Dore Gold: Moroccan-Israeli peace faces multiple security challenges
For much of the modern era, the Arab world has sought ways to provide legitimacy to its political leadership. That led it down the road of highly ideological politics based on promoting unity schemes even with the use of force, experimenting with Arab socialist doctrines, and maintaining at all costs the Arab-Israel conflict.Brian Hook: No more Arab-Israeli peace deals if Biden mollifies Iran
A few brave leaders were prepared to break with this paradigm and reached peace with Israel, such as president Sadat of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan. Most recently, King Hamad of Bahrain and Sheikh Zayed of the UAE have joined. Peace with Israel was not a risk-free strategy, and some of these leaders’ enemies were prepared to threaten them with assassination attempts and increased political turmoil. But they persisted nonetheless in the path of peace.
Now King Mohammed VI has bravely moved the Kingdom of Morocco into the circle of states making formal peace with Israel. It is a move that is not without risks for the Moroccans.
The security challenges that they face primarily emanate from the area of the former Spanish colony of the Western Sahara, where an insurgency campaign is being waged by guerrillas from the Polisario Front against the Moroccan security forces, with the support of Algeria. Morocco had valid claims to this disputed territory; many tribes in the area had been historically linked to the Moroccan monarchy.
The stakes in this conflict were considerable. The Polisario, which is also backed by the Iranian regime, seeks to undermine the territorial integrity of Morocco itself.
In 2018, Morocco presented documents to the Iranian government proving that Tehran was now arming and training the Polisario with the help of Hezbollah. The weapons supplied included shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles like the SAM-9 and SAM-11. As a result, Morocco cut its diplomatic ties with Iran. It turned out that the Iranians were using their embassy in Algiers as a conduit to the Polisario.
This was part of a pattern that the Iranians were following in Africa, seeking to infiltrate the continent by backing military moves of allies they sought to cultivate.
US President-elect Joe Biden will not be able to pursue Israeli-Arab normalization deals if he softens America’s stance against Tehran, former US special representative for Iran Brian Hook told i24 News.Israel, UAE collaborating to eliminate UNRWA - report
“If the Biden administration pursue a policy of accommodating Iran and alienating our partners in the region, there will be no more peace agreements that are made,” Hook said.
He spoke less than a week after Israel announced a normalization deal with Morocco, the fourth under the US brokered Abraham Accords. The focus of those deals has been Israeli-Arab peace and expanded regional economic opportunity.
But the deals have also been viewed as the backbone of a new and very public regional alliance between Israel and its Arab neighbors against Iran.
The United Arab Emirates was able to secure an agreement with the US to purchase advanced F-35 fighter jets, concurrent with its peace deal with Israel that was ratified in October. A normalization deal with Bahrain was ratified in November and a deal with Sudan has been agreed on but not ratified.
Israel and the United Arab Emirates are working together to eliminate the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) without solving the issue of Palestinian refugees, the French newspaper Le Monde has reported.
The report alleged that this has been underway since Israel and the UAE announced normalization between them in August.
According to the report, Emirati officials are considering an action plan intended to gradually eliminate UNRWA, without making this development conditional on a resolution of the refugee problem. This is despite the UAE having been a major source of funding to UNRWA in 2018 and 2019, along with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, to offset US President Donald Trump's halting of funds to the agency, which brought it to the brink of bankruptcy.
"In doing so, Abu Dhabi would be rallying to a long-standing demand from Israel, which insists that the agency is obstructing peace by nurturing refugees in the dream of returning to the lands from which their parents were driven in 1948," a tweet of a portion of the report said.
UNRWA was established 70 years ago to supply aid to Palestinian refugees, and its mandate is renewed every three years.
Last year in November, the UN General Assembly approved the extension of UNRWA’s mandate for three more years, only a week after its commissioner-general Pierre Krahenbuhl resigned over a UN ethics report alleged mismanagement and abuses of authority among senior officials of the agency, after which Israel called for UNRWA’s closure.