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I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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Okay, guys, on the line, I've got Ted Snyder from antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Ted?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show again, and this one is really important to me.
What's in the Israel-UAE agreement?
Well, here's five things that aren't.
I like the way you frame it, so go ahead and make us all suffer, Ted, we're listening.
Well, you know, it was packaged for the world in a very particular way, and I think the point I'm trying to make in my article is that when you open up the packaging, the gift inside is much smaller than what the packaging suggests.
You know, the packaging suggested that it was an end to Israeli annexation, that it was a peace plan, that it was something totally new.
It depends on where you want to start, but for starters, it's not a peace plan.
For two countries to have a peace plan, they had to have been at war, or at least had to have been not at peace, but the United Arab Emirates and Israel have never been at war.
The UAE has never even been involved with a war with Israel, so it's appealing to package it as a peace plan, but it's not the beginning of a peace.
They've always been at peace.
If you go back to Netanyahu's strategies from going back to 2017, 2014, and conversations and press conferences with Trump, Netanyahu's always referred to his new allies in the region, and he's always been very clear that the new allies in the region were Arab partners in the UAE.
That goes back to a UN speech in 2014, that was seven years ago, he was already calling the United Arab Emirates a partner.
So they've been partners for at least a decade, they've never been at war, so the first thing that's not in the plan is it's not a peace plan.
What is it exactly?
Is it just official recognition of each other?
Well, I mean, it's supposed to be a recognizing of a normalization of relations, Scott, but even that's not new, because Israel and the UAE have had fairly normal relations for actually an extraordinarily long time.
If you look back at some of the sort of key areas of security, intelligence sharing, defense, and commercial interests, the relationship between the two countries, you know, either secretly or overtly goes back a very long time.
The United Arab Emirates air defense system, so we're talking about, you know, high, you know, important classified military stuff, their air defense system, their missile defense system, those are manufactured in Israel.
So there's been close, Israel sold the military technology for this close military connection between the two countries.
There's been diplomatic connections between the two countries.
There's been business connections, especially in areas like intelligence and security going back for a long time.
Reporting done in 2012 that I talk about in my article shows that there were already lots of ties between the countries that they actually report going back as early as 2007.
And in a recent Washington Post article, they actually talk about intelligence cooperation between the two countries going back to the 1970s.
So we're talking about half a century where Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, has had a completely cooperative relationship with the UAE's intelligence agency going back a half a century.
So it's deceptive to call it a peace plan because they weren't at war.
And it's even deceptive to call it a normalization of relations.
It's at best a public admission that they've had pretty normal relations for a very long time.
But there's nothing substantially new here, Scott.
It's just packaging and, you know, timely packaging.
Okay.
Okay.
But, you know, they must have won some major concessions on behalf of the Palestinians then though, right?
So further, I think, no, not right.
And I know you know that.
I know you're setting me up.
Not right.
That's again the packaging for the United Arab Emirate to make this palatable to the Arab world and for Trump, who's long promised, you know, this breakthrough in a peace plan for the Middle East, it had to be packaged as a major concession for the Palestinians because for decades now, the understanding, not just in the Arab world, but in the United States also, was that no peace would be negotiated between Israel and the Arab countries without taking in consideration the Palestinian situation and including that.
This goes by different names.
You know, the Israelis sometimes call it, you know, peace for land, where you get peace by giving back the Palestinians' land, or the idea of the Saudi peace initiative that goes back years now, that every Arab and Muslim country is signatory to, where, you know, they would normalize relations with Israel if Israel returned to the pre-1967 borders.
So this was always interesting.
So they had to package it, that if they were making peace, that they were going to make, you know, major concessions to the Palestinians.
But there's no concession to the Palestinians because what's offered to them, or the way it was presented by the media, and the way the United Arab Emirate presented it, was that the agreement would stop the Israeli annexation of the Palestinian territory.
So sorry if I'm talking fast, Scott.
If you go back to the beginning of the Trump administration, Trump promised this, you know, great deal between Palestine and the Israelis.
And part of that deal, though, involved Israel annexing 30% of the West Bank.
So you get this Trumpian seal of approval on Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
This is a tremendous violation of international law.
It's completely unacceptable to the Palestinians or to the Arab world, or to the rest of the world, for that matter.
So the packaging was that we'll stop that, right?
What Israel will give to the Palestinians will stop the annexation of the West Bank.
But while the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed was telling his people and the Arab world that he's just pulled off this great agreement that would stop Israeli annexation of the West Bank, Netanyahu was simultaneously telling his people that there's absolutely no change in his plan to annex the West Bank.
