It’s No Accident Israel’s First Peace Agreement in Decades Is with the Emirates

Why am I, a British Muslim, writing these words for an influential American Jewish magazine? I am convinced that our destinies are interwoven with ideas that, as of last week, gave birth to the new peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. The UAE-Israel peace treaty is not simply about geopolitics, security and economics, Iran, or COVID-19. This moment represents something much larger and deeper: it is a blueprint for what is yet to come with the other moderate Sunni Arab nations, and beyond. We are in the midst of an existential shift in the global Muslim mind.

Almost all Muslims, 1.8 billion people, of whom 85 percent are Sunni and roughly 10 percent are Shiite, are expected to be “pro-Palestine” and anti-Israel—and by extension, suspicious of encounters with Jews. For a long time, to question this anti-Semitic binary was to be an outcast, to risk public condemnation and then isolation from the mafia-like organizations that control the Muslim street: Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizballah, Islamic State, and their many routes of influence from websites to university campuses to satellite-television channels. As a result, many Muslim activists embraced the binary without question. But in the last few years, the Emirati leadership slowly started to dismantle it, by, for instance, sponsoring and publicizing interactions between rabbis and imams, and by speaking openly about the common Abrahamic heritage of Jews and Muslims, as well as Christians. From these first steps came last week’s long stride toward a new, peaceful order in the Middle East.

In this endeavor, the Emiratis were being the faithful children of the founding father of their nation: Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyān (1918-2004). Unless we understand this man and his model, and understand by extension the inner dynamics and the culture of the people and the tribes of the Arabian Gulf, we in the West and Israel cannot comprehend how this peace came about and what it portends.