Israeli daily Haaretz said Friday that Israel would “inaugurate for the first time an official — and visible — diplomatic mission in Abu Dhabi”, despite the lack of official diplomatic relations.
“The inauguration of the Israeli office in Abu Dhabi will serve to intensify [shared] activities and cooperation in other fields besides energy and economy,” Masoud Ghanayem, an Arab member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), told Anadolu Agency.
This burgeoning cooperation, he said, would also likely extend “to political and security talks”.
IRENA was established in 2009, with Israel strongly supporting proposals to headquarter the new agency in Abu Dhabi, according to Israeli media.
“The inauguration of Israel’s office at this time is no coincidence,” Ghanayem said. “It comes after the United Arab Emirates began to feel the reduction of the U.S. role in the Gulf and Washington’s acceptance of Iran as a regional power.”
According to a statement by Maryam al-Falasi, director of communications for the UAE’s Foreign Ministry, IRENA is “an independent international organization that operates according to the law and the norms that govern these organizations”.
The office will be the first official Israeli presence in the Gulf since 1996, when Israeli commercial offices were opened in Qatar and Oman before closing again in 2000 following the eruption of the second Palestinian Intifada (“uprising”).
According to Ghanayem, “the Israelis — especially rightist Likud members — are optimistic [about the new office] and talk about ‘opening the first door into the Arab Gulf’.”
The new office, he went on to predict, “will gradually remove Israel from its regional isolation, while Israel will try to convince the Arab Gulf that it is a vital element of the Middle East,” Ghanayem added.
Israel is considered one of the most important countries in the region’s renewable energy sector, manufacturing and exporting a number of wind- and solar-energy systems.
Israeli exports in the renewable energy sector rose by 40 percent last year alone, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.
“Israel’s office in Abu Dhabi will strengthen its presence on the map of developed counties in the energy sector,” Jehad Harb, a Palestinian political expert based in Ramallah, told Anadolu Agency.
Walid Ali, head of the Lebanon-based Baheth Center for Palestinian and Strategic Studies, told Anadolu Agency by phone that the inauguration of Israel’s IRENA office constituted “a means of achieving larger political and security objectives… and an end-run around the Arab Initiative, which rejects any normalization with Israel until the Palestinians are granted their rights”.
The 2002 Saudi-backed Arab Peace Initiative offered cross-the-board Arab recognition of Israel in return for the establishment of a Palestinian state on territory occupied by Israel in 1967.
