The Meaning of Israel’s

Peace Accord with the

United Arab Emirates:
A Symposium
Jared Kushner
John Bolton
Ron Dermer
Dore Gold
Amos Yadlin
Ed Husain
Richard Goldberg
Hussein Aboubakr
I N T R O D U CT I O N Au g u s t 2 0 2 0

In August of 2020 Israel and the United Arab Emirates announced, to the
world’s surprise and (mostly) delight, a deal to pursue mutual peace and
normalization, making it just the third peace agreement Israel has come to
with an Arab state.

How did this historic deal come about, what does it mean, and what does it
portend for the future of Israel’s relations with its neighbors? We invited a
handful of serious thinkers to look at the political, cultural, and historical
meanings of this moment. Join us for a multi-part symposium with
contributions from:

• Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, on the

precursors to the deal
• Ed Husain, author of The House of Islam, on the free mind of the
Emirates
• Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, on his hopes
for Israel and her Arab neighbors
• Richard Goldberg, former member of the U.S. National Security
Council, on the American angle
• Amos Yadlin, former chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, on
motivations and complications
• Hussein Aboubakr, Egyptian-born writer and educator, on the new
ideology in the Middle East
• John Bolton, American National Security Advisor, on the need for
American leadership
• Jared Kushner, senior advisor to the president, on America’s
diplomatic outlook

This symposium was originally published at our website,

mosaicmagazine.com. Not yet a subscriber to Mosaic? Get
complete access to all this material and much more by signing up at
mosaicmagazine.com/register.

2
4................................................................... Israel’s History of Arab Realpolitik
Dore Gold

7................................................................... It’s No Accident Israel’s First Peace Agreement in Decades Is with the
Emirates
Ed Husain

12................................................................. Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. on His Hopes for the Relationship
between Israel and the UAE
Ron Dermer

23................................................................ The Role of American Policy and Personnel in the Israeli-Emirati Deal
Richard Goldberg

31................................................................. The New Agreement Breaks the Anti-Semitism at the Core of the
Middle East’s Dysfunction
Hussein Aboubakr

36............................................................... What Happens Next with the Israeli-Emirati Accords?

Amos Yadlin

40.............................................................. How the Israel-UAE Deal Demonstrates the Need for American
Leadership in the Middle East
John Bolton

44.............................................................. How American Diplomacy Created the Conditions for the Israel-UAE
Deal
Jared Kushner
 Tel Aviv’s city hall lit up in the colors of the flag of the United Arab Emirates on August 13, 2020.
JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images..

Israel’s History of Arab Realpolitik

For a long time, Israel has been quietly making common cause
with the victims of aggression in the Middle East. That’s now
coming to light.

DORE GOLD
AU G 19 2 02 0
About the author
Dore Gold, president of the
Jerusalem Center of Public
Affairs, is a former ambas-
sador of Israel to the United
Nations (1997-1999) and
the author of, among other
books , Hatred’s Kingdom,
The Fight for Jerusalem, and
The Rise of Nuclear Iran.
W
hile last week’s news of normalization between Israel and the
United Arab Emirates represents a tremendous breakthrough, it
is no secret that the two countries have been in contact for many
years. Those contacts predate the much-commented-upon cooperation
between Israel and the Gulf states (the UAE included) in the past decade
and are, in fact, not highly unusual in the Middle East. By seeing the
new developments in light of their historical precedents, we can better
appreciate their significance.
I recall, years ago, sitting at Tel Aviv University Law School and listening
to a guest lecture by Ariel Sharon in which he disclosed Israeli security
cooperation with neighboring Arab states during the early 1960s. At
the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt had undertaken a major military
intervention into Yemen’s civil war, and Israel found itself in a coalition
of states, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan, opposed to Egyptian
expansionism in the Arabian Peninsula.

The United Kingdom, the traditional protector of Middle Eastern borders,

was no longer in a position to step in. In the 1920s British biplanes had
defended the Hashemite monarchies of Transjordan and Iraq from
invasion by fanatical Wahhabi warriors. But those days were long gone,
and the USSR had since the 1950s been asserting itself as the ultimate
4 power broker in the region. Indeed, the Egyptian air force was using Soviet
 aircraft to bomb Saudi border towns.

