It's hard for me to consider an apartheid government a democracy. Nearly 6 million of Israel's subjects have neither citizenship, nor civil rights, let alone voting rights. By what stretch of the imagination is that a democracy?
Bahrain to establish diplomatic relations with Israel as Trump touts diplomatic breakthroughs in the Middle East
"Around-the-halls: Experts analyze the normalization of Israel-UAE ties [...] Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid), Senior Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy: In theory, who can argue against peace? In practice and principle, though, Israel is being rewarded for not doing something it should have never considered doing in the first place — annexing parts of the West Bank. This isn’t diplomacy, and it isn’t peace. It’s cynical, and it shows, once again, that Arab authoritarian regimes can’t be bothered to pretend they care about Palestinian rights. For the UAE, it’s a means to an end, formalizing increasingly warm feelings toward Israel, due to their shared enemy of Iran and their shared (and unusual) preference for President Trump over President Obama."
While peace is a welcome position anywhere, whether or not these deals will make much serious difference in the relationship between the countries remains to be seen.
Coming at this time they can't avoid a slight sense of being little more than a present, from the murderer of Jamal Kashoggi, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and Netanyahu, to Trump's reelection campaign.
President Trump speaks during a brief appearance in the Oval Office at the White House on Sept. 11, 2020, after it was announced that Bahrain has joined the United Arab Emirates in agreeing to normalize relations with Israel. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
By Anne Gearan and Souad Mekhennet
September 12, 2020 at 7:57 a.m. GMT+10
Bahrain and Israel announced Friday that they have agreed to establish diplomatic relations just weeks after the United Arab Emirates forged a similar deal with the Jewish state — a set of developments that the Trump administration heralded as evidence that its diplomatic efforts in the Middle East are working.
President Trump and the leaders of Bahrain and Israel spoke Friday and issued a joint statement that the president tweeted out shortly after he returned from a ceremony in Shanksville, Pa., commemorating victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“This is a historic breakthrough to further peace in the Middle East,” the joint statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain and Trump read. “Opening direct dialogue and ties between these two dynamic societies and advanced economies will continue the positive transformation of the Middle East and increase stability, security and prosperity in the region.”
After presiding over a chaotic and at times sputtering approach to international relations during much of his presidency, Trump has in recent weeks been able to point to deals that have shown progress in tense regions of the world even if they fall short of the hyperbolic language Trump has used to describe them.
Trump attributes advances that eluded previous presidents to his unorthodox approach to diplomacy, and he appears eager to showcase his role as a peacemaker ahead of the Nov. 3 election, particularly in a swing state such as Florida, where the fate of Israel is a top political concern.
“This is a truly historic day,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “There have been two peace agreements with Israel in the last 72 years. This is now the second peace agreement that we’ve announced in the last month, and I am very hopeful that there will be more to follow.”
He spoke of “tremendous enthusiasm” among other Arab countries.
Bahrain is among at least two smaller Persian Gulf states expected to follow the UAE’s lead. Trump spoke this week to the leader of the other, Oman.
All take cues from Saudi Arabia, the regional diplomatic heavyweight and religious lodestar, so the agreements are seen as having Riyadh’s tacit blessing. Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab nations are seen as motivated to have a better relationship with Israel because they have a common foe in Iran and are seeking to keep Tehran in check.
Bahrain considers Friday’s announcement a first step toward fully normalized ties with Israel, a person close to the Bahraini royal family said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to address the matter on the record.
The U.S. announcement made no distinction between the terms “diplomatic relations” and “normalized relations,” though the Bahrain announcement was less detailed than the one on full normalization between Israel and UAE. As part of that agreement, Israel shelved the potential annexation of parts of the West Bank — an issue given new urgency by the Trump administration’s willingness to back Israel’s assuming formal control over land containing Jewish settlements that are considered illegal under international law.
Trump said Israel and Bahrain would exchange ambassadors and open embassies for the first time, and begin work on cooperation in health, technology, agriculture and other areas. The agreement also provides for direct flights between Manama and Tel Aviv.
