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“Israel and the United Arab Emirates announced on Thursday that they will normalise diplomatic ties and forge a broad new relationship… Under the accord, which U.S. President Donald Trump helped broker, Israel agreed to suspend its planned annexation of areas of the occupied West Bank.” Reuters
Many on both sides are encouraged by the deal and see the potential for other Arab states to take similar steps:
“For once, Trump didn’t need to manufacture any superlatives. This was, as he tweeted, a ‘HUGE’ achievement. The UAE joins Jordan, which reached a peace agreement with Israel in 1994 and Egypt, which signed a pact with its former enemy in 1979…
“Quiet contact between Israel and the UAE has been an open secret for more than a decade… [Israeli PM Benjamin] Netanyahu and MBZ [Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed] were drawn together by shared interests: They agreed that Iran and its proxies threatened the Middle East; they mistrusted the Obama administration and its secret nuclear diplomacy with Iran; they favored more trade and investment across the region; and they liked the Trump administration’s transactional realpolitik… Trump’s surprise announcement might be an ‘August surprise’ in the presidential campaign. But it’s welcome news for Israel, the Arabs and the United States.”
David Ignatius, Washington Post
“The Abraham Agreement is huge. The deal brokered by the Trump administration breaks the Gulf Arab bloc against Israel, a massive diplomatic coup for the White House. The terms of the deal also shows other Arab states that Trump can exert a moderating influence on Israel to boot…
“Now that the UAE has made this move, one has to wonder who’s next. Saudi Arabia might be the most significant, but its insistence on proselytizing the extreme Wahhabi strain of Sunni Islam would make a reversal on recognizing Israel the most difficult. The smaller states in the Gulf might have to move first before the Saudis could sell it to the hardliners in the royal family and clerics in the kingdom. If this starts a chain reaction of recognition for Israel in the region, not only will that bolster Netanyahu’s standing at home but it will make the Palestinians start thinking that a smaller sovereign state beats nothing at all.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
Other opinions below.
“President Trump’s Mideast strategy has been to strongly back Israel, support the Gulf monarchies, and press back hard against Iranian imperialism. His liberal critics insisted this would lead to catastrophe that never came, and on Thursday it delivered a diplomatic achievement: The United Arab Emirates and Israel agreed to normalize relations, making the UAE the first Arab League country to recognize the Jewish state in 20 years…
“The UAE deal strengthens the anti-Iran coalition and withdraws an excuse—annexation—that the left could use to attack Israel. Whoever wins in November, the breakthrough leaves the U.S. in a better position in the Middle East.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“It’s notable that the UAE has signed its agreement with Israel when there are no peace negotiations whatsoever. And that is the most striking element of the normalization agreement. It reflects two realities of today’s Middle East: First, Israel and most Gulf states have been quietly cooperating for the past 20 years… The other important reality is that no one in the Middle East can say with a straight face that Israel is the source of the region’s instability…
“Israel had nothing to do with the collapse of the U.N.-recognized government in Yemen — the Iranian-supported Houthis did. Israel had nothing to do with the collapse of Syria — that was the fault of the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad. And Israel had nothing to do with the rise of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. In all of these cases, the regimes and groups most vocally opposed to Israel also served as the region’s chief arsonists… In assessing the region, the UAE’s leaders have seen one state thrive as its neighbors burned. They have chosen the strong horse.”
Eli Lake, Bloomberg
“For nearly four years, Washington foreign policy experts and Obama administration alumni warned that the Trump administration was jeopardizing any prospects for Middle East peace. By withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, we were told, the U.S. would alienate itself from its allies. By moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, it would inflame the anger of millions of Arab Muslims. By recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, it would estrange the Arab states. By maintaining close relations with the Israeli government, it would imperil the lives of Palestinians…
“President Trump has now proven that not starting new wars, bringing U.S. troops home, and signing peace deals is only possible when an outsider ignores the Washington foreign policy establishment.”
Richard Grenell, The Hill
“Obama and Biden do deserve ‘credit,’ just not in the way Biden claims. I think their years-long effort to court Iran spooked the Sunni states so badly that the looming prospect of a Biden presidency has the leaders of those states considering bold gambits right now like the one we saw this morning. If you’re expecting your patrons in Washington to shift from trying to isolate Iran to trying to build relations with Iran come January, you might want to seize the opportunity immediately to build an anti-Iran alliance with other regional powers.”
Allahpundit, Hot Air
“For Netanyahu, the agreement offers a positive headline at a moment when a pandemic-induced economic crisis is eroding his popularity and threatening to fracture his fragile coalition government… For Trump, the agreement bolsters a relatively scant foreign-policy record ahead of the 2020 election… As for the Palestinians, the deal leaves non-Israeli inhabitants of the West Bank subject to the military rule of an occupying power and 2 million Gazans living under an Israeli blockade on a small strip of land that has no sustainable source of drinking water and which the United Nations has deemed ‘uninhabitable.’”
Eric Levitz, New York Magazine
“A Saudi academic told me that Trump was easier for him to understand than for me, because I live in a country where nepotism is a crime, and he lives in one where it is the system of government. The idea that a president would appoint his son-in-law to manage the most sensitive aspects of his administration offends me. To a Saudi, he said, it is just how things get done…
“Every politically connected Saudi knows that Kushner has direct communication lines to Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), the crown prince and de facto ruler of the country, and to Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ), the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and counterpart to MbS in the UAE. There is no remotely comparable Palestinian figure with whom Kushner or Trump could chitchat or bargain. So it should be no surprise that the first harvest of this administration’s Middle East strategy would be an agreement that ignores the Palestinians altogether and instead deals with one of these billionaire princes.”
Graeme Wood, The Atlantic
“The UAE… understood from conversations with the administration that formal peace would give it access to previously off-limits U.S. weaponry, such as advanced drones. Until now, these weapons had been denied to them because of the U.S. commitment to preserving Israel’s qualitative military edge… The United States provided Egypt advanced weaponry after President Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel. Similarly, Jordan did not get F-16s until King Hussein concluded a peace treaty with Israel. The equation of easing the military edge requirements when a country makes peace with Israel is now going to be applied again to the UAE.”
Dennis Ross, Washington Post
“This deal will certainly encourage the other gulf sheikhdoms — Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — all of which have had covert and overt business and intelligence dealings with Israel, to follow the Emirates’ lead. They will not want to let the U.A.E. have a leg up in being able to marry its financial capital with Israel’s cybertechnology, agriculture technology and health care technology…
“Free advice for [President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud] Abbas: Come back to the table now and say you view the Trump plan as a ‘floor,’ not a ‘ceiling’ for Palestinian aspirations. You will find a lot of support from Trump, the Europeans and the Arabs for that position. You still have leverage. Israel still has to deal with you, because your people in the West Bank are not going to just disappear, no matter what happens with the U.A.E. and Israel.”
Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