Ultimately, what brought the Egyptian military effort to a crashing halt

was Israeli action elsewhere in the Middle East: the June 1967 Six-Day War.
Nasser began withdrawing troops from Yemen in August to make up for his
losses in the war with Israel, and then signaled his commitment to ending
Egypt’s role in the conflict. For the Saudis it was an important lesson: the
Jewish state alone had both the might and the will to fight against what
was at the time one of the foremost military powers in the Middle East.

The king of Jordan also learned something about his Israeli neighbor
in this period. When the Hashemite kingdom faced an armed invasion
from Syrian tanks in 1970, Israel understood that it was in its interest to
safeguard its neighbor’s territorial integrity. As far as I am concerned that
is still in Israel’s interest today, when Iran seeks to destabilize Jordan and
undermine its sovereignty.

And this brings us to the UAE, which, until 1971, was still a British
protectorate. London’s lack of interest in defending the status quo
during the war with Yemen was a sign of things to come. In 1968, the UK
announced it would withdraw from all its positions “east of Suez” by 1972.
The UAE thus gained independence at a time when it was clear that the
former colonial powers would no longer provide security; the new state
had to protect itself.

The Emirates of course had unresolved security problems of their own.

Already in the 1950s they were drawn into border conflicts with Saudi
Arabia at the Buraimi Oasis. What accelerated these territorial clashes
was the discovery of crude oil all along the eastern coastline of Arabia,
which was claimed by competing international oil companies representing
different national interests. The British were operating in Abu Dhabi
through a subsidiary of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, while the
Americans laid claims through the Saudi Arabia-based ARAMCO. At the
time, Britain was willing to protect the UAE’s territorial integrity (and thus,
its own oil interests), but by the 1970s it was clear that it could no longer be
relied upon to do so.

Although the conflict over the oasis simmered on until 1974, by the 1960s it
was clear to Abu Dhabi that it was not Saudi Arabia it had to worry about.
With the overthrow of the shah in 1979, and the rise of revolutionary Iran,
the Islamic Republic became the greatest threat to both the Saudis and the
Emiratis. The Iranian regime aspired to recover the lands its predecessors
once controlled during the era of the Safavid empire. Today, Turkey
under President Erdogan also looks to restore the areas once ruled by the
Ottomans centuries ago.

Israel was strong, and it respected the borders of other states in the Middle
East. If it moved into its neighbors’ territory, it was to defend itself against
armed attacks. Its adversaries were the same hegemons that posed a threat
5 to the Emirates, and that sought to take over parts of the Middle East or
 North Africa. And Israel shared the Gulf states’ concerns.

Another instructive example is Chad. During an official visit to this

Muslim-majority African nation, high-level officials explained to me that
they severed diplomatic relations with Israel in 1972 due to threats from
the Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. And why did Chad renew ties with
Israel in 2019? Because Qaddafi had been overthrown.

In short, Israel has been making common cause with the victims of
regional aggression. This was a new role, based on recognition that states
in the region are ultimately motivated by a keen understanding of their
own security interests.

If there is a new diplomatic doctrine at work here it comes from a realistic

understanding that the Jewish state can reach peace with its neighbors
if it can address their most vital concerns. Israel is not the regional
policeman, nor should it attempt to take on such a role. But it must make
its contribution to upholding the regional order along with its Arab allies.

When, in 2015, Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed a joint session of

the U.S. Congress in order to highlight the dangers of the Iran deal, he
was speaking for generations of Jews who fought off genocidal threats in
the past. But he also stood in Congress representing all the peoples of the
Middle East. He was part of a new regional order.

Undoubtedly our new Arab allies took notice of who was now willing to
stand by their side.

6
 The first hoisting of the flag of the United Arab Emirates at the Union House in Dubai on
December 2, 1971. Wikipedia.

It’s No Accident Israel’s First Peace Agreement in

Decades Is with the Emirates
The UAE is one of the youngest of the Arab states, and its distance
from 1948, 1967 and the other Arab-Israeli wars of the past gives its
leaders a freer mind to lead the way.

