Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and an adviser to Benyamin Netanyahu will inaugurate Tuesday the first direct commercial flight between Israel and Morocco, the fourth country in the Arab world to announce this year a normalization of its relations with the Hebrew state.
Tomorrow, we will, with pride, finalize the agreements of Abraham [name of the agreements of normalization, editor’s note] with the first direct commercial flight, from El Al, from Israel to Morocco, declared Monday evening in Jerusalem Mr. Kushner during a press briefing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.
The son-in-law of the US president and architect of the Trump plan for the Middle East, crushed by the Palestinians, thanked his friend Mohammed VI for making Morocco the fourth Arab country – after the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan – to have agreed this year to a normalization of its relations with Israel.
50,000 Israelis have just traveled to Dubai, and what is happening there is a revolution, because the Emiratis have welcomed them warmly […] and the same is going to happen now in Rabat and Casablanca, Mr. Netanyahu said.
Before the pandemic, Morocco received between 50,000 and 70,000 Jewish tourists each year, most of them indirectly from Israel.
You will see that this peace between the Jews and the Arabs outside of Israel is creating a new, positive dynamic between the Jews and the Arabs within Israel itself, added the Israeli prime minister, adding that his special security adviser, Meir Ben-Shabbat, will be on the flight on Tuesday.
This Tel Aviv-Rabat flight, which should be followed by the opening of the airline between the two countries, will be accompanied by the signing of several agreements, according to the program in preparation in Rabat.
By agreeing to officially relaunch its relations with Israel, Morocco obtained in return the recognition from President Trump of its sovereignty over Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony that has been disputed for decades by the separatists of the Polisario Front, supported by Algeria.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrations banned in Morocco
The agreement also proposes the opening of an American consulate in Western Sahara and an American investment program, which the Moroccan press ensures colossal, the reopening of diplomatic offices in Tel Aviv and Rabat, closed at the beginning of the years. 2000, and the development of bilateral economic cooperation.
But like Western Sahara, supporting the Palestinians is seen as a national cause in Morocco.
If, according to the official MAP agency, Moroccans celebrated the Moroccan nature of the Sahara all over the world, two pro-Palestinian demonstrations were banned last week in Rabat, with an impressive mobilization of the police.
The Palestinians, from secular Fatah of Mahmoud Abbas to the Islamists of Hamas, oppose these agreements because they believe that the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab world should have been done after an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and not before .
Israel, which has hundreds of thousands of Jews of Moroccan origin, and Morocco, where North Africa’s largest Jewish community still lives, had already maintained official relations by the end of the 1990s.
Cooperation in the field of intelligence
Two diplomatic offices liaised after the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, until their closure after the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000.
The new agreement formalizes a de facto partnership dating back more than 60 years, including cooperation in the field of intelligence and security, recalled Ahmed Charaï, Moroccan press boss known for his proximity to circles of power, in a statement. column published by the Jerusalem Post.
Because, if relations were officially suspended, the links have never ceased: bilateral trade represented 149 million dollars between 2014 and 2017, according to statistics published by the Moroccan press, and Morocco is among the five African customers. the most important in Israel, according to a bulletin from the France-Israel Chamber of Commerce.
A rare occurrence in the Arab world, Morocco claims the Jewish tributary of its history, under the leadership of King Mohammed VI. Casablanca notably hosts a museum of Moroccan Judaism.
