More News from the Middle East

The White House says that as many as five more countries are considering normalizing relations with Israel after the UAE and Bahrain signed such deals, and three are in the Middle East.  President Donald Trump said last the weekend that Kuwait was one of them. 

Axios reports that the Trump Administration is seeking direct Israel-Lebanon negotiations on setting their maritime border in order to resolve the dispute between them over natural gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. These would be the first direct talks between the two countries in three decades. 

Michael Doran, writing at Tablet Magazine, points to the great significance of the Abraham Accords that President Trump helped bring about: 

The Abraham Accords are the most significant development in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the last 25 years. Not only have the Palestinians lost their veto over normalization between Israel and other Arab states, but the entire “Resistance Alliance,” led by Iran, has revealed itself as incapable of placing obstacles in the way of Israel’s integration into the Arab state system. True, the UAE and Bahrain are small powers, but behind them looms Saudi Arabia, which is by far the most influential Arab state. Without Riyadh’s tacit support, the celebration on the White House lawn would never have materialized. If Trump wins the election in November, there is a good chance that Riyadh will normalize relations with Israel—to say nothing of Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Morocco, and Sudan, who are also waiting in the wings.

…It is equally notable that Trump’s masterstroke came by breaking the hold of the Washington foreign policy establishment on the Middle East peacemaking business. In denigrating his accomplishment, the leading lights of American foreign policy have also conveniently erased from memory their unblemished record of outrageously bad predictions.

Read the whole thing. 

Saudi Arabia is pushing to change public perceptions about Jews, changing school textbooks and prohibiting the disparagement of Jews in mosques. The Times of Israel has the story. 

Aaron David Miller, who handled Middle East policy for President Bill Clinton and, briefly, for President George W. Bush, admitted this week that he – and almost all of the foreign policy establishment in Washington – were wrong about how to bring about peace in the Middle East. He writes: 

[The signing of the Abraham Accords] confounded the predictions of many peace process veterans — me included. I always believed normalized relations between Israel and neighboring Arab states would necessarily follow a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian dispute. So, recent events started me thinking about what else we may have missed… Three long-held assumptions that have guided US policy haven’t borne out, and in the process have upended American thinking about the centrality of the Israel-Palestinian dispute long considered to be the core of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict.