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US President Donald Trump on Friday announced a peace agreement between Israel and Bahrain, which becomes the second Arab country to reach an agreement with its former enemy in the past month, reinforcing an ambitious push for the White House to redraw the conflicts in the Middle East.
Calling it a “truly historic day,” Trump said Israel and Bahrain were establishing full diplomatic and trade relations.
“They will exchange embassies and ambassadors, start direct flights between their countries and launch cooperation initiatives in a wide range of sectors, including health, business, technology, education, security and agriculture,” he told reporters.
Bahrain said in a joint statement that it had agreed to formalize the deal with Israel at a ceremony next Tuesday at the White House, where the United Arab Emirates will also sign its own thaw with Israel announced in mid-August.
According to the statement, Bahrain’s King Hamad, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump spoke on Friday before announcing the new advance.
Bahrain said that during the phone call, the king “highlighted the need to achieve a just and comprehensive peace as a strategic option, in accordance with the two-state solution and relevant resolutions of international legitimacy.”
A senior official in Bahrain’s capital Manama said the deal would boost regional “security, stability and prosperity”.
So far, Israel has been able to achieve only two peace accords with Arab countries: Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994, and Trump hopes that diplomatic successes will give it the much-needed boost ahead of the November 3 presidential election.
At the White House, Trump celebrated and called the progress “very, very important not just for the Middle East, but for the world.”
He said it was “so interesting” that he was able to make the announcement on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
“When I took office, the Middle East was in a state of absolute chaos,” Trump said.
In Jerusalem, Netanyahu praised the agreement.
“Citizens of Israel, I am moved to tell you that tonight we are reaching another peace agreement with another Arab country, Bahrain. This agreement adds to the historic peace with the United Arab Emirates,” said the Israeli leader.
In the United Arab Emirates, Hend al-Otaiba, director of strategic communications at the Foreign Ministry, sent congratulations to Bahrain and Israel.
“Today marks another significant and historic achievement that will greatly contribute to the stability and prosperity of the region,” he said.
Trump redraws the lines
Trump said that more Arab nations could also open their doors to Israel.
“I am very hopeful that there will be more in the future. I can tell you that there is tremendous enthusiasm from other countries to join as well,” he said.
The Republican businessman has proclaimed himself the most pro-Israeli American president in history.
He has made a series of decisions highly beneficial to Israel, from recognizing disputed Jerusalem as the country’s capital to breaking an international agreement aimed at ending Iran’s isolation in exchange for verified controls to prevent the militarization of its nuclear industry.
At the same time, Trump has pushed to reduce America’s military footprint after decades of bloody entanglements in Iraq and elsewhere. His earlier success in bringing about normalization between Israel and the United Arab Emirates led a right-wing Norwegian member of parliament to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The UAE’s announcement broke with years of politics over the Middle East conflict, prompting an angry pushback from the Palestinians and Iran.
The Palestinians, who see Arab support as crucial to their limited power to resist the Israeli occupation, quickly condemned the Israel-Bahrain deal as well.
The deal was “a stab in the back of the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian people,” Ahmad Majdalani, the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority minister of social affairs, told AFP.
Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, said it was an “aggression” that caused “serious damage” to the Palestinian cause.
Iran said the deal made Bahrain a partner in the “crimes” of Israel, its regional arch enemy.
He accused Israel of “decades of violence, massacre, war, terror and bloodshed in oppressed Palestine and the region.”
Trump, who has made crushing sanctions and diplomatic pressure on Iran a priority of his administration, nonetheless predicted that there would be a “very positive” development in the confrontation with Tehran.
“I can see a lot of good things happening with respect to the Palestinians,” he added, arguing that the Palestinians would end their conflict with Israel once enough Arab countries had taken the initiative.
“As more countries normalize relations with Israel, which will happen fairly quickly, we believe, the region will become increasingly stable, secure and prosperous,” he said.
“Meanwhile, we are taking out our soldiers, so we are doing it the other way around. They were doing it with nothing but fighting and blood all over the place,” Trump said. “The sand was loaded with blood. And now we can see that a lot of that sand is going to be loaded with peace.”
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