for the offense and for burning the Emirati flag in Al-Quds [Jerusalem] and Palestine, as well as for desecrating Emirati state symbols."
Arafat wrote: "That is not part of our habits or traditions. Disagreements do not hurt the strong friendship between us. I am calling on our present generation to read history well, so they will know that the Emirates have supported the Palestinians and their problems in the past and in the present."
In a related development, media outlets in the UAE are attacking Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his criticism of the Emirates. To point out his hypocrisy, the news outlets ran an expose of Erdogan's former foreign minister and current political rival, who said at a meeting of his new party that Erdogan was hiding the fact that after a trade of barbs with former Israeli President Shimon Peres after Operation Cast Lead, Ankara had issued an official apology to Peres.
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