Former MK Takes Stage at UNC, Declares “The Arab-Israeli Conflict is Over”
Former MK Alon Tal in the Knesset, Source for image: Times of Israel
During a guest lecture at UNC Chapel Hill’s Stone Center held on February 16th, Alon Tal spoke assertively: “The Arab-Israeli conflict is over.” The statement sounds overly optimistic and perhaps even demagogic at first, but it is rather pertinent after analyzing promising advancements in peace-making and cooperation between Israel and Arab countries.
Born in Raleigh, NC, Alon Tal was a member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament) between 2021 and 2022, representing the centrist Blue and White Party. He became the first North Carolinian and only the seventh American ever to do so. Tal graduated from UNC in 1980 and pursued his doctoral studies at Harvard University in the environmental field, serving the Israeli army in the meantime.
In the lecture, he continued his argument by emphasizing that the present issues are related to certain armed factions or groups within the Palestinian community, making an important distinction in his claim. More prominently, tensions have been kept high not only between Israelis and Palestinians, but also with Iran’s government and Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed fundamentalist armed branch founded in Lebanon. In the broader Arab world, however, trends have gone on an opposite path.
So what recent events motivated the former MK (Member of Knesset) to make this ambitious claim?
A significant motivator behind the changing trends were the 2020 Abraham Accords, brokered by the United States, which normalized relations between Israel and Arab countries for the first time since the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace deal. Among the signatories were the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, followed shortly by Morocco and Sudan (which has agreed to normalization but did not yet sign a formal deal). More than normalizing relations, this huge peace deal has effectively been building friendship between Israel and Arab countries, especially those in the Gulf Region.
The UAE for instance, went from having no trade relations with Israel in 2019 to becoming one of its main partners today. Israel’s ambassador to the UAE Amir Hayek said that trade more than doubled between the two countries in 2022 to nearly $2.6 billion, compared to $1.22 billion in the previous year, which already placed the UAE as Israel’s 16th largest trade partner. Bahrain and Morocco have also shown an increase in trade with Israel, although to a lesser extent. Likewise, tourism has grown significantly with the accords, as over 268,000 Israelis visited the UAE in 2022, and 200,000 more visited Morocco in the same year.
Beyond trade and tourism, the accords reflect unprecedented acceptance of diversity and respect for different religions and ethnicities in the Middle East. As mentioned in the formal Israel-UAE Agreement document, the goals of the treaty include fostering “closer people-to-people relations” and the “spirit of coexistence, mutual understanding and mutual respect.” With those values in mind, UAE’s Abu Dhabi made the historic move to open a landmark interfaith compound featuring a mosque, church, and synagogue on February 17th, the first compound of its kind in all of the Arab world. The state-of-the-art project, called The Abrahamic Family House, is a monumental milestone in the progression of the countries' relationship, as it demonstrates the UAE’s movement away from mere symbolic gestures and towards a concrete and mutually beneficial cooperation.
The Abrahamic Family House, in Abu Dhabi. Source for image: Times of Israel
The Abraham Accords have also triggered a cascade effect, as other Arab countries are now actively seeking to strengthen their ties with Israel—providing further evidence to support the notion that the Arab-Israeli conflict is over. “A deal with Saudi Arabia is just around the corner,” stated Alon Tal at the UNC event as the two countries strengthen ties especially in the common goal of countering Iran’s destabilizing aggression in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has already officially opened its airspace to Israeli flights in July 2022, and formal normalization could enhance further military and intelligence cooperation between the two powerful US allies. A Saudi-Israeli deal could also bolster economic ties in the region, as plans to connect the Arabian Peninsula with Israel’s Port of Haifa through a rail link across Jordan are also being discussed.
Following Saudi Arabia’s breakthrough, Oman also recently opened its airspace to Israeli flights on February 23, a move that shortens the distance to Asia by two hours and could transform Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport into a global transit hub between Asia and Europe. Like Saudi Arabia, Oman is a candidate to join the Abraham Accords in the future.
While significant progress has been made to approximate Israel to the Arab world, tensions between the Jewish state and, especially, the previously mentioned groups—Palestinian armed factions, the Iranian government, and Hezbollah—cannot be ignored. A Bloomberg News report indicated that Saudi Arabia, for instance, is unlikely to agree to full ties with Israel unless substantial advancements are made to establish peace with Palestinian leadership and people. This raises the question of whether Saudi Arabia will prioritize addressing the Palestinian issue—and remain engaged only in clandestine ties with Israel—or, instead, focus on the threat posed by Iran to the region and formally partner with Israel in this endeavor. Despite this uncertainty, there are strong indications that the idea of an Arab-Israeli conflict is effectively being replaced by one of Arab-Israeli cooperation.