Israel and Bahrain are not at war, so their agreement is not a peace deal in the usual sense. Like most other Arab states, Bahrain had until now officially considered Israel to be an illegitimate usurper of Palestinian land and rights.
Egypt and Jordan were the only Arab states to have made formal peace with Israel before the UAE agreement in August.
As a practical matter, establishing full diplomatic relations means Bahrain is acknowledging Israel’s legitimacy, but there were signs that the kingdom is cautious about how it presents the matter.
Bahrain is sending its foreign minister, rather than the king or the country’s powerful crown prince, to the White House next week to attend a signing ceremony between Israel and the UAE.
The ceremony Tuesday will be patterned on White House celebrations of U.S.-backed peace agreements between Israel and Egypt in 1979 and between Israel and Jordan in 1994.
A statement from the official Bahrain News Agency focused on hopes for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
“During the call, HM King Hamad stressed the need to reach a just and comprehensive peace as a strategic option, in accordance with the two-state solution and relevant resolutions of international legitimacy,” the statement said, using the abbreviation for “his majesty.”
Bahrain is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet and is a major hub for U.S. military activity in and around the Persian Gulf and for U.S. efforts to monitor Iranian military activity.
Bahrain was the site last year of the Trump administration’s rollout of an economic plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The plan envisions billions of dollars in outside investment, much of it from the gulf region, to improve employment prospects and living standards for Palestinians.
The more sensitive political proposal was released in January and included a map of a provisional Palestinian state in the West Bank. Palestinian leaders rejected it without holding negotiations. Trump administration efforts have since focused on establishing direct ties between Israel and its neighbors in a bid both to give Israel greater security and to apply pressure on Palestinian leaders to open talks.
“I think the Palestinians are going to end up doing something that’s going to be very smart for them, and all their friends are coming into this and they want to come into it, they want to come into it very badly,” Trump said Friday. “I can see a lot of good things happening with respect to the Palestinians, which would be really wonderful, whether you were on their side or not on their side.”
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas cut off contact with the Trump administration and renounced peace efforts after Trump’s announcement in December 2017 recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and pledging to move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv.
Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, and previous U.S. administrations had declined to announce anything that could prejudge negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
Netanyahu issued a video celebrating the news about Bahrain.
“We have invested in peace for many years, and now peace will invest in us,” Netanyahu said. “It will lead to very large investments in the Israeli economy.”
News of the agreement broke after the start of the Jewish sabbath in Israel, muting the immediate reaction to an announcement that had been anticipated, at least potentially, for weeks.
The Palestinian Authority condemned the announcement as a betrayal of “the Palestinian cause” and of previous commitments made by Arab states.
“This step is a token of support for legitimizing the ugly crimes of the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people, at a time when the occupying state is consolidating its takeover and annexation of the Palestinian land by military force,” Palestinian leaders said in a statement.
Palestinian officials had been blindsided by the UAE announcement and rejected UAE leaders’ characterization of the deal as a means to preserve a path to Palestinian statehood.
Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has led the White House peace efforts, echoed Trump’s confidence that other nations would decide to forge their own diplomatic and economic relationships with Israel, but he stopped short of predicting that Saudi Arabia would soon be among them.
“The leadership in the region is, they recognize that the approach that’s been taken in the past hasn’t worked, and they realize that their people want to see a more vibrant and exciting future,” Kushner told reporters Friday.
Steve Hendrix in Jerusalem and Kareem Fahim in Istanbul contributed to this report.
One conservative view - It’s Not a Peace Deal. It’s a Powder Keg.
"Around-the-halls: Experts analyze the normalization of Israel-UAE ties [...] Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid), Senior Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy: In theory, who can argue against peace? In practice and principle, though, Israel is being rewarded for not doing something it should have never considered doing in the first place — annexing parts of the West Bank. This isn’t diplomacy, and it isn’t peace. It’s cynical, and it shows, once again, that Arab authoritarian regimes can’t be bothered to pretend they care about Palestinian rights. For the UAE, it’s a means to an end, formalizing increasingly warm feelings toward Israel, due to their shared enemy of Iran and their shared (and unusual) preference for President Trump over President Obama.""
