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Kashrut in the United Arab Emirates Is a Sign of a Warm Peace

Sept. 10 2020

While Israel made peace with Egypt in 1978 and Jordan in 1994, and cooperates closely with both countries on matters of intelligence and security, it has not managed to establish friendly relations with either. There is limited trade, and less tourism; Egyptians and Jordanian who visit Israel risk being greeted with opprobrium when they return, and their parliaments and media tend to be intensely anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic. By contrast, American, Israeli, and Emirati leaders have stressed their hope that the normalization of relations between Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi will lead to a warm peace—a “peace between peoples” rather than merely governments. Jeremy Sharon reports on one bit of evidence that this might be true:

The emirate of Abu Dhabi has sent a message to all hotels in its territory saying that they should provide kosher food options to their visitors, in the expectation of a surge in Israeli and Jewish visitors following the pending normalization agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. In a message sent to hotels in the emirate on Tuesday, the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism said that hotels were “advised” to adopt the measure to guarantee that all visitors are catered for.

Sarah Besnainou, an active member of the Jewish community in Abu Dhabi, welcomed the measure, saying that the tourism department was [taking] “extraordinary steps to welcome Jews and Israelis,” following the recent agreement to normalize relations between Israel and the UAE.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Israel-Arab relations, Kashrut, United Arab Emirates

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic