Trump Announces Peace Deal Between Israel, UAE; ‘Full Normalization’ Joel B. Pollak 13 Aug 2020
President Donald Trump announced Thursday morning that Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had reached a peace deal and would achieve the “full normalization” of relations, the first peace agreement between Israel and any Gulf Arab state.
President Trump called the new agreement the “Abraham Accord,” after the common ancestor of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. In a statement (above), the president called the agreement a “historic diplomatic breakthrough.”
Trump told reporters that he had spoken by telephone to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan. “This is a truly historic moment. Not since the Israel-Jordan peace treaty was signed more than 25 years ago has so much progress been made towards peace in the Middle East.”
President Trump added: “Now that the ice has been broken, I expect more Arab and Muslim countries will follow the United Arab Emirates’ lead.”
Relations between Israel and the UAE have been improving over the course of the Trump administration, as the president reversed the policies of the Obama-Biden administration, which encouraged Iran to become a regional power — much to the alarm of both Israel and the Sunni Arab states. (Biden is running on a promise to restore the failed Iran nuclear deal.)
White House adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had taken the lead in negotiating toward Middle East peace. Speaking at the White House, Kushner lauded the president for taking an “untraditional approach” to the Middle East, “focusing on common interests as opposed to allowing them to focus on their common grievances.”
Kushner addressed the people of the region: “The problems of the past do not condemn you to a future with conflict. There is a lot of hope, and a lot of potential, and this will benefit you, and this will also benefit people here in America.”
National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien added that President Trump had “inherited a mess” in the Middle East from the Obama-Biden administration. He applauded Trump for removing the risk to the U.S. from the region by defeating ISIS; boosting U.S. energy independence; supporting Israel (by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital, and Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights); reaching a deal to bring troops home from Afghanistan; and the new Israel-UAE peace deal.
Zitat2020 saved its weirdest twist for August: Jared Kushner’s going to win a Nobel prize.
They’ll never give it to Trump, not even if he negotiates world peace. But Jared, the White House’s foremost Democrat, might be acceptable to the committee.
His most intriguing comments this morning after normalized relations between Israel and the UAE were announced haven’t been noticed much elsewhere, to my surprise:
“There is a good chance that another country could make a deal with Israel in the coming days,” Kushner said at the White House.
Speaking to reporters after he unveiled the historic agreement, Trump suggested more diplomatic breakthroughs between Israel and its Muslim neighbors in the region were expected.
“Things are happening that I can’t talk talk about,” he said.
The Israel/UAE deal is the biggest foreign policy achievement of Trump’s presidency. Could there be a bigger one within the week?
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The smart money on whom Kushner has in mind is Qatar, where the U.S. has military bases and which has played diplomatic roles for the White House before, such as by hosting U.S./Taliban talks. But an interesting alternative possibility is Bahrain, the headquarters for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet and a country with an unusual sectarian arrangement. A majority of the population is Shiite but the king is Sunni, and a Sunni king who’s worried about Iran stirring unrest among his Shiite natives might have extra incentive to join a U.S-Israel-Sunni anti-Iran coalition. Either way, I think Trump and Kushner want a second country to follow the UAE in order to create some momentum towards peace, in the belief that the more Sunni nations normalize relations with Israel, the easier it is for holdouts to break their own embargoes and normalize as well. There’s hope for a “domino effect” here.
.Trump will never be given a Nobel Peace Prize .“There is a good chance that another country could make a deal with Israel in the coming days” .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 this works out it will be a nice end run around the obstreperous people called "Palestinians"
Illegitimi non Carborundum
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.- Orwell
The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it - Orwell