Not all diplomatic deals are preludes to peace—and the Israel-UAE agreement fits an inauspicious pattern.
An explosion rocks Syrian city of Kobani during a reported suicide car bomb attack by the militants of Islamic State (ISIS) group on a People's Protection Unit (YPG) position in the city center of Kobani, as seen from the outskirts of Suruc, on the Turkey-Syria border, Oct. 20, 2014. Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images
In August 1907, Russia and the United Kingdom signed the Anglo-Russian Convention, which settled their geostrategic differences and brought them into a rough alliance after nearly a century as bitter and bloody adversaries. Their confrontation around Eurasia had produced in part or whole the disastrous slaughters of the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, the British invasions of Afghanistan in 1839 and 1878, numerous crises over the Turkish straits, and the endless, wasteful competition across central Asia known as the Great Game. To at least some contemporary observers, the agreement seemed to be a sign of greater peace to come.
There was one problem: the Anglo-Russian Convention wasn’t the product of more peaceful attitudes in London or St. Petersburg, but of a dramatic shift in the balance of power and the rise of a new threat. It was the belligerence of Wilhelmine Germany that made the Convention possible, even necessary, for both countries—and far from stemming conflict, the Convention made it far worse. Now backed by England (in addition to France), Russia asserted itself more forcefully in the Balkans, egging on a terroristic Serb regime against Austria and so transforming a Balkan crisis into the horror of World War I. If Britain had continued to oppose Russian interventionism in the Balkans as it traditionally had before the 1907 Convention, history would have taken a very different course and that war, and the bloody 20th century it inaugurated, might have been avoided.
The lesson of the Anglo-Russian Convention is that a diplomatic event that brings a close to one longstanding geostrategic rivalry may not be the great boon it appears. Instead, it might be a harbinger of worse to come. And there is reason to be concerned that this is precisely how we might eventually look back on this week’s announcement that the UAE will normalize relations with Israel, in return for Jerusalem’s agreement not to annex any of the West Bank.
Was this a positive development? From one vantage point, sure. It represents one more Arab government giving up on nearly a century of conflict with Israel. There are rumblings that other Arab states may soon (or eventually) follow. That seems entirely plausible, given the covert warming of ties between Israel and various Gulf and Maghreb countries over the past two decades, although it’s hardly inevitable. If it were to happen, it would put to rest one of the most vexing, chronic conflicts of the 20th century.
But this is the 21st century. The Arab-Israeli conflict has not been a defining factor in the geopolitics of the Middle East for decades. There has not been a conventional war between Israel and an Arab state since 1982. The 2006 Second Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah, the closest we’ve come, was notable because of how many of the Arab states condemned Hezbollah. Indeed, for at least 30 years, the threat to Israeli security has come overwhelmingly from the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance,” not from the Arab states.
Of course, like Europe in the early 20th century, the Middle East has seen its geostrategic problems multiply in the early 21st century rather than abate, despite the fading of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Just as Europe then still suffered from the epochal aftereffects of the industrial revolution, so the Middle East is being turned inside out by the impact of the equally profound information revolution. The result has been massive economic, cultural, and demographic shifts that inevitably create political turmoil. Iran’s Green Revolution of 2009; the Arab Spring of 2011; the civil wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Sinai, Turkish Kurdistan, and—to some extent—Iraq—are all part of this upheaval.
The unrest itself has created new opportunities for Iran, which has used the chaos and civil war to help its allies across the region. Today, Hezbollah rules Lebanon. Iran has greater sway in Syria and Yemen than ever before. It wields considerable influence in Iraq, albeit less so at this moment than six months ago for reasons that might pass all too soon.
