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Three members of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Federal National Council (FNC) visited Israel’s Knesset (Parliament) on Monday, becoming the first Emirati delegation to do so since the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020.
The delegation met a range of Israeli lawmakers, led by Knesset Speaker Mickey Levy. Ram Ben Barak MK, the Head of Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, called his guests from the UAE, “neighbours and brothers”.
In a speech at the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Ali Rashid al-Nuaimi, the Chairman of the FNC’s Defence Affairs, Interior and Foreign Affairs Committee said that they want people to look at the “big picture” of the Abraham Accords. He stressed: “It’s not a political agreement only, it’s not an issue related to security and defence. No, it is an agent of change for the whole region”.
Al-Nuaimi said that after the 2021 war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas “people were questioning what will happen to the Abraham Accords” but that he wants “everyone to know there is no way back, we are moving forward, we are not repeating history, we are writing history”.
Prior to arriving at the Knesset, the Emirati delegation paid a visit to Yad Vashem memorial museum, where they laid a wreath to honour the victims of the Holocaust.
In another example of the growing relationship between the two countries, on Sunday, Israel’s police chief, Commissioner Kobi Shabtai, held his first official visit to the UAE. The aim of the trip was to establish close professional relations with the Emirati police force, opening official lines of communication and institutionalising the cooperation between the senior staff in the Israeli and Emirati police forces.
