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WASHINGTON – Proclaiming “there is going to be peace in the Middle East,” President Trump on Tuesday received Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain at the White House for the formal signing of new diplomatic agreements between them.
The ceremony took place on the South Lawn of the White House marking an agreement that has become a focal point of the president’s foreign policy message in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign.
Although the details are unknown, the agreements, known as the Abraham Accords, will normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, including the establishment of the first embassies in each other’s countries. Israel and the United Arab Emirates recently announced the start of the first commercial flights between them. Until now, Israel had normal relations only with two other Arab states, Jordan and Egypt.
The staging of the event seemed designed to invoke the scene 25 years ago in the same venue, when President Bill Clinton negotiated a deal, and an iconic handshake, between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. .
But many analysts in the region, while crediting Trump for helping negotiate the deal, a job spearheaded by his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, called the peace speech overblown. They point out that Israel has long been moving toward a de facto alliance with the Sunni Arab states of the Persian Gulf, largely for a common cause against Shiite Iran.
“It is not conflict resolution and it is not peace, this is a trade agreement,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel advocacy group highly critical of Netanyahu. “It is very, very clear that there are aligned interests between Israel and these countries – military, security, diplomatic, economic – and those interests have been there for two decades.”
“This formalizes that, but should not be exaggerated as the resolution of a core Israeli conflict with its neighbors,” he added. Israel’s decades-long conflict with the Palestinians, he said, “remains unresolved with this agreement.”
Meeting with Netanyahu in the Oval Office, Trump presented Netanyahu with a large golden key embedded in a wooden box that he described as “a key to the White House, a key to our country.”
“You have the key to the heart of the people of Israel,” Netanyahu replied.
“This is peace in the Middle East without blood on the sand,” Trump added.
Speaking on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning, Trump bragged that Tuesday’s event was just the beginning of great things to come.
“We have many others that are going to enter in a short period of time,” Trump said, “and the Palestinians will eventually enter as well. You are going to have peace in the Middle East. “
But during Tuesday’s ceremony, the Palestinians seemed like an afterthought, not mentioned in official comments from Trump and Netanyahu.
Palestinian leaders, however, show no signs of reconsidering their outright refusal to negotiate with Israel under a peace plan the Trump White House launched in January.
Trump also said on Fox that he would “have absolutely no problem” selling the F-35 fighter jet to the United Arab Emirates, a step the Trump administration is considering despite objections in Israel over the sale of advanced military equipment. to an Arab. state.
Trump officials deny that such a sale is a condition for the Emirates to reach its deal with Israel.
