Israel objects – and has been firm in stating its objections – to an American sale of state-of-the-art F-35 Stealth fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates. And while the UAE has taken the Israeli objections with ill-grace, security cooperation between the two nations is in every other respect, going like gangbusters. Here’s the story of that cooperation.
The Israeli and UAE defense ministers on Tuesday [August 25] held their first publicly-acknowledged phone call since their countries’ recent agreement to normalize ties, officials said, heralding possible security cooperation.
The conversation between Benny Gantz and Mohammed al-Bawardi came amid Israeli dissent at the prospect that the US-brokered deal could grant the Gulf power access to advanced weaponry previously denied to it, such as F-35 stealth fighter jets….
In a tweet, Gantz said they had agreed to “keep an open channel between us.”
He also noted they had talked about potential “security cooperation between the countries, which would strengthen the stability of the region.”
There is already a great deal of “security cooperation” between the UAE and Israel. Gantz means that there will be even more security cooperation. Like what? Like the Ofek 16 electro-optical reconnaissance satellite, launched this past July, that can monitor all of Iran and the Gulf region, and that can enable Israel and now its ally the UAE, as well, to keep close tabs on what the Iranians are doing, such as where they are placing their missile factories and launching pads, what mischief their flotillas in the Gulf are up to, and how their nuclear project is coming along. Israel stands ready to supply the UAE with access to all of this critical information. Israel’s technical superiority in the field of reconnaissance satellites is widely recognized; now those advances will be available to the UAE as well.
The normalization accord, announced on Aug. 13, forges a new axis in confronting Shi’ite Muslim Iran and Sunni Islamist militants in the Middle East, and makes the UAE only the third Arab country to forge ties with Israel in more than 70 years.
The UAE Foreign Minister, Anwar Gargash, predicts that this will be a “warm peace,” as opposed to the “lukewarm peace” that Israel has with Egypt and the “cold peace” it has with Jordan. Unfortunately, the UAE has not really taken seriously the American policy – required by Congress, and observed by every president since 1973 – that requires the U.S. to maintain Israel’s QME (its “qualitative military edge”) so that no other country in the Middle East has access to the most advanced weaponry that is sold to Israel. Right now, that means only one thing: the state-of-the-art F-35 Stealth fighter jet.
But the UAE has argued that the agreement should remove “any hurdle” to advanced US weapons sales, arguing that it eliminates any potential for belligerence between it and Israel.
The QME was not intended to prevent sales of advanced weapons only to states hostile to Israel, but to all Middle Eastern states, however good or bad their relations with Israel at any moment in time happened to be. In Washington it has been well understood that in the Middle East, the most volatile and violent part of the world, Israel should not be expected to risk its security by allowing the sale of America’s most advanced weapons to a state or states in the Middle East that, while friendly now, might be hostile in the future. In Israel they remember keenly how, under the Shah, Iran was an ally of Israel, well-supplied with advanced American weapons. But when the Shah fell, the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini replaced him – a regime implacably dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. Turkey, too, was for decades an ally of Israel, but ever since Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power, the country has become steadily more hostile to Israel; Erdogan has even published a proposal for a pan-Islamic army that would be strong enough to destroy the Jewish state. Meanwhile, the Turkish army still has advanced weaponry bought from the Americans, which Israeli generals now must include in their calculations about future conflicts.
Seeking to allay Israeli security concerns, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reassured Israel on Monday that it would retain a military advantage in the region under any future arms deals with the UAE.
Was Pompeo attempting to assure the Israelis that there would be no sale of F-35s to the UAE, or was he hinting at something else — that, if that F-35 sale went through, the Americans had something else up their sleeve, a new weapon, not necessarily a plane, that would restore that temporarily lost QME, and would be made available in the Middle East only to Israel?
An Israeli defense official said that while Israel was firm in opposing any prospective US sale of the F-35 to the UAE, the Netanyahu government was “entirely immersed” on the question of expanding criteria for Israeli defense exports to the Gulf power.
Israel is not opposed to the sale of advanced weaponry to the UAE. It is “expanding criteria for its defense exports” – that is, making ever more of its own weapons available for sale to the UAE. It has not raised any objections to American sales of weapons — drones, anti-missile defenses, planes, cyberwarfare program — save in the unique case of the F-35.
According to defense industry sources, Israel has sold the UAE security products in the cyber and surveillance realm. A study by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab has linked spyware technologies produced by Israel‘s NSO Group to political surveillance in the UAE.
In the early 2000s, Israel was in talks to sell the UAE drones, according to a US official who was involved in the negotiations — but called off the deal after the 2010 death in Dubai of an arms dealer with the Islamist group Hamas, which Emirati authorities blamed on a Mossad hit team.
Now that Israel and the UAE are on good terms, surely the UAE will be buying those advanced drones, in the manufacture of which Israel is a world leader. It might also buy the Iron Dome anti-missile system, or the “breakthrough technology” for lasers that Israel started just this year to use to shoot down incoming missiles and drones. All of that is likely to be made available to the UAE if only it gives up its insensate demand for the F-35 planes, the sale of which for Israel – as the UAE pretends not to know — crosses a red line.
But what is potentially most worrisome about the sale of F-35s to the UAE is its effect on Egypt. No one has mentioned this, but why wouldn’t Egypt eventually follow suit, and ask the Americans to sell it “just a few” F-35s, to be paid for by the Gulf Arabs, perhaps even by the UAE? Why should anyone object? After all, General el-Sisi can point out, Egypt was the first country to “make peace with Israel.” It has been collaborating with Israel in fighting Jihadis – remnants of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic state – in the Sinai. What’s the problem? And Israel would then be put in the awkward position of showing its lack of trust in Egypt – a country which fought five wars with Israel, in 1948-1949, 1956 (the Sinai Campaign), 1967, 1967-1970 (the War of Attrition), and 1973 — by trying to stop such a sale. If the sale of F-35s to the UAE were to go through, then a similar demand from Egypt is hardly unthinkable.
Of course, this possible bonanza of Israeli arms sales to the Emirates could turn to bust if the UAE insists it simply must have those American F-35s, and Netanyahu rallies Congress to stop the sale, and the UAE then decides, as it certainly could in a fit of pique, that it’s now in a mood of “let’s-call-the-whole-thing-off.” And that would be a terrible mistake.