Nearly 43 years separate the historic landing of El-Al Flight 443 in Cairo and El-Al Flight 971's scheduled departure Monday for the United Arab Emirates.
There is of course one giant difference between the two. The first flight to Cairo ended decades of war, enmity and bloodshed between two countries with a shared border. The current flight simply puts an official stamp on decades of clandestine security and civilian cooperation between the two countries, which are separated by more than 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) and have never been hostile to one another.
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Regardless, both flights will have been trailblazers in the annals of the Israeli-Arab conflict and both are worthy of being called historic. The comparison doesn't detract from the importance of Monday's event and only highlights at least four dramatic differences that have transpired in our region these past 40 years.
The first difference, which occurred just two years after that flight to Cairo, was the revolution in Iran and the rise of the ayatollah regime, which strives to acquire nuclear weapons, destroy Israel and undermine regional stability.
The second difference is, of course, the Arab spring, which drove the final nail into the coffin of Arab unity, deposed rulers and caused others to focus on saving their governments overpaying lipping service to the idea of Arab solidarity.
The third difference, a byproduct of the first two, is the marginalization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is not the reason for the region's ills, as is clearly evident, and whose resolution, when it comes, will not magically solve all the region's problems either.
The fourth difference pertains to the rise of a new generation of leaders in the Arab world – younger, more progressive, less influenced by resentments of the past, and looking toward a brighter future. The most prominent of these new leaders is Mohammed Bin Zayed, the 59-year-old crown prince of the UAE, who realized and capitalized on all the benefits that emerged in the region due to the peace treaty with Egypt, in order to break through the glass ceiling of relations with Israel.
All eyes are now fixed on an even younger leader, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman, although we must acknowledge that his path to peace with Israel is more difficult. Not just because it would look as if Saudi Arabia, the regional power, was being "dragged along" by a tiny Gulf state, but mainly because normalizing relations with Israel means shunning the Arab peace initiative, which Saudi Arabia spearheaded 18 years ago and which conditions peace with Israel on its withdrawal from certain territories and allowing Palestinian refugees to return.
Perhaps such a huge step will have to wait until his father, King Salman, passes away. Until such as time, we can at least take solace in the fact that even if Saudi Arabia still hasn't opened its doors to peace with Israel, it has opened its skies to the first civilian flight from Israel on the way to the UAE.
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