Building on a New Momentum : Achieving Peace in the Middle East

"To all of Israel's friends in the Middle East – those who are with us today and those who will join us tomorrow – I say, salaam aleichem, peace unto thee, shalom."

"[This day] brings hope to all of the children of Abraham."

"The blessings of peace that we make today will be enormous,” he continued, “first because this peace will eventually expand to include other Arab states, and ultimately, it can end the Arab-Israel conflict once and for all."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 15 September 2020

 

L to R: Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Abdullatif Al Zayani, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump and United Arab Emirates (UAE) Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed participate in the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords. September 15, 2020   (photo credit: REUTERS/TOM BRENNER)

"[The accord will] change the course of history, [it marks] the dawn of a new Middle East."

"Together these agreements will serve as the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region, something which nobody thought was possible, certainly not in this day and age."

"These agreements prove that the nations of the region are breaking free from failed approaches of the past. Today's signing sets history on a new course and there will be other countries very very soon that will follow these great leaders."

U.S. President Donald Trump

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were never at war with Israel. Their military arms never formed a coalition with Middle East Arab nations like Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan to march on Israel with the intention of destroying it. And while most Arab countries expelled their Jewish citizens and confiscated their properties when Israel we re-formed as a nation in 1948, neither of the Gulf countries removed citizenship from their Jewish populations. Bahrain had a Jewish parliamentarian, Houda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo.

 

As a Bahrainian parliamentarian she was appointed Ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2013, by decree of Foreign Affairs Minister Khaled Ben Ahmad Al=Khalifa. Civil relations between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain through behind-the-scene arrangement has been ongoing for years. What their successive and simultaneous peace accords with Israel succeeded in doing was formalizing a warming relationship into a universally recognized position of neighbourly acceptance.

 

The accord, named the Abraham Accord, takes its name from the historical Biblical recognition that Arabs and Jews emerged from the same source in the Middle East. The Old Testament patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah in their old age finally bearing a son, Isaac, and an already-existing son of Abraham and a handmaiden of Sarah's, Ishmael, becoming the forbears of Jews and Arabs respectively. And that out of monotheistic Judaism came Christianity with the birth of the Jewish sage Jesus, and then the latecomer religion Islam. All three make up the Abrahamic trio.

 

Equally behind-the-scenes interventions and guidance by the Trump administration working to develop further a formal acknowledgement of acceptance of Israel  and peace between neighbours has resulted in the two Gulf nations agreeing to sign a formal concordance of peace, partially symbolic, and wholly reflective of the fact that the region needed to move away from its tradition of hostility to the presence of the historical-to-the-present position of the State of Israel. The Trump administration succeeded where previous administrations all failed to achieve that goal.

 

A group of paratroopers surrounds then-IDF chief rabbi
Shlomo Goren at the Western Wall on June 7, 1967.

 

And they did so by abandoning the expectation that no Arab country would take measures to normalize their relations with Israel until the issue of Palestinian statehood alongside Israel materialized, other than the peace agreements signed between Israel and Egypt on Israel's return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, captured in the 1967 war when Egypt marched with Jordan and Syria against Israel as part of a combined Arab army. Jordan followed years later. Israel retains the Golan Heights from which Syrian forces had continually attacked Israel from above.

 

 

The only non-Arab Muslim country in the Middle East, Shiite Iran, whose brand of Islam seeks ascendancy over the majority Sunni Muslim Arab nations, has become a threat to the balance of power and the security and stabilization of the Middle East. The Islamic Republic of Iran's interference in Arab nations, from Lebanon where it established Shia Hezbollah, to Syria where it supports the Alawite Shia minority regime against the Sunni majority, and Yemen where Houthi Shia rebels have torn the country apart, and its dedication to achieving nuclear supremacy concerns their Arab Sunni and Jewish Israel neighbours mightily.

Concerns that have brought Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and Oman a little closer to Israel, viewed as a strong opponent of Persian Iran's agenda. The Palestinian agenda has gradually receded into the background in the face of the perceived threat from Iran and the need to present a united opposition to its plans, opposing Saudi Arabian stewardship of Mecca and Medina for one thing. For another, the failure, one after another, of the Palestinian Authority and its predecessor Yasser Arafat, to make good on their professed wish to achieve nationhood -- by accepting their Jewish neighbour unconditionally.

All of which conspired over time to reduce the fixation of the Arab League in its violent hostility to Israel's presence, in ostensible support of the Palestinian 'cause'. A cause which has proven time and time again that it is not peace with Israel that consumes its attention to the future, but the destruction of Israel to enable the Palestinian leadership to claim the heritage geography on which Israel sits as 'Palestinian', including the ancient Judean city of Jerusalem.

President Trump's negotiations with other Arab nations appears to be bearing fruit, with rumours of other Arab states like Morocco in North Africa reaching the decision-point of agreeing it to be past time to part with the antipathies of the past and welcome a future of shared geography, trade opportunities, sharing of future technologies to benefit and enrich the experience of all nations in the region. While the Palestinian Authority and Hamas fume and threaten both Israel and those whom they claim have betrayed them, they betray their own existential interests.