Yesterday, Saudi Arabia announced that planes from "all countries" can use Saudi airspace for flights to and from the UAE. That may not sound like much, so let me translate. What the Saudis actually meant is that flights between Tel Aviv in Israel and Dubai in the UAE can traverse Saudi airspace including flights by El Al, the Israeli airline.
Since the founding of Israel in 1948, Saudi Arabia has been in a state of war with the Jewish state. The Saudis have not permitted Israeli commercial flights across their airspace ever. That's right, Saudi airspace has been closed to Israeli flights for the last 72 years (although there really weren't many commercial flights anywhere in 1948.)
By opening up their airspace, the Saudis gave an approving nod to the recent peace agreement between the UAE and Israel which was brokered by President Trump. Since the Saudis are one of the most important Sunni Arab states, this is a big deal. It's another big step forward in the Middle East toward peace.
Don't expect to hear much about this in the mainstream media, however. Good news on the peace front in the Middle East looks good for President Trump, so the news will be suppressed to the greatest extent possible. The media doesn't want to help Trump and they don't want to admit again how wrong they were in criticizing the Trump approach to Middle East peace.
Remember when the President moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv? This was criticized at great length by Dems and the media "experts" as something that would lead to renewed hostilities across the Middle East. After all, this move violated one of the rules of the longstanding approach to the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, namely that the USA had to continue to recognize fictions so as not to upset the Palestinians. The President, however, chose to switch to a new paradigm, one in which reality -- actual facts -- governed conduct. Jerusalem has been the actual capital of Israel for the last 72 years; there is no reason for America to keep its embassy in Tel Aviv.
After the embassy move, President Trump recognized Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Once again, the Dems and the media denounced the move as antithetical to peace and likely to cause hostilities across the region. Once again, the opposite proved true. There was no meaningful violence. Why would there be? After all, Israel has been in control of the Golan region since 1967 when it was won from Syria after the Syrian attack on Israel that year. Under international law, Israel had the right to keep and annex that area. Everyone knew that, even the Syrians and the Palestinians. The US and its Western allies, however, lived for 50 years under the fiction that this was just "occupied territory".
Another big move by President Trump came in response to a plan by Israel to possibly annex the so-called settlements in the West Bank area. It was a cornerstone of Obama policy in dealing with Israel that all the settlements were a barrier to any peace agreement. Obama pushed the plan that all Israeli settlements would have to be abandoned if there were ever to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
It's important to remember just what these settlements really are. Basically, about 75% of these "settlements" are just either neighborhoods in or suburbs of Jerusalem, the Israeli capital. As that city grew, many new neighborhoods or suburbs were built, and many were inhabited by Israeli Jews. Obama wanted to keep the West Bank free of Jews -- or as the Nazis used to say "Judenrein". It was a sort of preventative ethnic cleansing. And remember, the very heart of Jerusalem, the old city, is also a settlement under the Obama view. That means that the Western Wall, the most sacred site in the world for Jews was supposed to be off limits to Jews under the Obama view.
President Trump made clear that his administration would accept whatever Israel decided to do regarding the so called settlements. Once again, Trump recognized reality, not some theory popular in the faculty lounge at Harvard or Princeton. Reality is the basis for actual and lasting peace.
This approach was criticized over and over again by the Middle East peace experts from prior administrations as well as by media pundits. It was not just that they disapproved of it; rather, it was that they announced it was inevitable that huge hostilities would break out across the region as a result. They were wrong, but I have yet to see one article in which these people admit that they were wrong. Indeed, each time something new happens regarding US policy in the Middle East, these same people are trotted out by the media to criticize whatever President Trump has done.
But let's get back to this move by the Saudis. It's not just a signal that the Saudis are blessing the Israel - UAE peace deal. It is also a signal to the other states in the region like Oman and Kuwait that the Saudis do not oppose making peace with Israel. After President Trump is re-elected, you should look for Israeli peace deals with other Sunni Arab nations. We Biden to win, he would go back to the old, failed Obama era policies. Biden has already said that, and since so many far left Democrats are openly hostile to Israel, there could be a dramatic shift for the worse in the peace climate in the Middle East.
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