“The more you have alarming trends, the more you have people to face them,” said Professor Uriya Shavit. “While anti-Semitism is really bad and getting worse, I think it is really crucial to keep the picture balanced.”
Israel s Peace Deals Show How Abnormal Israel s Treatment Has Been | Opinion Seth J. Frantzman
, Executive director, Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis On 12/23/20 at 5:30 AM EST
Israel now has a peace plane. The plane is an El Al Boeing 737 and is named for the Israeli city of Kiryat Gat. It has become renowned for being the first Israeli plane to fly to Morocco on December 22, as Israel normalized relations with Rabat, and also the first to go to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in late August. The presence of an El Al airplane in capital cities around the Middle East is unprecedented just as seeing Israeli flags proliferate across Morocco, the UAE and Bahrain has seemed like something from a parallel universe, in which all the pervasive acrimony against Israel doesn t exist.
The new relationship will quickly build new economic and military ties.
The GITEX technology week in Dubai in early December 2020 was a unique event as it came amid a global pandemic and aimed to show that a large tech confab could be held as countries are just beginning to receive vaccines. With some 1,200 exhibitors from sixty countries, the large event in the center of Dubai included unprecedented Israeli participation this year. It also had an inaugural UAE-Israel Future Digital Economy Summit.
In some ways the event was entirely normal, a reminder of a world before the coronavirus brought air travel to a halt in March of this year. I toured the events halls of GITEX and the Israeli presence, observing that the first time that Israel had participated appeared to fit well with the rest of the exhibitors.