ED HUSAIN
AU G 19 2 02 0
About the author
Ed Husain is an advisor to
governments, author of The
House of Islam: A Global His-
tory (Bloomsbury, 2018), and
a doctoral researcher at the
University of Buckingham.
W
hy am I, a British Muslim, writing these words for an influential
American Jewish magazine? I am convinced that our destinies
are interwoven with ideas that, as of last week, gave birth to the
new peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. The UAE-Israel
peace treaty is not simply about geopolitics, security and economics, Iran,
or COVID-19. This moment represents something much larger and deeper:
it is a blueprint for what is yet to come with the other moderate Sunni
Arab nations, and beyond. We are in the midst of an existential shift in the
global Muslim mind.

Almost all Muslims, 1.8 billion people, of whom 85 percent are Sunni
and roughly 10 percent are Shiite, are expected to be “pro-Palestine” and
anti-Israel—and by extension, suspicious of encounters with Jews. For a
long time, to question this anti-Semitic binary was to be an outcast, to risk
public condemnation and then isolation from the mafia-like organizations
that control the Muslim street: Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood,
Hizballah, Islamic State, and their many routes of influence from websites
to university campuses to satellite-television channels. As a result, many
Muslim activists embraced the binary without question. But in the last
few years, the Emirati leadership slowly started to dismantle it, by, for
7 instance, sponsoring and publicizing interactions between rabbis and
 imams, and by speaking openly about the common Abrahamic heritage of
Jews and Muslims, as well as Christians. From these first steps came last
week’s long stride toward a new, peaceful order in the Middle East.

In this endeavor, the Emiratis were being the faithful children of the
founding father of their nation: Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyān (1918-
2004). Unless we understand this man and his model, and understand by
extension the inner dynamics and the culture of the people and the tribes
of the Arabian Gulf, we in the West and Israel cannot comprehend how this
peace came about and what it portends.

The Emiratis come with a proud history, strong families, old tribes,
firm belief in one God, loyalty to friends, and hospitality for guests: values
that inform their modernization programs and the ambitions of their
political leadership. Sheikh Zayed, the embodiment of that wisdom and
moderation, was known as Hakim al-Arab among fellow leaders, “the wise
one of the Arabs.” He was the father of the current, peace-making Crown
Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, known widely as MbZ.

The moral courage of MbZ to make peace with Israel comes directly from
the way Sheikh Zayed raised his family and the culture he fostered among
the citizens of his country. There are a few stories from Sheikh Zayed’s life
popular among Emirati elders that show this. Here is one. When Sheikh
Zayed was visiting Switzerland, a Jewish trader in a culturally mixed area
recognized him window-shopping for gifts outside his shop. The merchant
closed his business, came out, took a member of the Sheikh’s entourage
aside, and said “There are many Arabs here and the emir will cause
controversy for him if he enters my shop. They boycott Jewish places so
to avoid embarrassment and controversy, please take the sheikh to their
stores.”

Sheikh Zayed noticed the Jewish man speak and then leave. He
ascertained what was said, visited the Arab stores, and then went to his
hotel. The following day, he returned. The Jewish man’s store was open.
The sheikh entered. “I thank you for your concern, but we are brothers.
Our father was Abraham,” he said. Sheikh Zayed then made several
purchases from the shop and told the story of Abraham’s two sons, Isaac
and Ishmael. “Arabs are the children of Ishmael. Can brothers live in
peace?” he asked, and then told the story about the prophet Mohammad,
who, upon seeing a funeral cortege pass, stood up in respect.

“Messenger of God, that is a Jewish person’s funeral,” his companions

protested.

“Is this not a human soul?” the prophet replied.

In sum, Sheikh Zayed and his sons have long upheld the culture of
compassion taught by early Islam. But, happy as that is, it is still a far cry
from a concrete peace deal. There have been other factors and dynamics at
8 play in bringing the Israelis and the United Arab Emirates into alignment.
 They too require understanding and protection.