In fact, he said, we will never give up our right to annex the West Bank.
So who's telling the truth?
The package says we're stopping the packaging.
The PR says we're stopping the annexation.
Trump and Netanyahu says we're not stopping the annexation.
So what does the package actually say?
The package doesn't promise to stop annexation.
The word's not stop.
The word in the package is suspend.
And when the American ambassador to Israel, David Freeman, was asked what suspend means, he said that suspend by definition means a temporary halt, right?
So he said it's off the table now, but it's not off the table permanently.
Israeli sources say that Trump never asked Netanyahu to stop the annexation.
All he ever asked them was that they temporarily postpone the annexation so that they could pull off this agreement.
So it's a PR move.
There's no end to annexation.
In fact, Scott, the situation is exactly as it was before, that they will annex.
They just won't annex yet.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, the background is they annexed the whole territory back in 67, and they're never giving it up.
You know, I remember in the 1990s, I was a cab driver, and I remember listening to G.
Gordon Liddy saying, let me tell you something.
The West Bank belongs to Israel, and it always will.
Too late.
You lost.
It's ours.
And yeah, those are the facts, all right.
That's the truth of it.
So so so from the from the Palestinian perspective on the ground, you're totally right.
It doesn't change anything because the reality is they're occupied.
And and whether it's not that it's unimportant from an international and a legal standpoint, whether Israel annexes or not, but but from a facts on the ground standpoint, it doesn't really change anything for them because they're already occupied.
What this deal does do, which which just like knocks the feet right out from under the Palestinians, is that it now means that Israel can go on occupying with an important Gulf state, the United Arab Emirates, putting a seal of approval on that occupation.
And and that handicaps the Palestinians who had always counted on counted on Arab support to oppose that occupation.
But with with with the UAE normalizing relations without ending the occupation, it takes away that support.
And it means that for the first time, it means that Israel is is publicly demonstrating that they can make peace with an Arab nation without ending the occupation.
Right.
So so it doesn't change the facts on the ground for the Palestinians, but it completely handicaps them in future negotiations where where the occupation is now something that can get us go on with the seal of approval of an of an of a not unimportant, you know, Gulf state.
So so it's it's very important that this that this deception is there.
It's you know, it's not insignificant.
It's an important deception.
And I guess one other point that that we haven't made to Scott is that when I said that it didn't stop the annexation, that all it did is suspend it, I mean, that also could be presented as a concession for the Palestinians that, look, we've suspended it.
We've bought you time, whatever.
But even that's just packaging, because this agreement did not suspend the annexation because the annexation was already suspended.
So just like it's not a peace plan because there were already a peace and just like it's not a normalization of relations because there were already normalized relations.
It's not even a suspension because it was already suspended.
And you know, if there's any doubt that it was ever suspended, then members of Netanyahu's own cabinet, Yisrael Katz, I forget, I think he's the finance minister, I forget, Yisrael Katz, he's a member of Netanyahu's cabinet.
You know, he said on Israeli news that the annexation of parts of the West Bank were already suspended long before the announcement.
And he even said, like using my imagery of packaging, he said that presenting the agreement as being related to the annexation made it palatable to the world and the Arab companies.
So even that's not part of the deal, Scott, even that's just the packaging.
The deal doesn't win a suspension of annexation because it was already suspended for a lot of reasons.
But one of, I think, the really interesting ones is that, you know, really unusually, like really historically unusually, Israel came under really unprecedented pressure from allies to not annex because the annexation would be so grievous a violation of international law.
So, so you've got, you know, not only the United Nations, which maybe you would expect to do this, saying that it's a breach of international law, but you've got Boris Johnson, the prime minister of the UK, saying that Britain will refuse to recognize the annexation, that they won't, they just won't recognize it.
The European Union went so far as to say that if Israel goes through with the annexation, it might actually jeopardize relations between Israel and the EU.
And France and Germany sort of put an exclamation point on that by going out independently and saying that it would also affect their bilateral relations with Israel.
So you've got Israeli allies like Britain, France, Germany, actually, at least publicly drawing a line, saying that if you annex, you're jeopardizing your relationship with the international community.
And so Israel had already suspended.
So no, I didn't know that, Ted, but do you take that seriously?
That's I mean, I know the European states have taken some pretty strong statements in the past, but you think that they really meant what they said there?
I don't have any special insights into that because I don't have access to anything but what's on the public record.
