Jerusalem, the golden bowl — and somewhere out over the Arabian peninsula on Sunday, a very quiet aeroplane. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secretly visited the United Arab Emirates and met with the country’s president, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed — so an Israeli source familiar with the visit tells CNN. Iran dominated the agenda, the source says, Iran being the arena where the two countries have been deepening their cooperation right through the current war. Netanyahu’s own office did not confirm the visit. The UAE foreign ministry did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. So: a prime minister flies to a Gulf capital, meets a president, and officially... nobody went anywhere at all.

The great Gold-Plated Waltz of the Abraham Accords! It has its own choreography by now, and the first rule of the choreography is that everyone pretends there is no dancing. Netanyahu has never made a publicly acknowledged official visit to the UAE. Back in May, his office let it be known that the prime minister had secretly visited in March, during the early days of the Iran war — a “historic breakthrough,” no less. The UAE foreign ministry swatted that one away as “completely unfounded.” During the war Israel is also said to have deployed an Iron Dome missile defense system to the Emirates, and Israeli officials describe security cooperation between the two countries as unprecedented. Unprecedented, historic, breakthrough — and strictly between us, please.

The timing! The rare trip, if confirmed, comes exactly one month before Israel’s October 27 election — and it lands smack in the middle of the ugliest controversy in Israeli political life. Reporting by Haaretz and The New York Times has alleged that Bin Zayed himself warned Netanyahu of a major Hamas operation in the days before October 7, 2023. The Atlantic separately reported that Egypt’s intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, flew to Israel on September 26 of that year to warn that Gaza would “blow up.” And on Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that there were at least three Egyptian warnings conveyed to Israel about Gaza — the last of them in a phone call to Netanyahu himself, just days before the attack.

When necessary, all relevant intelligence has been and continues to be communicated between the relevant entities.<source:UAE Foreign Ministry statement, earlier this month>

Note what that statement, issued after the first reports of the Bin Zayed warning, does not do: it does not deny the call. The ministry said it “does not comment on media stories or speculation regarding conversations between government leaders” — and then pointedly vouched for the pipeline. According to CNN, an Israeli source familiar with the matter says Netanyahu’s office tried to get the UAE to deny the report outright, and the UAE would only agree to issue that statement about intelligence sharing. The prime minister’s office, for its part, has repeatedly denied receiving any warning at all and has dismissed the reports as fabricated lies aimed at damaging him electorally. His Likud party went further, posting on the prime minister’s own X account an allegation of “blatant foreign interference” in the election by Mohammed Dahlan, the UAE-based Palestinian politician — while providing no evidence for the claim.

Enter the challengers, smelling October in the air. Gadi Eizenkot — currently polling as Netanyahu’s main rival in the upcoming elections — said Saturday that the revelation about the warning settles everything.

leaves no room for doubt: Netanyahu led, with blindness, arrogance and irresponsibility, the State of Israel to the greatest disaster in its history.<source:Gadi Eizenkot, Saturday>

And so the aircraft keeps making its runs — Jerusalem to Abu Dhabi and back, cargo of denials in the hold, cooperation painted on the fuselage. The prime minister’s rivals have made accountability for the failure to prevent October 7 the beating heart of their campaigns; the prime minister answers with a war alliance nobody will photograph and a warning everybody will launder through a communiqué. In four weeks the voters get their say. Until then, all relevant intelligence will continue to be communicated between the relevant entities — and all relevant visits will continue not to have happened.