First, there is a reason why the treaty is named the Abraham Accord.
MbZ seeks to connect his people to a God who is one, compassionate,
reasonable, just, and merciful. And this one God is the common
denominator between Jews and Muslims and Christians. In almost
every public utterance of MbZ’s this theme finds expression. He warmly
welcomed Pope Francis to the UAE in 2019 to hold an open-air mass, a
historic first in the Arabian Peninsula. The creation of a vibrant Jewish
community in the Emirates, again a first, is another part of this Abrahamic
conviction. All this comes together in the newly built Abrahamic Family
House in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the Emirates. There, a mosque, church,
and synagogue are located inside a single shared compound.

The message sent by these actions and symbols is that it is time to turn
away from fighting the religious wars of the past. For enlightened Muslims,
Jews are not our enemy. We are brothers.

The second of these dynamics is more political. The UAE is pioneering

a pathway for Arabs and Muslims to move away from the dysfunctional
but widely popular ideology of the so-called ummah. This ideology
conceives of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims as comprising a single political
community, one that waits in anticipation of a single caliph as leader and
a single ever-expanding empire that will rule Israel, India, the West, and
China, in particular reclaiming lands that Muslims once ruled in Spain
(Andalusia), Italy (Sicily), and elsewhere. This ideology of Islamism—one
nation, one leader, one land—recalls imperial aspects of the European
fascism from the 1930s. It is dangerous ultimately destructive, and it leads
to pathological forms of repression like Islamic State.

The victory of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamists in

elections across the region is evidence of the potency of this trend. Iran
and its proxies are likewise working to ensure Persian influence at the
heart of a future Islamic empire. And the West in its clumsiness is happy to
facilitate them. The blunder that is made and repeated by diplomats, civil
servants, and NGO activists from Washington, London, and Brussels is to
demand unrealistic democratic reform. In so doing, Western activists are
motivated by their own kind of imperial instinct to politically homogenize
the region in their own image. Far from helping the nations of the Middle
East to achieve actual democracy, the activists have turned the idea of
democracy into a stick with which to beat our closest and most natural
allies in the region.

The UAE-Israel peace accords are, among other things, a shock treatment
to both universalist, imperial states of mind—the hard Islamist one and
the gentler, blundering one.

How so, exactly? The antidote to dysfunctional globalism is to be found

in honoring national borders and reinforcing national sovereignty. The
9 United Arab Emirates, along with its friends in Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
 Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, and elsewhere are focused now on expressing
this modern identity, not on the imagined glories of long-past religious
empires—even if, to political Islamists, this is idolatry.

Such is the background to making peace with Israel, the world’s oldest
surviving people and antiquity’s first nation-state. Israel is meant as a
prototype. It was Moses who guided the Jews toward Jerusalem to live
in liberty, to coexist under the law, and to love the land of ancient Israel.
Saxon kings of England, the Dutch, Montesquieu in France, the American
Founding Fathers, all took inspiration from this and attempted to rebuild
Jerusalem, a new Israel in their own lands. (Hence the way William
Blake’s famous lines “Till we have built Jerusalem/ in England’s green and
pleasant land” have echoed through the ages.) The same ancient love for
the land and its laws is now being offered up by MbZ and his friends as a
model for the future of the Arab and Muslim world.

In defense of the UAE’s peace deal with Israel, Saudi and Egyptian
journalists constantly reinforced this message of healthy nationalism: it
is a sovereign decision by a sovereign nation-state. The stirring national
anthem of the Emirates, sung daily by every school child, includes the
lines “long live my nation, my country, which I serve sincerely. Long
live the flag, we sacrifice our souls for our country.” Standard stuff to
Westerners, maybe, but not so much in the context of the ummah.

It is also under this ethos of strengthening nation-states and identity

that the UAE has bought more time for the Palestinians to negotiate a
two-state solution. Hamas or Hizballah cannot win anything for ordinary
Palestinians. The Emirati diplomacy of direct conversations with the
Israelis, far from closing off the idea of a Palestinian state, has provided the
Palestinians with their last hope for one.

In historical terms, the states of the Middle East are new and still
not fully formed, requiring of their leaders and citizens hard work, clear
vision, and entrepreneurial skills. The Emirates is one of the youngest of
these states, founded only in 1971, which gives it a surprising advantage: its
youth and distance from 1948, 1967, and the other Arab-Israeli wars of the
past gives it a freer mind to lead the way.

