Friends are not always friends

I'm not really the type to spend time watching the news, but when the Abraham Accords were signed in 2020, I jumped out of my chair with joy!

However recently there was a UN Security Council discussion about Palestine and one of the enthusiastic supporters was the United Arab Emirates. I was surprised, shocked even.

With the United Arab Emirates we have so many joint projects, including philatelic projects which are just amazing, and we even held a joint exhibition which was just cool! We have guys from the area who are like family, but the question is - are the Emiratis (and Bahrain too) friends or not?

Just before the signing of the Accords, there was a decision by the Permanent Arab Committee in 2018, that approved the issuance of a commemorative stamp titled "Al-Quds - The Capital of Palestine". In 2019 the United Arab Emirates decided to comply with the decision and in 2019 issued a stamp going along with this. We can see the stamp on the right. Yes this surprised me although it was issued a year before the signing of peace agreements, but we had reasonable relations before then!

But were the Emirates always friendly towards us or were they in a state of war? Depends on who you ask. In 1998 I was sent by the company I worked for, to work in South Africa and we all know how much South Africa, these days, is a friend of Israel. In South Africa, the local distributor brought me a document to fill out and sign that the company's product is not Israeli and that I have to obey the instructions of the Ministry for the Economic Boycott of Israel whose address was in Abu Dhabi (the capital of the UAE). The office was completely governmental and was fully exempt from postage as seen in the 1974 envelope shown below. 

The Boycott Ministry continued to operate in 1998 and thereafter. When did the ministry's activities cease? I personally do not know, but it was hinted that the ministry ceased to exist when the Abraham Accords were signed. By the way, this registered envelope is one of two that I have seen in my forty years of collecting. I believe there are more but they haven't been released to the market yet. For those asking, I didn't sign the document because it was a lie on my part, of course, because the product is Israeli and so am I.

Is this the only activity of the UAE "against us"? The answer is no! They supported the first Intifada that broke out in 1987. They wanted to show that they supported the 'struggle', so they added a special slogan cancel to mail that left the country, such as the parcel receipt that you can see, which was sent to India. The cancel was only used in 1988 and in forty years of collecting, I have seen a small number of items, all parcel certificates, stamped with this cancel. I tried to check the reason for the lack of use of the cancel, but people don't have an answer. To them, it's not an important enough item for someone to investigate. Well, it's my fault too because I didn't keep researching the cancel. Personally, I think this is a very beautiful cancel. I once had three of these items signed with a cancel in support for this intifada.

There are more examples but I'll discuss Bahrain, which is also one of the signatories of the Abraham Accords. As you remember, in 1973 in the Yom Kippur war we were caught not exactly ready. After the war, oil-producing countries began a boycott that caused a global shortage and increased prices. Bahrain did not participate in the war with armed forces but as part of a wider group of Arab states that supported the cause against Israel by other means, such as participating in the oil embargo imposed by the Arab oil producers. Bahrain decided to impose taxation on all mail sent through the Bahrain Post Office , a tax collected at a flat rate of 5 fils collected by selling a tax stamp affixed to each item of mail. On the stamp was written simply "Al Majhood Al Harbee" which translates as "the war effort". This is quite misleading as the funds did not go to support the military campaign but to help the refugees of the conflict. Who knows if any actually received the finds or how a refugee was defined. The stamp displayed is not exactly cheap. It's worth about $100 but so far I haven't seen it on a real postally used letter. The stamp was issued in November 1973 and was replaced in March 1974 and perhaps this explains the difficulty of finding it on letters. There are quite a few of the replacement stamp.

So there you have it, the countries of the first Abrahamic agreements were not always friendly towards us and acted against us, unlike today when they are friendly towards us and in the act against us.