Israeli Summit Mixes Historic Symbolism With Sharp Disputes

SDE BOKER, Israel — For all its powerful geopolitical symbolism, the first-ever multilateral Arab-Israeli summit on Israeli soil was a largely transactional affair.

The meeting of the top diplomats of Israel, the United States and four Arab countries at a resort hotel in the Negev Desert on Monday was a marquee event that showcased Israel’s growing legitimacy among Middle Eastern leaders who for decades had shunned the Jewish state. The jovial candid photos of the leaders and their high-flown speeches amply testified to the event’s momentousness.

But the real business of the hastily arranged summit was urgent diplomacy, spurred by the war in Ukraine and the pending nuclear agreement with Iran: The United States wanted to press the other five countries to take a harder line against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, while they in turn wanted American assurances that Iran would be constrained.

The 18-hour summit produced no concrete public results, but there were hints of a behind-the-scenes thaw between the United Arab Emirates and the United States after weeks of growing tensions. Washington has been frustrated by the Emirates’ neutral response to the Russian invasion, while Emirati officials were angry at what they see as American indifference to Iranian threats to Emirati security.

The summit notably brought Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and his counterpart from the United Arab Emirates, Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, face to face, and their evident camaraderie raised hopes of a more substantial breakthrough when Mr. Blinken meets the de facto Emirati leader, Mohammed bin Zayed, on Tuesday in Morocco.

Mr. Blinken and Sheikh Abdullah displayed visible warmth to each other, two officials who attended the conference said. One photograph of a behind-the-scenes meeting appeared to show the two men sharing a joke, prompting smiles from other participants.

“Everybody got a little bit of what they wanted,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political scientist. “The photo that we saw the most is Sheikh Abdullah having a nice conversation and a laugh with Blinken.”

Beyond the apparent entente between the Americans and the Emiratis, the summit also allowed Israel and the four Arab countries to deepen their coordination on shared security threats, intelligence gathering, energy concerns and food supplies, according to officials who attended the summit.

It allowed the five Middle Eastern states — Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Israel — to collectively encourage the United States to remain engaged in the region, despite its focus on Russia and China. And it gave them the chance to lobby Mr. Blinken not to lift sanctions on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a key Iranian military force, in exchange for Iran’s curbing its nuclear ambitions.

“What we are doing here is making history — building a new regional architecture based on progress, technology, religious tolerance, security and intelligence cooperation,” said the Israeli foreign minister, Yair Lapid, who organized the conference.

“This new architecture, the shared capabilities we are building,” he added, “intimidates and deters our common enemies, first and foremost Iran and its proxies.”

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the summit was the fact that it took place at all.

When Israel signed normalization agreements with the U.A.E., Bahrain and Morocco in 2020, with the help of the Trump administration, it was unclear how sustainable or meaningful the relationships would be. The fact that all three gathered for the first time on Israeli soil, nearly two years later, shows how cemented those ties have become.

The presence of Egypt, the first Arab country to make peace with Israel in 1979, also highlighted how the 2020 agreements have encouraged Cairo to breathe new life into a relationship it had long neglected.

“This is our first time” in Israel, Sheikh Abdullah said in his closing statement. “If we are curious sometimes, and we want to know things and learn, it’s because although Israel has been part of this region for a very long time, we’ve not known each other. So it’s time to catch up.”

In that spirit, the participants confirmed that they would try to meet in a different country each year, and said they wanted to welcome more countries to the future gatherings.

But in private, the participants discussed their differences as well as their points of unity, including on Iran and the fallout from the Ukraine war.

The Emirates was frustrated by a perceived lack of American engagement after recent attacks by Iranian-backed Yemeni militants, the Houthis, on the Emirates and its ally, Saudi Arabia. The Emiratis, like the Israelis, also fear that American-backed efforts to persuade Iran to curb its nuclear program — negotiations are taking place in Vienna — won’t do enough to limit other kinds of Iranian aggression across the Middle East.

American officials felt betrayed by the Emirati decision to abstain from a United Nations Security Council vote to condemn the Russian invasion, and frustrated that the Emirates’ ignored American requests to increase its oil production to make the world less reliant on Russian fuel supplies.

The Emirates also raised eyebrows in Washington by maintaining warm ties with Russia — Sheikh Abdullah himself met with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, in Moscow this month — and by reviving ties with Syria: Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, visited Abu Dhabi this month, undermining American efforts to keep him estranged internationally.

For its part, Iran called the gathering an “evil conference” and a “betrayal of Palestinian aspirations for freedom.”

“Any measures to normalize and establish relations with Zionist terrorists and occupiers of Jerusalem is a stab in the back of Palestinian people,” Saeed Khatibzadeh, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, said, according to official Iranian media.

The summit did confirm that to a growing number of Arab states the lack of a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was no longer an obstacle to a partnership with Israel, even if such a partnership is still opposed by a majority of Arab civilians.

Mr. Blinken and three of the four Arab ministers used their closing remarks to restate their countries’ backing for a two-state solution to the Palestinian question. But the absence of the Palestinian leadership from the discussion highlighted how Israel’s ties with the wider Arab world have become divorced from Israeli-Palestinian relations.

On a hill opposite the hotel where the summit was held, protesters tried to draw attention to the Palestinians. One group held a banner that said: “Haven’t you forgotten someone?”

The decision to hold the summit in the tiny, remote desert town of Sde Boker, rather than in Jerusalem, was nevertheless a reminder that the status of Jerusalem remains a highly sensitive issue for the Arab countries that participated.

While they may be prepared to work with Israel, analysts say, they still want to avoid any gesture that symbolically undermines Palestinian hopes of statehood, including a future capital in East Jerusalem, which Israel captured from Jordan in 1967.

But Sde Boker, the final home of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who is buried nearby, has its own meaning. Ben-Gurion saw the establishment of desert towns like Sde Boker as an important emblem of the Zionist dream of resettling the land of Israel.

Those themes have particular resonance today, given recent tensions between nearby Bedouin communities and their Jewish neighbors in the Negev. Arab Bedouins demonstrated in large numbers in January to protest Israeli government-backed attempts to plant trees on desert land that the Bedouin claim as their own.

To guests staying this weekend at the Kedma Hotel, where the summit was taking place, the meeting was simply a charming surprise. Oren and Meital Dror, an Israeli couple celebrating their 15th wedding anniversary, were swimming in the pool just hours before the ministers arrived.

“An exciting experience,” said Oren Dror, a 42-year-old entrepreneur. “We will remember it for years.”

But, if he were alive today, “no one would be more stunned than Ben-Gurion himself” to see the summit, said Tom Segev, an Israeli historian and biographer of the Israeli leader.

“He never believed in real peace with the Arabs,” Mr. Segev said of Ben-Gurion. “On the other hand, he always attributed greater significance to the Negev than to the West Bank and Gaza. So he may have said, as was his way, ‘I always told you so.’”

Reporting was contributed by Rawan Sheikh Ahmad in Haifa, Israel; Myra Noveck in Jerusalem; Gabby Sobelman in Rehovot, Israel; Mona el-Naggar in Cairo; Aida Alami in Paris and Farnaz Fassihi in New York.