A spokesman for the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has condemned attempts aimed at normalizing diplomatic relations between some Arab countries with the Israeli regime, describing such behavior as “treason.”
In a press release on Sunday, Abdul-Latif al-Qanua said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s move to welcome Tel Aviv’s warming relations with Arab countries was “a reflection of how deep these ties have gone, and the level some Arab regimes have sunk to.”
He warned that the normalization of Arab states’ ties with the Israeli regime would harm the Palestinian cause.
He stressed the importance of supporting the Palestinian people through prosecuting the Israeli war criminals at the International Criminal Court (ICC) instead of establishing new relations with “an illegal entity.”
The UAE minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation on Saturday tweeted an article supporting an alliance between Arab countries and Israel. The posting received an immediate welcome from the Israeli prime minister.
“I welcome the closer relations between Israel and many Arab states. The time has come for normalization and peace,” Netanyahu tweeted in a dual-language English-Arabic tweet.
Sheikh Abdullah’s tweet linking to an analysis in The Spectator garnered media attention on Saturday, including 1,600 retweets and over 4,000 likes. The article he linked to, written by former Tony Blair advisor and ex-Council on Foreign Relations fellow Ed Husain, argued that Netanyahu’s 2018 Oman visit could be seen as a watershed moment for Israel’s traditionally difficult relations with many of its Middle Eastern neighbours.
“A new narrative is emerging in the Middle East. New maps of the Muslim mind are being drawn and old hatreds are on the run. The anti-Semitic craze to destroy Israel was powerful in the 1960s, uniting Egypt’s President Nasser with his fellow Arabs. But now, Sunni Arab neighbours are changing course,” Husain wrote.
