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President Trump announced on Friday that Bahrain will establish full diplomatic relations with Israel, following the United Arab Emirates, in another sign of the changing dynamics of the Middle East that are drawing Arab nations closer to Israel, isolating Palestinians and positioning Trump. as a campaign. seasonal peacemaker.
Trump announced the news on Twitter, issued a joint statement with Bahrain and Israel, and called the move “a historic breakthrough for greater peace in the Middle East.”
The announcement follows what Israel and the United Arab Emirates made last month that they would normalize relations between them, on the condition that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel does not comply with plans to annex parts of the West Bank. Trump administration officials said they hoped the deal would encourage other Arab countries with historically hostile relations toward Israel to take similar action.
Bahrain, a small island kingdom off the east coast of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf, has strategic significance for Washington as host of the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
The deal was largely brokered by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has led the administration’s efforts to achieve a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. That project has largely been on hiatus since the administration unveiled a heavily leaning pro-Israel peace plan in January that analysts called unacceptable to the Palestinians.
Since then, Kushner and other Trump officials have directed their energies toward Israel’s relations with other Arab countries, in part as a means of showing the Palestinians that their demands would no longer dictate the broader dynamics of the region.
