After a phone meeting with US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed, crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, announced a “full normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates”.
In response, the Palestinian Authority recalled the UAE Ambassador serving in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of the Fateh party called the decision by UAE tantamount to treason to the Palestinian people, while the rival Hamas party said that the UAE was back-stabbing the Palestinians with this move.
While the UAE has worked with Israel for years under the table, it had, before now, publicly supported the Palestinians and their efforts for sovereignty and self-determination.
Now, the oil-rich Gulf nation has become the first Arab country to officially normalize relations with Israel.
Mahmoud Abbas, in his response, urged other Arab nations not to follow the UAE’s example “at the expense of Palestinian rights.”
The announcement came after a meeting of the Arab League to address the US-created ‘peace deal’ which is being imposed by Jared Kushner and is a denial of Palestinian basic rights.
While the UAE claimed that they had agreed to normalize relations only because Netanyahu had agreed in exchange to revoke his claim of sovereignty over the West Bank — which is one of two main Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967 by the Israeli military. The Israeli military has governed the indigenous Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by martial law since then.
But Netanyahu said he had never agreed to revoke his claim, saying he had only agreed to delay his full takeover of the West Bank, which he has been planning for some time.
According to AFP, Netanyahu said that full Israeli annexation of Palestinian land is still “on the table”, and that he would “never give up our rights to our land”.
