Netanyahu calls UAE a ‘democracy,’ putting spotlight on human rights
Critics of the UAE and Israel have been quick to pick up on Netanyahu’s comment.
By SETH J. FRANTZMANBenjamin Netanyahu(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to fumble an attempt at praising the United Arab Emirates. In a recent interview he called the monarchy an “advanced democracy” and even posted a video with this laudatory comment, before deleting it. Now the comment and the embarrassment of deleting it has caused the usual social media storm for a day.But the attempt to praise the UAE and asserting that it and Israel share common values spotlight a larger question about how the UAE-Israel deal is being perceived.Critics of the UAE and Israel have been quick to pick up on Netanyahu’s comment. Turkey is one of the harshest critics of the Israel-UAE deal. The pro-government Anadolu news agency in Turkey mocked the comment by noting that the UAE is not a democracy and that it is rated as “not free” by Freedom House, a US research group. This is a bit ironic since Turkey is the largest jailer of journalists in the world and also run by an authoritarian regime. But Anadolu’s point is that the Emirates is far from being any kind of progressive ideal.At the same time, other critics of Israel and Netanyahu have slammed the deal. Ben Rhodes, the former Obama adviser, has recently slammed Israel as an authoritarian regime similar to Belarus, Russia, Egypt and Turkey. Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser for Bernie Sanders when Sanders was running for president, tweeted on August 16 slamming Israel’s deal with the UAE. He called the UAE a “repressive monarchy” and excoriated it for playing a role in the war in Yemen. Now the UAE will “have pro-Israel advocacy organizations writing stuff like this about them,” he wrote. He was referring to a tweet by the American Jewish Committee that emphasized the UAE’s commitment to fighting extremism and promoting diversity.THE UAE is sometimes called “progressive” by its supporters on social media. But the term doesn’t mean the same thing as it does in the West. The UAE is not a democracy, and there are many aspects of it that are controlled from the top down by a government that attempts to be benevolent monarchs, tolerating some aspects of an open society while controlling many others. In this sense the UAE is similar to, but often leading, its neighbors such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait or even Iran across the water.In 2019 the UAE pushed an annual theme of a “year of tolerance” and has sought to open up the country to other faiths and religions. The UAE is a model of tolerance, coexistence and peace, Gulf News stated last year. Universities and the leading Nahyan family in Abu Dhabi all stress this theme. The UAE welcomed its first Hindu temple last year, a major symbol for the many foreign workers from places such as India. The Emirates has also become more open to the Jewish community. Relations with Israel follow from this openness.The UAE also hosts literary festivals and other cultural events that are supposed to showcase how open the country is. All of this is a major symbol of change and attempts to differentiate the UAE from the extremism that can be found in Iran or the reactionary terrorist views of groups such as ISIS or even the Muslim Brotherhood, which the UAE opposes. The Emirates has tried to emphasize diversity at home and in the region.Talking about tolerance, diversity and coexistence is important in a region that has generally not become more tolerant in the last 100 years. However, this is often in contrast to complaints of human rights violations against migrant and foreign workers, who compose some 90% of the UAE’s private sector workforce. In the past, allegations of abuse, nonpayment of wages, confiscated passports and sexual assault of domestic workers were common.The UAE said in 2016 that it improved the rights of temporary workers by providing additional oversight and improving transparency. But stories continue of abuses of maids and even of women from places like Kenya being kept in conditions they refer to as similar to slavery. Stories of these abuses are widespread in neighboring states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and elsewhere. “They see us as slaves,” Kenyan women told The Guardian in interviews in 2019 about life in the Gulf.FOR ISRAEL and the UAE, these issues of human rights can be portrayed through the lens of two states that are attempting to do a better job than in the past, and to present a better future than other countries in the region when it comes to tolerance and coexistence.
For instance, Israel has its own laundry list of allegations of abuses against foreign workers and migrants. It was not so long ago that Israel was excoriated for attempts to deport people from Sudan and other African countries who had crossed through Sinai to Israel. In addition, Israel was slammed for trying to deport foreign workers who had children in the country. This is only the tip of the iceberg of accusations against Israel for abuses in the West Bank and racism against minorities.While the UAE is not a democracy, it may be making more strides than many countries in the region to improve. That means that while Iran is busy hanging people and gunning down protesters, and while Turkey, which was once a democracy, has silenced all critical media and now imprisons people for social media critiques of the president, the UAE appears to be going in a more positive direction.These issues are relative because the UAE is not a democracy, and, given the fact that the majority of its population are not citizens but foreign workers, it doesn’t seem clear how it might chart a path to more democratization.In contrast, Israel is a vibrant democracy but is criticized for controlling the West Bank and denying Palestinians a path to a state. This means Israel and the UAE are united in visions of a future as well as having many challenges in terms of human rights.
