After joining the World Trade Organisation in 1996, the UAE authorities were clearly under pressure to drop or at least relax their boycott of Israel. When Dubai agreed to host the 2003 annual general meeting of the WTO, delegations from all member states had to be invited, and there was no way to prevent the arrival of an Israeli delegation and the flying of an Israeli flag on top of the Dubai World Trade Centre tower.[739] The UAE’s newfound leadership role in renewable energies has had similar results: after winning the bid to host the headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency, in early 2010 the Abu Dhabi immigration services had little choice but to allow an Israeli delegation — including a minister — to arrive in the emirate for IRENA meetings. Explaining that ‘…although Israel and the UAE have no diplomatic ties’ an IRENA spokesperson confirmed that ‘Israel was accommodated in accordance with specific UAE agreements’.[740] In addition to international organisations, there has also been increasing pressure directly from the US, with the US Department of Commerce’s Office of Anti-boycott Compliance dutifully recording all examples of the UAE’s boycott requests. These are normally clauses inserted into contracts issued by UAE companies, most often with the following wording: ‘the seller shall not supply goods or materials which have been manufactured or processed in Israel nor shall the services of any Israeli organisation be used in handling or transporting the goods or materials’.[741][742][743][744][745][746]
Meanwhile, it was reported in late 2009 by the Toronto-Harvard OpenNet Initiative that — as something of an exception to the country’s massive increase in internet censorship — the UAE had quietly unblocked internet access to web sites based in Israel with the ‘.IL’ suffix. All such sites were suddenly found to be ‘consistently accessible via the country’s two ISPs’ and it was stated that ‘…it is not clear why the UAE authorities have decided to remove the ban on.IL Web sites and whether this unblocking will continue’.[747] Even more curiously, in late 2010 it was reported by a Kuwaiti newspaper that a female member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family had been flown to Israel to undergo ‘complex heart surgery’. The entry procedures were reportedly facilitated by a member of the Knesset, after the sheikha’s doctor had recommended a specific hospital in Haifa. Interestingly, the sheikha’s picture was featured in a report on Israel’s Channel Two which emphasised the way in which ‘medicine does not differentiate between patients and should be a means of rapprochement between the peoples of the region’.[748] And in February 2011 Amnesty International highlighted the disappearance of a UAE national teacher who had previously been detained in late 2008 for ‘demonstrating in solidarity with the people of the Gaza Strip, then under Israeli military attack’.[749] In years past it is likely that a Gulf national taking such a stance would have had the tacit approval of the authorities, rather than face any difficulties.
In some ways Bahrain has gone even further than the UAE in improving its relations with Israel, at least on an official level. For the past few years government personnel have been instructed not to refer to Israel as the ‘Zionist Entity’ or ‘The Enemy’ and in 2005 the kingdom closed down its equivalent boycott office.[750] Moreover, according to leaked US diplomatic cables from the same year, the king confided to US diplomats that ‘He [the king] already has contacts with Israel at the intelligence/security level (i.e. with Mossad) and indicated that Bahrain will be willing to move forward in other areas’. When pressed on trade ties with Israel, however, the king did admit that it was ‘too early, and that the matter would have to wait until after a Palestinian state’.[751] Indeed there are signs in Bahrain, as with the other Gulf monarchies, that revelations of any formal ties with Israel would be met with strong condemnation from the national population. In summer 2010, for example, large demonstrations were staged in Bahrain’s principal mosques — both Sunni and Shia — to denounce the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Flotilla. Worryingly for a king nurturing security and trade links with Israel, the crowd’s main slogan described the US president as being a liar for ‘not exposing Israel as being a terrorist state’.[752]
There is some evidence that the governments of both Qatar and Saudi Arabia have also been relaxing their stance on Israel. Up until 2009 there was an Israeli ‘commercial interest section’ based in Doha,[753] and in 2010 it was reported that the Qatar Investment Authority and the Saudi Olayan Group had partnered with Credit Suisse and Israel’s IDB Holdings in order to form a new fund to ‘opportunistically pursue credit investments in emerging markets’. With each partner putting in $250 million, the $1 billion fund is one of the largest new funds created since the 2008 credit crunch. Although the resulting media coverage noted that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were still technically part of an Israel boycott group, analysts were quoted as stating that ‘the Arab boycott is mainly on paper’ and that ‘there is a flow of Israeli know-how and products to the Arab world’.[754] Interestingly, it appears that Qatar’s relaxations on Israel have now also extended to education. According to documents leaked to Al-Arab newspaper in summer 2011, documents and course material supplied to trainee Arabic teachers in the emirate were written in both Arabic and Hebrew and seemingly sourced from the Israeli Ministry for Education. When questioned on this matter, the distributors simply argued that ‘there had been a mistake’.[755]
With regards to security ties, as with Bahrain an open channel of communication now exists between Qatar and the Israeli security services. In late 2010 a large delegation of senior Israeli policemen was in the emirate, ostensibly taking part in an Interpol assembly, with the head of the Israeli police’s investigations and intelligence branch being among them. Remarkably, it was reported by Agence France Presse that the Israeli delegation also met with Dubai’s chief of police ‘by chance’ and that ‘there was no apparent tension… despite the dispute between their countries’.[756] Thus far there is little firm evidence of growing security ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel, or at least there have been no blatant admissions as with Bahrain and Qatar. Nevertheless, for the past few years there have been frequent and powerful rumours circulating that the two powers are co-operating, mostly as a result of Saudi Arabia’s stance on Iran and the existence of a mutual enemy.[757]
741
84. Davidson, Christopher M.,
757
100. In summer 2010, for example, Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency reported that Israeli military aircraft had landed at a Saudi airbase close to the city of Tabuk in the northwest of the kingdom. Moreover, it was claimed in the Israeli press that Israel was investigating the usefulness of Tabuk as a possible base for striking Iran, and that a senior member of the Saudi ruling family was coordinating the operation. A commercial passenger travelling through the airport was even quoted as saying that all air traffic was closed down without explanation during the alleged Israeli landings, but that all stranded passengers were compensated financially and housed in luxury hotels.