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It is not yet known that Donald Trump drew cheers between Kentucky and Kansas with his Twitter message. And yet: the diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and the Kingdom of Bahrain, which the US president announced on Friday, is more than remarkable.
So far, Israel has only signed peace agreements with its neighboring countries, Egypt and Jordan. That was decades ago. However, a few weeks ago, the powerful United Arab Emirates announced that they would normalize relations with the Jewish state. And now Bahrain, a small country, but geostrategically important.
Bahrain, almost as big as Hamburg, is an archipelago that has become a state and consists of several dozen islands, both natural and man-made. About 1.5 million people live in the dwarf state, which has been enriched by its oil, is now a banking center for the Arab world and is also the base of the US fifth fleet.
About two-thirds of the roughly 800,000 citizens are Shiites and one-third are Sunni. In Bahrain, the conflict between the two main Islamic denominations becomes visible again and again like under a magnifying glass. It is a bloody dispute that broke out in the desert of the Arabian Peninsula more than a millennium ago.
Hamad bin Issa Al Khalifa has ruled the Kingdom of Bahrain since 1999. The man with the fleshy cheeks and a thick mustache likes the role of the reformer. A fake parliament was created under his rule. Decisions in Bahrain do not come from the people, but only from them and their sponsors. They are based in Saudi Arabia.
Bahrain: Sunni ruler, Shiite people
The Saudi monarchy presumably saved the king’s throne in the Arab Spring nearly ten years ago when his Shiite subjects took to the streets of the capital, Manama.
Bahrain was the only Gulf state to be briefly haunted by the 2011 protests. Saudi Arabia sent soldiers and brutally ended the uprising.
The Sunni hegemonic power portrayed the popular uprising in Bahrain as a conspiracy behind which stood its main adversary in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is alleged that the Shiite ayatollahs wanted to use the Arab Spring to establish a Shiite God state based on their model in the small kingdom of Bahrain.
There are historical reasons for this fear: Iranian hardliners keep reminding that Bahrain was once a Persian province in the 18th century and that the Tehran regime’s goal must be to restore this state of affairs.
Is the shadow war between Iran and Israel intensifying?
In his tenure to date, Donald Trump has not proven particularly interested in the Sunni-Shiite conflict. The President of the United States and his son-in-law Jared Kushner have two central interests in the Middle East. He wants:
In Tehran, the recent rapprochement between Bahrain and Israel should be noted with concern, says Raz Zektiven, an expert on Iran at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, SPIEGEL.
The reason: after years of rapprochement, Bahrain is now, finally and officially, a front-line state in the brutally waged shadow war, on the side of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel, which have strategically allied against Iran.
In this context, “terrorist attacks against Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates cannot be ruled out,” says Zektiven, “either by Iran itself or with the help of its power militias, such as the Houthi rebels in Yemen.”
Palestinians withdraw envoys from Bahrain
The Palestinians now play almost no role in this regional struggle to reorganize the Middle East. The Ramallah government has called its envoy from Bahrain for consultations, but Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is notably on the sidelines.
Apart from Iran, only Turkey has so far condemned the rapprochement between Israel and Bahrain. Egypt, on the other hand, like Bahrain, relies on oil dollars from the powerful in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, welcomed the move, according to the AFP news agency.
In the next week, Abbas is unlikely to fulfill his wishes for Donald Trump. He has the next appointment in the Middle East on Tuesday: he will receive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and emissaries from the United Arab Emirates in Washington. You will sign the peace pact.