But I was struck by the language of the public record.
You know, you see countries saying things like that's against international law or you shouldn't do that.
But to publicly state that it would actually affect both bilateral relations between European countries and Israel and between the European Union and Israel, to get those very strong statements, I'm not an expert on this, but it resonated as being not characteristic language, but it was stronger language.
And I guess the other thing, Scott, is that it worked.
I mean, Israel did back down.
Netanyahu had promised annexation by the first week of July and it didn't happen.
And that was partly because of opposition within Israel itself.
There was some opposition in Israel to annexation.
There was even some opposition to annexation amongst the Israeli lobby community.
But there was large opposition from the international community and wherever that force came from, wherever it was real, the impact was real enough that it did stop the annexation.
We're two months past annexation date and it hasn't happened.
And you know, as I said, Israel said that the annexation had already been suspended.
So the point is that you can present it as stopping the annexation.
That's just packaging.
There was never anything about stopping.
It was just suspending.
And even the suspending is just the next layer of packaging because that's not giving anything to the Palestinians that they didn't already have.
And I guess you don't even need to state the obvious point that promising to stop the annexation isn't giving the Palestinians anything they don't have already because it's against international law already to annex territory.
So even if you give that to the Palestinians, you're only giving them what they legally already have.
So there's layers upon layers upon layers of packaging.
And when you strip it all away and get to what's in the box for the Palestinians, there's nothing.
There's lots of gifts for the UAE.
There's lots of gifts for Israel.
There's lots of gifts for America, but there's nothing in the box for the Palestinians.
So to disingenuously present this as a peace plan that gives some huge benefit for the Palestinians is pure public relations.
This is a deal that benefits the other three parties to the deal.
And they're using the Palestinian angle to make it palatable because there's no other way that you could present such a plan.
Right.
So that's it.
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All right, so another aspect of this is that the UAE is determined to buy a dead albatross in the form of the F-35 to wear around their neck from now on and the Israelis got to pretend to oppose that.
Am I reading that right?
Yeah, so this is really complicated and it gets more and more complicated every day as more and more stuff comes out.
I mean, I mean, the first thing that's becoming clear is that it's not just F-35s that, so the F-35 is this, you know, this jet fighter that the United Arab Emirates has wanted for a long time, whether they need it or not.
Now we know the deal seems to include Reaper drones also.
And the one that's just gotten thrown in there lately is that it seems to also include a type of jet called an EA-18G Growler.
And the thing about Growler jets is that they can block radar in front of them, so they can slip through countries' air defenses.
You know, to the Israelis, you know, that may be a significant thing.
I don't know.
I don't know enough of planes, but there's more in the package than F-35s.
But what seems to have happened is that, and this is where it was confusing, because when the deal got signed, the UAE made it really clear that part of this deal was that they get access to U.S. military technology like the F-35s.
And the state seemed to confirm that.
Jared Kushner and others made statements.
Trump made statements suggesting that this package would make it easier for the UAE to access American military equipment like F-35s.
And then what happened really early is that Netanyahu came out and said that that was not part of the deal.
And other members of his cabinet recently have come out, his intelligence minister have come out and saying, you know, even as much as like a week ago, saying that we're not going to let this happen.
There's no way that we're going to let this happen.
And the UAE was furious because although they knew that in some way, you know, Netanyahu was going to have reservations about this, they were clearly under the impression that he wasn't going to publicly air those reservations, that part of the deal was, you know, the airplanes.
And Netanyahu says it wasn't.
So subsequent reporting seems to really clearly reveal that it was.
There's nothing in the published deal, as far as I can tell, there's nothing in the published deal that says the UAE gets airplanes.
But it's very clear now that there was a secret aspect of the deal that Netanyahu signed off on this, that Netanyahu, in order to make this happen, agreed to the sale of American military equipment, including F-35s to the UAE, that the public denial of that was, again, packaging.
That was to make it palatable to his audience.
So there was this public denial, this private secret handshake.
What seems to be happening now, and maybe this is the way it was always supposed to happen, is that the Israeli cabinet, the Israeli sort of inner circle, they seem, from what I'm reading, to have accepted that they cannot block the sale of F-35s, that even though they're still, as I said as recently as days ago, saying they're going to block it, they seem to be accepting that they can't block it.
And so the plan B, which I wonder if it wasn't always plan A, was that since the United States has an obligation to maintain Israel's military supremacy in the region, Israel's stance is that if you're going to sell F-35s to the UAE and we can't stop it, then you have to sell us more advanced military equipment.
