El Al flight 791 made history on Aug. 31 when it flew directly from Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi. However, it could have taken off four years ago. This week's historic event could have happened in 2016, when “regional peace” was taking shape in a series of clandestine contacts among various parties. The cast included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli opposition leader Knesset member Isaac Herzog, US Secretary of State John Kerry and a series of Arab leaders including Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates.
For Herzog, the former Zionist Camp party leader, current chair of the Jewish Agency and presidential hopeful, the missed opportunity was surely bitter. He could have been an honored guest on the flight. Throughout 2016, he conducted secret negotiations with Netanyahu on joining his government. The idea was that Herzog and his party would join Netanyahu’s radical-right coalition government to shore up its slim margin of Knesset support (61 of 120 seats), and together the two would launch a regional peace initiative. They intended to upend the Middle Eastern paradigm that set Israeli peace with the Palestinians as a precondition for official ties with the Arab world, abandon the Palestinian issue and start instead from the outside and work their way inward.
