Arab-Israeli conflict Israel, Morocco to Normalize Relations

The White House announced Thursday, 10 December, that Morocco would normalize its relations with Israel, as three other Arab countries have already done recently, and that the United States recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara.

Rabat has confirmed the imminent resumption of its diplomatic relations with Israel. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, also welcomed a “historic” agreement, referring to the establishment shortly of “direct flights” between the two countries.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement in power in the Gaza Strip,described this agreement as “political sin.”

Israeli business people have been doing business in Morocco since the late 1980s, and Morocco and Israel had already opened liaison offices in Rabat and Tel Aviv in the early 1990s. These offices were close in 2000, during the second Palestinian intifada, but the economic and business relationship between the two countries continued.

Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have already agreed in recent months to normalize their relations with Israel. The two Gulf states already had thriving economic relationship with Israel since 1994.

Sudan has also given its agreement in principle to normalize relationship with Israel, and observers say that the recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia is “inescapable.”

Since early this year, Morocco has indicated its willingness to formalize its relationship with Israel in return for U.S. support for Morocco’s position on Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony. The territory has been under Moroccan control since the early 1980s (for a while, following the withdrawal of Spain in 1976, it was controlled jointly by Morocco and Mauritania), but the local Sahrawi people, and their armed organization, the Polisario, have been fighting for independence. Neighboring Algeria has been supporting the Polisario.

Morocco is willing to offer the Sahrawi limited autonomy, but decades of UN-mediated talks – at one point headed by James Baker, the former U.S. secretary of state — have so far yielded no solution to the conflict.

Negotiations involving Morocco, the Polisario, Algeria, and Mauritania have stalled since March 2019.

A tentative agreement reached in 1991 calls for a referendum on the future of the territory, and the UN position is that that referendum should be held, but the two sides have not agreed on who should take part in the referendum.

Until a decade ago, most members of the African Union (AU) supported independence for the Sahrawi people, but over the last few years, more and more AU members have come to accept the Moroccan position.