But it’s complicated. Because Syria, Egypt, Qatar, the rest of the Arab League, UNRWA, et cetera.
From Axios: come Monday, this biggest regional cooperation project ever between Israel and neighbors, is planned for signing in Dubai, with midwife John Kerry in attendance. The plan calls for a UAE-funded and engineered solar farm in Jordan to provide energy internally and to Israel, Israel to build a desalination plant on its Mediterranean coast to provide water to Jordan.
...The vision behind the project originally came from EcoPeace Middle East, a regional environmental NGO… The logic was that Israel needs renewable energy but lacks the land for massive solar farms, which Jordan has [and Jordan] needs water but can only build desalination plants in the remote southern part of the country [ — ] Israel's coastline is closer to Jordan's big population centers.
...The solar farm will be built by Masdar, a UAE government-owned alternative energy company.
- The plans call for the solar farm to be operational by 2026 and produce 2% of Israel's energy by 2030, with Israel paying $180 million per year to be divided between the Jordanian government and the Emirati company.
- The agreement links the electricity deal to further water purchases from Jordan. It states that Jordan plans to double the amount of water it purchases from Israel, either from a new desalination plant or existing facilities….
Meanwhile, the UAE, and
Jordan, Egypt and several other Arab countries, are quietly lining up to tip the balance toward the return of Syria to the Arab League …. The regional body suspended Syria in 2011, and most countries in the region cut ties with Bashar al-Assad's regime.
This very month ten years ago, the Arab League 22 nation-members approved a sweeping package of censures and sanctions including suspending Syria from that 22-member-nation body, and most cut ties with it, in the international wave of pressure against al-Assad’s violent suppression of the internal Syrian uprising.
Now, though bloodshed continues, and parts of Syria remain out of Assad's control, and the country is a mass of human and material disaster, an expectant air of post-war reconstruction seems to be developing that’s perhaps hoped will spill over to some of Syria’s neighbors. Jordan, for example, has long had a massive unemployment problem and consequent civil unrest, among other adverse issues that intertwine with export losses:
The Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat revealed this week what it called a "Jordan-sponsored document" on reintegrating Syria into the Arab League. It would base normalization on policy shifts from the Syrians, mainly on curbing Iran’s influence in the country and the exit of pro-Iranian militias…
Jordanian exports to Syria fell by two-thirds as a result of the closure of the borders between the two countries during Syria's civil war… Kais Zayadin, a former Jordanian member of parliament who serves on a royal commission on modernizing Jordan's political system, [said] “Jordan wants to have a special role between Damascus and the West [fitting] Jordan’s goal to be the leader of a new Levant approach..."
Zaid Nabulsi, a Jordanian lawyer and political activist, says Syria's return to the Arab fold "has become an irreversible fact." Tagreed Odeh, a Jordanian political analyst, says it seems Jordan, the UAE and other Arab countries are all working together to prepare the ground for the return of Syria to the Arab League during the next Arab summit in Algiers.
However, in a joint press conference on Friday, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and his Qatari counterpart, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said their respective nations don’t support normalization at this time, and suggested that their friends and partners in the region “consider the signals they’re sending,"
Editorial comment: generally speaking economics drives everything pretty much everywhere (including in the US, altho’ that’s another story), whether short-sighted or for the longterm, whether personal on the part of massively powerful rulers and plutocrats, or in broad public interest, and whether covert or overt. Politics is just the machinery. Reportedly,
[the] United Arab Emirates (UAE) supports the establishment of a Palestinian state within the framework of a two-state solution
and recently handed the UNRWA‘s Tamara Alrifai $600,000 in financial support to build a school in the Gaza Strip named for Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who stated publicly in May that the “United Arab Emirates stands ready to facilitate peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians”. But that followed a reported February cutback of the UAE’s other UNRWA funding, said to be prompted by concerns of poor financial management, but seeming chronologically related to the Abraham Accords’ normalization with Israel. Still, a late October meeting in Dubai between Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Makhtoum and a possible Mahmaoud Abbas successor —Palestinian Authority General Intelligence Service head Maged Faraj— may augur (or auger) that conditions for the Palestinian people could change for the better, along with whomever else’s.
But I couldn’t find anything to suggest that the UAE-Jordan-Israel solar-power/water project includes stipulations to aid dire Palestinian need for these commodities, nor anything to suggest that Syria’s al-Assad would stop murdering his own people in trade for reconstruction help.
(Nor that the Arab League —especially the hugely rich Gulf states— have any significant benevolent concern for the their migrant labor populations that in several of those nations outnumber their own citizens and have little to zero legal rights.)
So, even though we can recognize the interesting economics going on, and might consider goals geared for 2026 as reasonably longterm thinking, it’s hard to say.
Still, the opposite of love isn’t hate (they’re both emotions, after all), but non-engagement; and the opposite of hate isn’t love but cooperation (a rational choice of behavior). Almost any economic kind is usually far better than none. Hats off to organizations like EcoPeaceMiddleEast, for not giving up.