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President Donald Trump has just announced another landmark normalization agreement between an Arab country and Israel, scoring another victory for his Middle East peace strategy.
Friday evening, Trump tweeted that the leaders of Bahrain, a small kingdom in the Persian Gulf, and Israel had “agreed to the establishment of full diplomatic relations.” The announcement comes less than a month after the United Arab Emirates took the same step with Jerusalem.
The joint declaration of the three parties does not include details about what, exactly, the agreement implies, but presumably it will mean the eventual establishment of embassies in each other’s countries and a more open diplomatic, economic and security commitment.
Some details may still need to be worked out and the deal may not go through. The statement said that Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif Al Zayani will join Israel and the United Arab Emirates for a signing ceremony at the White House on Monday, where the UAE and Bahrain will sign their respective agreements with Israel.
Trump is already calling the pact a success.
“This is a truly historic day”, Triumph he told reporters in the Oval Office after announcing the deal. “So interesting that it is September 11,” he added. Friday is the 19th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
But not everyone is happy with the deal: the Palestine Liberation Organization, the official national representatives of the Palestinian people, reportedly condemned the decision as a “betrayal of the Palestinian cause.”
That is not so surprising, as Arab countries have long supported the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel, at least rhetorically, if not always in practice. However, with more and more Arab nations like Bahrain getting nice to Israel, the Palestinians may lose some of that backing.
Before the agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel was announced in August, the last peace agreement Israel reached with an Arab country was with Jordan in 1994 (it signed one with Egypt in 1979). Now Israel can claim it has more friends in the region, possibly reducing pressure on its relations with the Palestinians.
But based on the changing dynamics in the Middle East and America’s own relationship with Bahrain, it was always a leading candidate for normalization.
Why Bahrain normalized ties with Israel
Bahrain’s leadership surely considered many reasons before joining the US-led effort to improve Israel’s ties with its Arab neighbors, but two keys stand out.
First, regional politics in the Middle East has changed dramatically in recent years.
While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once served as a main axis around which Middle East politics revolved, with almost every country in the region, from Iran to Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, aligned with the Palestinians against Israel, that now has changed. What animates the foreign policies of Middle Eastern countries these days is the Arab-Israeli confrontation with Iran, which some have called a “cold war.”
As Iran has increased its efforts to establish itself as the regional hegemony, including by developing a robust nuclear program (but, at least so far, not a real nuclear weapon), rival Gulf countries have found their security interests. much more closely aligned with Israel. .
Bahrain is on the anti-Iran side, and arguably has good reason to be. As noted by Phillip Smyth, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Bahrain suffered an Iranian-inspired coup in 1981 and an Iranian-backed insurgency threat in the 1990s.
“The government of Bahrain fully understands what the Iranians can contribute,” Smyth told me. Given the opportunity, Bahrain “will find unique and novel ways to respond to Iran’s actions. And why not try to undermine [Iran] diplomatically with the ideological belief that he has: that Israel is a satanic entity that needs to be erased from the face of the Earth.
Second, Bahrain and the US have a close relationship, especially during the Trump administration. The US Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based in the small kingdom, so each has military and economic reasons to remain friendly.
But Jared Kushner, Trump’s top Middle East peace negotiator, has also made Bahrain a central player in his efforts. In June 2019, Kushner hosted his “Peace to Prosperity” workshop, aimed at getting ideas before presenting his Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, in Bahrain. Looking for a country to follow the UAE in normalizing relations with Israel, he and his team are likely to turn to Bahrain.
The question now is whether more countries, like Oman and Sudan, will follow suit. If so, it can show that the Trump administration’s strategy in the Middle East has met with some success and prove dire for Palestinian hopes of real power in future negotiations with Jerusalem.
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