JEWISH WORLD

By DORE GOLD T he recent decision of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to sign a peace treaty with Israel should not have come as a complete surprise. For the UAE has stood out as one of the most stable Arab states and a key ally of the West as a whole. Against the turbulent develop- ments in much of the Arab world emanating from what is called the Arab Spring, the UAE looks like an island of stability. Indeed, this is an attribute in which the UAE leader- ship takes pride. In 2011, the coun- try’s leading think tank, the Abu Dhabi-based Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research (ECSSR), asserted that the UAE had become “a model of political stability at the regional and global levels.” To prove its point, the think tank, which is headed by Sheikh Mo- hammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, made reference to a recent report by Bank of America/Merrill Lynch that ranked the UAE as one of the most immune countries to political risks in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa. There have been individuals who have protested for more political li- berties in the UAE, in the spirit of the early Arab Spring. Pro-demo- cracy activists were put on trial in June 2011. These cases received international attention, but never turned into a movement that threat- ened to bring down the government. The country’s leadership did not loosen up its instruments of control: It continued to make the formation of political parties a violation of the law. Some professional associations were disbanded. The UAE govern- ment was willing to absorb interna- tional criticism when it closed down democracy promotion initiatives sponsored by Western govern- ments, like the National Democratic Institute in Dubai and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, allied with German Chancellor Angela Mer- kel’s ruling party. The UAE re- mained stable and continued to be exceptional in the Middle East re- gion. T here are structural reasons that can explain the UAE’s special status at present. Across the Arab state system, those societies in which no particular ethnographic- religious group is demographically dominant have been the most vul- nerable to internal convulsions since 2011. Thus, Iraq, with its amalgam of Sunni Arabs, Shi’ite Arabs and Kurds, and Syria, with its combina- tion of Alawites, Druze, Sunni Arabs and Christians, have been the states in which the breakdown of internal order has been most vio- lent. In contrast, in Saudi Arabia, Sunni Arabs constitute 85 to 90 per- cent of the population, while in Jordan an estimated 97 percent of the population are Sunni. Neither of these kingdoms has experienced what went on in Iraq and Syria. In past decades, prevailing inter- nal groups, like the Sunnis in Iraq or the Alawites in Syria, were able to sustain their positions of political dominance with the assistance of an external force, like the Soviet bloc, which helped run the security serv- ices in those countries, thus ensur- ing a high degree of internal con- trol. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s con- tributed to the challenge faced by these regimes. In the Persian Gulf, this role was largely assumed during the colonial period by Great Britain. But by 1972, Great Britain withdrew from the Gulf region, after controlling the external policies of the Gulf sheikh- doms, which had been British pro- tectorates. From Kuwait down to Oman, the British left behind only small teams of advisers. These were sometimes reinforced by small con- tingents of Jordanian forces en- gaged in military training. Where does the UAE stand in light of what has been going on in the Middle East? The UAE is a fed- eration of seven hereditary mini- states, led by Abu Dhabi. It is sur- rounded by larger and more power- ful neighbors, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, which have threatened its territorial integrity in the past. One striking demographic feature is that only 11 percent of the UAE popula- tion are actually citizens of the country. Foreign workers that come mainly from the Indian subconti- nent make up around 50 percent of the workforce. Thus, a significant portion of the population is ethni- cally alienated from the leadership, which is of Arab origin. Since the main minority groups are completely outside the UAE political system, the main potential source for internal rifts comes from any threat to the federal structure. Each federal emirate is led by Why The UAE Is So Stable In a region marked by religious extremism and political conflicts continued on page 18 JEWISH WORLD • OCTOBER 16-22, 2020 11 What perhaps explains the cohesion of the UAE is that one region Abu Dhabi dominates the federal government. REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK Against the turbulent developments in much of the Arab world emanating from what is called the Arab Spring, the UAE looks like an island of stability, “a model of political stability at the regional and global levels,” in the words of a recent finding.