In a momentous development, the first direct commercial flight between Israel and a Gulf state took place today. El Al flight 971, bearing a greeting of peace painted on its fuselage in Arabic, Hebrew and English and carrying White House adviser and First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner, US National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien and Israel’s National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat, flew from Ben Gurion airport to Abu Dhabi.
For those eagerly tracking the flight, there was a particularly emotional moment when the Israeli plane passed through Saudi Arabian airspace, at one point over Riyadh.
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For so long, Saudi Arabia has been the epicentre of Sunni Islamic hostility to Israel. Until now, Israeli aircraft were denied passage through its airspace. But the normalisation agreement with the UAE which gave rise to flight 971 could not have happened without the Saudis’ approval. Might one now dare to hope that a new and positive chapter is now opening in the century-old war against Israel’s existence by the Arab world?
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