This direct commercial flight from the Israeli national airline El Al to Morocco is important proof that the normalization of relations between Morocco and Israel is well underway. After the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, Morocco has indeed become the fourth country in the Arab world to announce this year a normalization of its relations with Israel under the aegis of the United States. The inaugural flight on December 22, which highlights this, is a direct flight between Tel Aviv and Rabat.
At the heart of the process, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law
“I was here a few months ago on the first flight to the United Arab Emirates after this historic breakthrough for peace. Since then, commercial flights have been commuting several times a day between the two countries (…), my hope is that this flight today in Morocco will create the same dynamic, ”Jared Kushner told AFP on the tarmac. from Tel Aviv Ben-Gurion Airport. “Over the past 75 years, Jews and Muslims have been separated, which is not natural as they have lived together for centuries in this region (…), and what we are seeing today is a return to this standard, ”added the son-in-law of the American president and architect of the Trump plan for the Middle East, crushed by the Palestinians.
Agreements and more air links in sight
Before the novel coronavirus pandemic, Morocco received between 50,000 and 70,000 Jewish tourists each year, most of them indirectly from Israel. “50,000 Israelis have just gone to Dubai and what is happening there is a revolution because the Emiratis welcomed them warmly (…), and the same will happen now in Rabat and Casablanca”, had Netanyahu said Monday evening, whose special security adviser Meir Ben Shabbat, also flew to Rabat on Tuesday in a plane from the Israeli company El Al. This Tel Aviv-Rabat flight must be monitored through the signing of agreements in Morocco and the development, in the long term, of direct airlines between the two countries.
Sahara-Palestine: two weights for one scale
By agreeing to officially relaunch its relations with Israel, Morocco obtained in return that President Trump recognize its “sovereignty” over Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony that has been disputed with it for decades by the separatists of the Polisario Front, supported by the ‘Algeria. The agreement also proposes the opening of an American consulate in Western Sahara and an American investment program, which the Moroccan press ensures colossal, the reopening of diplomatic offices in Tel Aviv and Rabat, closed at the beginning of the years. 2000, and the development of bilateral economic cooperation.
But, like Western Sahara, support for the Palestinians is seen as a “national cause” in Morocco.
If, according to the official MAP agency, Moroccans have celebrated the “Moroccanness of the Sahara” all over the world, two pro-Palestinian demonstrations were banned last week in Rabat, with an impressive mobilization of the police. The Palestinians, from secular Fatah of Mahmoud Abbas to the Islamists of Hamas, oppose these agreements, believing that the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab world should have been done after an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and not before.
The formalization of a de facto partnership
Israel, which has hundreds of thousands of Jews of Moroccan origin, and Morocco, where North Africa’s largest Jewish community still lives, had already maintained official relations at the end of the 1990s. Two diplomatic offices liaised after the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace accords of 1993, until their closure after the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000. The new agreement formalizes “a de facto partnership dating back over 60 years”, with in particular a “cooperation in the field of intelligence and security”, recalled Ahmed Charaï, Moroccan press boss known for his proximity with the circles of power, in a chronicle published by the Jerusalem Post. A rare occurrence in the Arab world, Morocco claims the “Jewish tributary” of its history, under the leadership of King Mohammed VI. Casablanca notably hosts a “museum of Moroccan Judaism”.
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