Yet of far greater geostrategic importance to the Middle East has been the disengagement of the United States. Both the Obama and Trump Administrations have simultaneously denied this and bragged about it, but the reality on the ground is far more straightforward. Both Obama and Trump steadily distanced themselves from the problems of the region, despite the constant warnings of their diplomatic and military advisors along the way. And just as the rise of a belligerent Germany overturned all the dynamics of Europe, so the disengagement of the United States has done the same in the Middle East .. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/15/carter-doctrine-rip-donald-trump-mideast-oil-big-think/ . Because the United States was the most powerful force in favor of the status quo, so our withdrawal has emboldened those actors seeking to overturn the regional order. Iran and its allies are the most obvious and successful of these beneficiaries, but so too are various radical Sunni Islamist groups. Predictably, America’s detachment has terrified our allies, and that fear has pushed them to take actions they never otherwise would have—some good, some dangerous, some both at the same time, like Israel-UAE normalization.
For all its economic and military strength, Israel remains a small, beleaguered country, at least psychologically. Of course, Iran is trying to do everything it can to turn that perception of menace into a strategic reality: bolstering Hezbollah and Hamas; building a vast military infrastructure in Syria; reaching out to radical Palestinian groups in the West Bank and Jordan; mounting cyberattacks against Israeli infrastructure, and so on. Because of its small size, extreme casualty sensitivity, and historic ghosts, Israel’s inclination—and its strategic doctrine—is to strike hard and fast at potential threats before they can become existential. That is what it has been doing for years in Syria, waging a war of attrition with Iran and its allies to try to prevent Tehran from building a military base there to open a new front against Israel.
The UAE has pursued a similar approach to its security concerns over the past two decades, albeit without quite the capabilities or psychological scars of the Israelis. Along with Saudi Arabia, the UAE intervened with conventional land and air forces in Yemen, employed its air force and covert support in Libya and Syria, and led the blockade of Qatar by the other Gulf states. Yemen is a particularly important case to understand. There, the UAE and Saudi Arabia decided to intervene in 2015 to prevent a military victory by what they saw as an Iranian-allied Shi’a militia, the Houthis. However, they did so only after repeatedly asking the United States to do more to prevent the expansion of Iranian power in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq to no avail. Their leaders explicitly said that since the United States wasn’t going to act to limit the Iranian threat, they felt they had no choice but to do so themselves. Thus, the fear of growing Iranian power in the face of a retreating America pushed the Emiratis and Saudis to embark on a risky and bellicose course of action.
It is no accident that both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have begun nuclear programs in the past dozen years. These are both ostensibly for power generation and to save their oil supplies for export, not for producing weapons. Of course, so too was/is Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran claimed, and Saddam’s, and North Korea’s, and the list goes on. In private, Gulf leaders will say that they fear that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons and without the United States to protect them, they feel they may have no choice but be able to match Iran to deter it.
It gets worse when you recognize that none of these countries—not even Israel—has the same military or intelligence capabilities as the United States. We are usually better able to gauge the level of threat in the Middle East than our regional allies, the Iraq WMD fiasco notwithstanding. Other countries, starting with Iran, won’t pick fights with the United States the way that they will with one another. Iran is wary of Israel, but it may be less so in future as its own capabilities and those of its allies expand. Meanwhile, it has never shown any fear of the Arab states.
Thus, just as the 1907 Anglo-Russian convention closed out one of the great conflicts of the 19th century only to help enflame the great conflict of the 20th century, so the Israel-UAE agreement must be seen as part of the ending of a 20th-century conflict, but also as potentially the beginning of a new 21st-century conflict that may dominate the Middle East. In that Middle East, without an American hegemon to keep a lid on aggression, status quo powers as diverse in other ways as Israel and the UAE have no choice but to find common cause. To band together as best they can to fight their common enemy, as the British and Russians did in 1907. All of this is a recipe for greater tensions, fear, conflict, and potentially outright war.
We may be putting to bed one great regional conflict, only to watch another arise. And that should temper our enthusiasm for the latest turn of events, no matter how positive it may seem in the short term.
Kenneth M. Pollack is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the new book Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness.
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