Israel is in a different position than it was in the 1970s, when then-President of Egypt Anwar Sadat got off a plane at Ben-Gurion International Airport and a peace deal with "our biggest enemy" was signed six months later.
But the agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to be signed today are completely different. They might even improve Israel's position more than the deal with "our biggest enemy." Since making peace with Egypt, the Arab world, with the PLO at its center, has moved to a different strategy for eliminating Israel. Instead of military attacks, they have set in motion a strategy to cause Israel to collapse from within.
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The Israeli establishment woke up to that far too late. The delegitimization campaign has paralyzed the IDF. The line of "peace" with the Palestinians led by the late Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres was seen by the top defense officials as the only option. The upper ranks of the defense and security echelon were in shock after the results of the 2006 Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report.
Top defense officials, who clung to an outdated perception of security that did not provide a solution for the new existential threat, found themselves at a disadvantage in facing the dual threat from the Palestinians and the combination of the international Left and the Islamists. The responses on the Left to the breakthrough reached by Prime Minister Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump show just how major it is.
The Left is calling the peace agreements "fraud" and "fake news," designed to serve only Trump and Netanyahu's personal interests. But if that were the case, why did one left-wing think tank write "It is no wonder that there is widespread support for the move. Official normalization between Israel and the United Arab Emirates could benefit Israel politically and diplomatically as well as strengthen tourism, foreign ties, trade, and mutual investment…"?
Normalization with the Emirates puts a crack in international opposition to the ongoing "occupation," or in other words, the campaign to delegitimize Israel and cause it to fall apart from within have been dealt a harsh blow. In effect, there is no more "peace camp" in Israel. There is the legacy camp that aligns with the global Left and the Palestinians in their attempt to destabilize Israel during a crisis. The people of the "peace camp" are the ones who went out to blockade Ben-Gurion Airport to demonstrate how deeply they opposed Netanyahu's diplomatic path.
Anyone who really ever wants peace with the Palestinians should also be pleased. Because that will happen only when the Palestinian leaders recognize that their tactics have failed. Peace will arrive when the Palestinians acknowledge the limits of their identity, as well as the legitimacy of the Jewish state. The peace deal with the Emirates brings us closer to the Palestinians recognizing that. A prediction: when peace with the Palestinians arrives, we won't even notice.
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