Israel’s Arab neighbors predict little change in relations.
If the end of Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year reign as prime minister is a political earthquake inside Israel, its tremors stop clearly at Israel’s borders.
The political drama has solicited
barely a shrug from Israel’s Arab neighbors, who do not expect it to lead to
substantial changes in the issues they care about — namely, Israel’s approach
to the Palestinians or to the wider Middle East.
“Truly this is not being talked about or thought
about,” said Elham Fakhro, senior analyst for Gulf States at the International
Crisis Group. “For those who care about the Palestinian side, they see every
Israeli government as similar, they feel like the occupation is going to
continue regardless and it doesn’t matter who is the face of it.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s long tenure as
Israel’s dominant politician has seen shifts in Israel’s relations with the
Arabs. The peace process with the Palestinians has fallen dormant. Israel has
stepped up its shadow war against Iran by regularly bombing targets associated
with its allies in Syria. And in cooperation with former President Donald J.
Trump, Israel reached new agreements to establish diplomatic relations with
four Arab states, helping erode what was long considered an Arab consensus
against engaging with the Jewish state.
But few in the Arab world expect
any of that to change now that Mr. Netanyahu is being replaced at the helm of
Israel’s government.
The new prime minister, Naftali
Bennett, is at least as hostile to the idea of a Palestinian state as Mr.
Netanyahu. And there are no signs that any of the parties to the agreements
with the four Arab states, which began with the so-called Abraham Accords with
the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and were followed by similar deals with
Sudan and Morocco, are considering throwing them out.
“The Abraham Accords are not a Netanyahu
accord,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political scientist in the U.A.E. “They
are not even an Israel accord. They are a U.A.E.-driven accord and they will
outlast Netanyahu or any Israeli prime minister.”
“The Abraham Accords are here to stay,” he
continued, “and that is good for the U.A.E., good for Israel and good for
America.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s departure could
actually make the agreement easier to preserve, Mr. Abdulla said, since the
longtime prime minister was widely seen as arrogant and pretentious.
“It is good for the accord that he is gone,” Mr.
Abdulla said, adding that it would have been awkward for Mr. Netanyahu to visit
Abu Dhabi, the Emirati capital.
Large parts of the population in
many Arab countries still oppose Israel’s existence or strongly oppose its
blockade of the Gaza Strip, which it enforces with Egypt, and its decades-old
occupation of the West Bank. That gives them little interest in Israel’s
internal politics since significant changes to those policies are not on the
table.
Ben Hubbard is the Beirut bureau
chief. He has spent more than a dozen years in the Arab world, including Syria,
Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Yemen. He is the author of “MBS: The
Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman.”