By Alexander Cornwell
ABU DHABI (Reuters) – The diplomatic adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates on Saturday said the United States needs to push for a quick end to the Israel-Hamas war and that a new process must be found for the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian issue or the United States would be seen as ineffective.
Anwar Gargash also said that Israel’s policy of containment that has been the “hallmark” of the Palestinian issue for the past two decades had failed and called for a new approach that addresses refugees, borders and East Jerusalem.
“US involvement will be seen by when we end this war, the quicker the better, and whether we can have another you know, sort of process at problem solving, at issue solving,” he said at a policy conference in the capital Abu Dhabi.
“If this crisis continues, and especially the humanitarian side, and if this crisis, brings us back full circle, to the old containment policy of pre-Seventh of October, I think the American role here is not going to be, forget right and wrong, is not going to be seen as effective,” he added.
The UAE was the most prominent Arab state to sign the 2020 Abraham Accords, a pact brokered by the U.S. to establish diplomatic ties with Israel that broke with decades of pan-Arab policy that called for a Palestinian state before normalisation.
A Gulf Arab power, the UAE is one the United States’ closest partners in the Middle East and hosts U.S. forces. It has also pursued a more independent and assertive foreign policy over the past decade, demonstrated by its ties with Israel.
(Reporting by Alexander Cornwell; editing by Alexandra Hudson and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
