Arab vagaries of normalization with Israel

George W. Bush stigmatized, on May 18 in Dallas, “the decision of a man, totally unjustified, to brutally invade Iraq …”, before recovering: “I mean Ukraine. “This lapsus as revealing as mediated has aroused a flood of comments, stressing, among other things, the complacency which continues to prevail in connection with the disastrous American invasion of Iraq, in 2003. Shortly after the speech of the former president of United States, the Iraqi parliament voted unanimously a law criminalizing any form of “promotion” of “the Zionist entity”, as well as Israel was called in the propaganda of Saddam Hussein.

The Camouflet remains scathing for the neoconservatives who pushed Mr. Bush to an Iraqi adventure, pretending that “the road to Jerusalem passes through Baghdad”. According to these ideologists, the fall of the Iraqi dictator was to mechanically arouse a process of democratization within Iraq, resulting in normalization with Israel, dynamic then called to extend to the rest of the Arab countries. >

Dictatorial normalization

Two decades later, Iraq is struggling to emerge from a cycle of civil wars, without ceasing the dispute of the representativeness of its institutions. And the unanimous vote of Iraqi deputies sanctions the now final failure of the neoconservatives, since, in the Arab Middle East, only authoritarian regimes have normalized their relations with Israel.

These regimes have also highlighted such normalization to maintain the complacency of the United States towards its repressive excesses, while their population often remained sensitive to Palestinian suffering. Egypt of ex-marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sissi undoubtedly has five times more political prisoners than that of Hosni Mubarak, who had himself inherited from the peace concluded, in 1979, by Anouar El-Sadate with Israel. The political opening granted by the King of Jordan Hussein before the signing of peace with Israel in 1994, was therefore called into question and it was further restricted under the reign of her son Abdallah II.

The Abraham agreements, signed with Israel by four Arab states between September and December 2020, have the United Arab Emirates, already on the initiative of a virulent counter-revolutionary campaign in the Arab world. Bahrain is aligned with the position of Abu Dhabi, who had supported, as of 2011, if necessary by arms, the suffocation of constitutionalist agitation. In Sudan, it was the military hierarchy that imposed normalization with Israel on civil authorities which it has since overthrown, in October 2021. Only Morocco contrasts with this dictatorial dynamic, for two reasons: a part, the importance and voluntarism of the community of Moroccan origin in Israel, which gives this normalization a human depth absent in the five previous agreements; On the other hand, the American counterpart of recognition of the “Moroccanity” of Western Sahara, a claim carried out by a large consensus in the Cherifian kingdom.

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/Media reports.