Last Thursday a young rabbi called Zvi Kogan, an Israeli-Moldovan citizen living in Abu Dhabi, went missing. An emissary of the Chabad movement, Kogan ran a kosher supermarket in Dubai and when he failed to turn up for meetings, his wife sounded the alarm. On Sunday, his body was found an hour-and-a-half from Dubai. An investigation involving Mossad now suggests that Kogan was abducted and murdered in an Iranian terror plot using Uzbek agents. The affair is chilling and complex.
To me, it is also especially resonant and sad. A few years ago, I went to Dubai for a few days to hang out with the local Jewish community. I’d heard a lot about how it had burgeoned since the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020. I’d also heard about the soon-to-open, splashy, new Abrahamic Family House complex in Abu Dhabi, which included a big synagogue.
I was desperate to know whether a normalised relationship with Israel, involving direct flights between Tel Aviv and Dubai – unthinkable a decade ago and still today for most other Arab countries – really meant that suddenly the Islamic UAE was actually a genuinely appealing, and, above all, safe proposition for Jews.
I was impressed by what I saw. My exposure took place at the Chabad house in Dubai, the locus of activity for the UAE community. I went on two long nights, first for a Purim party and then for Shabbat dinner. Although I detected hostility from my taxi driver on telling him my destination on the Purim night, which made me a bit uneasy, I dismissed it as being in my head.
Both events were well attended by a variety of interesting people. Purim saw plenty of out-there costumes and heaping vats of food, from hummus to noodles, with kids running around having fun. At Shabbat dinner, the crowd included quite a few people passing through town to attend conferences. The vibe was young, male, jet-set, educated and exuberant.
I also met a core community composed of mostly young people who had moved from Israel for better business conditions and more affordable lifestyles. There was a Ukrainian who was figuring out her next move in light of Russia’s invasion. There was an Italian-Jewish woman who was the Middle Eastern head of marketing at a major fashion house. There was the sixtysomething collector of fine whiskies who had lived in Dubai for decades, in a subtle dance with officialdom over his Jewishness prior to the Accords, who raved about life in the Gulf.
I also met the head of Chabad, his wife and kids, and other movers and shakers in the local chapter of the organisation, a crowd that had been sent from the New York branch. They all told me that they felt less antisemitism in Dubai than in New York and that they could wear their Jewish clothing, including kippot, out and about in the city and encounter friendly curiosity at most.
The UAE’s first chief rabbi, Levi Duchman, dropped by on Purim but I didn’t catch him. He spent Shabbat in Abu Dhabi. He seemed a busy man, much in demand, constantly driving between the two emirates. Kogan was a close aide to Duchman.
From Duchman’s fans I heard about the kosher provisions blossoming in Dubai, from catering companies to restaurants to the supermarket, which seems to have been the one run by Kogan. They admitted, when I asked, that they were not technically allowed by law to worship in a synagogue or anything that counted as one, but they were sure that this would come.
Mostly, then, they were selling it to me. Yet I couldn’t let go of a niggling sense that it must all be a bit too good to be true, a fear that leopards can’t fully change their spots overnight.
In the event, it has proved to be so. Not because Dubai and Abu Dhabi are themselves hostile to the Jews, including the Israelis, who live there. But because, in being an Islamic country, positioned in the Gulf and with the classic historical enmity to Israel rooted in all the usual sinister traditions and ideological perversions of the Islamic world, it is not sufficiently hostile to the kinds of people willing to commit terror to kill Jews.
The UAE is not entirely safe, especially for Israelis. There are too many Iranians operating there in terror cells. And there are too many agents of other regimes working in conjunction with each other and the Iranians – all with an easy escape to those countries, or indeed Turkey, which is where the killers of Kogan seem have gone.
The leopard changed its spots. But not enough. I fear that since October 7, the merry band of Jews I met in the UAE will be feeling not only a little more circumspect but possibly frightened, too.
