Pedro González
Journalist
In times of war, and especially when it takes on the appearance of involving the whole world, it is difficult to dissociate oneself. Israel is in an embarrassing situation. It claims and proclaims its absolute loyalty to the United States, which also has the full backing of the European Union when it comes to the war in Ukraine. But its interests have recently converged markedly with Russia, a power that has been filling much of the vacuum left by the Americans in the Middle East.
In the marathon meetings held by a group of journalists from the Brussels-based Europe-Israel Press Association (EIPA), which also includes Atalayar, the common denominator has been the firm proclamation that ‘Israel will be on the right side of history’, a phrase with which Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid announced a vote in favour of condemning Russia for its aggression against Ukraine in the UN Assembly.
However, the leaders of the eight-party conglomerate that makes up Israel’s motley coalition government, with varying nuances, point to the important consequences for Israel of this alignment. Russia is part of the still uninterrupted Vienna negotiations for the revival of the nuclear deal with Iran, which was unilaterally interrupted by President Donald Trump and whose hypothetical conclusion is seen as a real existential threat to Israel. Whatever the composition of the government, “the pressure to prevent Iran from getting what it wants will intensify, because if it is allowed to do so, the entire Middle East will be under a threat that is not only existential for Israel”, according to the spokespersons for the Israeli prime minister and chief diplomat, Keren Hajioff and Lior Haiat, respectively.
The mediation proposed by Neftali Bennett to reconcile the diametrically opposed positions of the Ukrainian and Russian presidents does not seem to have met with Moscow’s approval for the time being. So much so that, internally in Israel, the intimacy that the now opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu managed to achieve with Putin is even missed, a harmony that his current successor has not been able to attain.
In addition to helping speed up the departure and reception of Jewish Ukrainians from the country, Israel claims to be facilitating the departure of Egyptian, Ethiopian and Emirati nationals, while also arranging reception and settlement schemes for new forced migrants to rebuild their lives in Israel.
The great fear in the Knesset is that the world’s attention on the direct confrontation between Russia and Ukraine will allow the renewal of the nuclear deal with Iran to be dismissed. In this regard, Israeli diplomacy has mobilised with one key objective in mind: To bring to the Gulf states the conviction that what is needed in Middle Eastern geopolitics is not “an old-fashioned gendarme”, a role that Iran and Saudi Arabia have fought and still fight for, but a multilateral framework of cooperative relations and joint progress in all fields of the new technological society, showing all societies the enormous difference between a medieval image model like Iran’s and the one that is giving birth to the very rapid complementary development of the Abraham Accords.
“Moving is a blessing”, says an Arab proverb quoted by Issawi Frej of the left-wing Meretz party, Minister of Regional Cooperation, who abhors immobility when situations such as the war in Ukraine, or even closer to home, the unresolved Palestinian problem, can multiply their danger if we do not negotiate to the point of exhaustion in order to find a way out.
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