So if the UAE is going to come out of this with advanced military equipment from the States, Israel's going to come out of this deal with more advanced military equipment from the States.
So both countries in this package, while the Palestinians get nothing, both these countries are going to get access to better American military equipment than they have currently.
Yeah.
There, see, it's a win-win-win situation for everybody except the Palestinians, and nobody cared about them in the first place.
It's a win-win-win and then abandoned betrayal of the Palestinians.
All the others come out with something.
So the UAE comes out of this with access to American military technology.
The United States comes out of this by, at least on the surface, lumping together two anti-Iranian allies, too important to make this sort of block against Iran.
The States, of course, also gets massive amounts of money in military sales.
And for Trump, coming into an election with four years with nothing to show for it in terms of a foreign policy achievement, gets to, based on the packaging but not the content, gets to boast that he's pulled off a foreign policy achievement.
For Israel, they get to maintain an occupation with Arab approval.
They get to show that they can make a peace deal without considering the Palestinians.
And probably designed from the beginning, they get more American military technology.
So this is a big win for the UAE.
It's a big win for the United States.
It's a big win for Trump.
It's a big win for Israel.
And it's a big nothing for Palestine.
Yeah.
Well, and I don't know that they're that much more screwed than before, but I see what you mean about how this always was at least a possible future point of leverage, that they're never really going to be able to normalize relations with the rest of the world or with the rest of the region until they, you know, allow for independence on the West Bank.
And now that that is canceled, now it's even the shadow of that threat is over, essentially.
Look, I totally agree with you, Scott.
It's not like the Palestinians had this huge hope looming on the horizon.
But I think what's happened here, not that anything changes on the ground for the Palestinians, but I think what's happened here is the loss of, or at least the beginning of the loss of Arab support in the form of the UAE being willing to make peace with Israel without asking Israel to stop an occupation or to address the Palestinian issue.
And I think the significance of that, and this is a larger topic and maybe it's a topic for another day, but I think the significance of that is that Netanyahu's sort of signature contribution to Israeli foreign policy has been this shifting in what, I talk about this all the time because I think it's so important in Israel, it's this shifting in what the Israelis call the Doctrine of the Periphery, and the Doctrine of the Periphery in the beginning of Israel's history held up, surrounded by, you know, hostile Arab nations we can't negotiate with, we're an island in danger.
And so you negotiate peace with the periphery.
In other words, you go outside of the region and you negotiate peace with countries like, believe it or not at the time, Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia, later Morocco, and you have this idea where you make countries, you make peace with the outside because you can't make peace with the inside.
Then Rabin and Peres come along and they shift the periphery doctrine.
And they say, now, look, we'll make enemies of the outside, that's Iran, and we'll do that by making peace with the inside.
And so you get nominally things like the Oslo Accord where you say, okay, we can make peace with the Palestinians.
And the point is that you're never at peace with both in the same time.
You're either at peace with the outside and not the inside or peace with the inside, not the outside.
Netanyahu's, I think, signature contribution to Israeli foreign policy has been what he calls the outside-in plan.
And that's for the first time an Israeli prime minister has said, I can be enemies with both Iran and Palestine at the same time.
And the way you do that, he said, is instead of severing the Arabs from the periphery, you sever the Palestinians from the Arabs.
And so Netanyahu calls this outside-in.
And what that means is that you start with the outside.
You make friends with the Sunni Arab nations, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt.
You make friends.
And then once they're all on board and no longer allied with the Palestinians because they're now Israel's ally, now you turn to the inside and you impose a settlement on the Palestinians who are now bereft of support.
They're weakened because the Arabs aren't there with them anymore.
And you get this completely vulnerable Palestinian population.
And that's what this begins.
Netanyahu has been talking about this with Trump since 2017.
He's been talking about it since 2014.
This is the beginning of the outside-in where an Arab nation is being peeled away from the Palestinians.
And this, I think, will, if it continues to happen, this will leave the Palestinians more and more vulnerable because they'll have no support, they'll be isolated.
And I think that's the long-term significance of this normalization of relations, is that it's the first public presentation of Netanyahu's outside-in plan, and I think that's a tragedy for the Palestinians.
Yeah, absolutely.
I see what you mean there in sealing that fate.
And so the whole first part of that, as far as I know, the best book on that is Trita Parsi's book, Treacherous Alliance, and we're going to talk with him later on the show actually today.
And I think I might even read that book a second time.
It's so important the way that it explains it all from the point of view of the highest-level strategy of America, Israel, and Iran.
And of course, the poor Iraqis all stuck in the middle.
Yeah.
And Trita Parsi in Treacherous Alliance, he talks about this really effectively, but this was Ben-Gurion.
This came from the Mossad, and it was Ben-Gurion's policy, and it's all over the place in Israeli history, in Israel literature.
And it's not even like diplomatic, like Trita Parsi talks about this really well in Treacherous Alliance when he talks about military cooperation and diplomatic cooperation.
And there's other literature that looks at even the intelligence cooperation, that going back to the beginning of the periphery doctrine, you get the Mossad doing intense intelligence sharing with first Iran and Ethiopia and Turkey, and then later Morocco, and even stunning stories where you get things like the Arab League meeting in Morocco, and Moroccan intelligence letting Israel bug the room so Israel can hear everything the Arabs are doing because Israel's got this intelligence alliance with the periphery.
So it's military, it's diplomatic, it's intelligence.
I think it's the singularly most important lens to view Israeli foreign policy, is to try to consistently view it through this periphery doctrine, even though a moment ago I couldn't remember what it was called.
Yeah, no, but no, you're exactly right.
And this is my problem too, is I get all bogged down getting angry about the way these people are being mistreated or whatever.
But then I miss the important point, you know, that you got to zoom out to 30,000 feet and look at what you're saying.
So switching from, we did have the periphery doctrine, then we went to the, I forgot what they called it, the close in doctrine, the Rabin, Ehud Barak type consensus, Sharon even, and then Netanyahu's evolution of this same thing, that it's really about splitting the Palestinians from any of their Arab partners first.
And Scott, I think the important thing to remember there too, is that for Donald Trump, this is an isolated thing, right?
For Trump, this is looking for a foreign policy win coming into the election.
But for Netanyahu, this is not an isolated thing.
This is, as you said, zooming out to 30,000 feet.
This is part of a much bigger package that he's been working on since the day he came to office.
So it's easy sort of through the lens of American media to look at this as an isolated agreement, an isolated event.
But when you zoom out, this is one step, one piece in what for Netanyahu, unlike Trump, was much of a much broader strategy that he's been planning.
It's not a whim like Trump, I need a foreign policy win fast, so give me something.
This has been something as part of a picture that for Netanyahu has been emerging for since the beginning of his political career.
That's actually not quite true.
He did sort of switch sides, but since the beginning of the time he was prime minister.
So it's part of, you do, you have to zoom out, you have to get a really sort of large perspective.
You're not going to understand this negotiations unless you look at the much larger perspective of why Israel really want to do this.
Don't forget, if Netanyahu did secretly sign off on letting American military technology go to the United Arab Emirates, this is a big thing for Netanyahu.
It's something that, it's got to be something he really wants if he's willing to give an Arab country F-35s, right?
So this is part of a big thing for Netanyahu.
Okay, but now, so what about the blowback here?
I mean, I'm not subscribed to Ayman al-Zawahiri's podcast, but it seems like the people who are, he must have a very fertile set of minds out there to plant all his seeds in if we take the success of Al-Qaeda recruitment in the 1990s during Iraq war one and a half and during the war in Lebanon and all that, and compare that to the current situation, well, the last generation of war in 19 years, today, since September 11th, it makes you wonder what the blowback from all this is going to look like in five, 10, 15 years going forward, you know?
And I think there, it depends what you mean, like blowback for whom, I mean, there could be for the, for, you know, the Crown Prince of the UAE, there could be blowback from his own people against him, there could be blowback from other Arab countries who seem to be much more nervous about going on with these talks than they were before.
You've got Saudi Arabia cancelling meetings, you've got the UAE cancelling meetings, even the signing of the agreement, my understanding, and again, I don't have a huge amount of information on this, but Trump really wanted the signing, I think to be much closer to election day.
So this could be like really pulling a rabbit out of a hat just before the elections.
And the UAE wasn't, didn't want to give him that gift.
That's why it's probably going to happen as, you know, as early as next week.
I'm hearing September 15th.
So there's, there could be lots of different kinds of blowback, including, including blowback in the Arab world against this willingness to make, you know, a separate peace, a peace on their own without Palestine.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, thanks very much for your time.
I sure appreciate it, Ted.
Thanks so much for having me, Scott.
It was great talking to you.
All right, you guys, that is Ted Snyder, regular writer for Antiwar.com.
This one is called What's in the Israel-UAE Agreement?
Well, here's five things that aren't.