In its wake, we will see other Muslim-majority nations stand with Israel
soon. King Hamad of Bahrain was an early inspiration for peace, with his
Hanukkah party for American Jews in 2016. The late great Sultan Qaboos
of Oman invited the Israeli prime minister to Oman in 2018. That the
future king of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Mohammad bin Salman, will journey
to Jerusalem and make peace with the Jewish people is no longer a dream
but a probability. And there are other nations still that may surprise us.
Who knows, in the years ahead, Syria and Lebanon might join them;
the sectarianism that has torn those nations apart is resolved not by
depending on Iran but by turning them back to their natural home: their
Arab allies.
10
 Much of this depends on how we in the West behave. Do we act like
campus activists or the well-intentioned but uncomprehending diplomats
who stomp around helping the region tear itself apart, or do we support
our natural friends and assist them toward a different Middle East made of
robust nation-states unafraid to engage with each other? The choice is of
course no choice at all. But will we make it?

11
 Ron Dermer, Israeli ambassador to the United States, in Washington, D.C. in 2019. Michael
Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.

Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. on His Hopes for the

Relationship between Israel and the UAE
Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. joins us to share his vision for the
region and the strategic insight that brought us to this moment.

TIKVAH PODCAST AT
MOSAIC AND RON
DERMER
AU G 2 0 2 02 0
About the authors
A weekly podcast, produced
in partnership with the
Tikvah Fund, offering up
the best thinking on Jewish
thought and culture.
Ron Dermer is the outgoing
Israeli ambassador to the
United States.
W
e are witnessing a moment of great consequence in the annals
of the modern Middle East, and in the history of Zionism. One
week ago, the president of the United States, the prime minister
of Israel, and the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, together
announced the normalization of relations between the UAE and Israel.
This is Israel’s first peace accord with an Arab nation since 1994, and it is
the first time it has ever entered into such an arrangement with an Arab
nation that does not share its border.
How this happened, who made it happen, and the consequences it could
well have for regional security, regional prosperity, and peace between
Israel and her Arab neighbors, is our subject on this week’s Tikvah Podcast.
I’m your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest is, since 2013, Israel’s ambassador
to the United States, Ron Dermer. He is one of Israel’s longest-serving
representatives in Washington, and is known to be a close and trusted
colleague of Prime Minister Netanyahu working shoulder to shoulder
with the Trump administration, the prime minister in Jerusalem, and
representatives from the Gulf. He had a significant role to play in bringing
about this agreement.

12 In our conversation, we speak about his hopes for the relationship between
 Israel and the Emirates, the nations he expects will follow their lead,
the ramifications of the accord for the Palestinians, the hopes he has for
Israel’s relationship with Jordan and Egypt. Among the most interesting
things we discuss is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s strategic insight that
relates diplomatic achievement abroad with commercial, entrepreneurial
and military strength at home.

Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.

We’re having this conversation on Wednesday, August 19th, 2020.

Earlier this week, Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, sent a letter
to Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi,
inviting him to Jerusalem in recognition of the imminent settlement
of officially normalized relations. My first question is, how did this
deal come to pass?

It was really a historic day. As you said, it’s the third time that we have had
an Arab state agree to normalization, the first since 1994. We’ve had over
a quarter of a century without, effectively, a peace agreement. However,
we haven’t been at war with the Emirates, so it’s probably best to say it’s
the full normalization of relations with an Arab state. We haven’t had
that happen for 26 years, since the peace treaty with Jordan, and before
that the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. But in recent years, we’ve seen a
change in the Arab world’s view of Israel. The prime minister has spoken
about this shift for several years—publicly at the United Nations, in the
United States Congress, and elsewhere.

It was happening underneath the surface, but I think what drove this
shift was a combination of factors. One was certainly the rise of Iran as a
power in the region, and that created a common danger—it was important
for Arab states to work closely in security cooperation and intelligence
cooperation against that threat. A second issue was the rise of Sunni
fanaticism. Iran is a radical Shiite regime, but there’s also radical Sunni
forces in the region. The first iteration–let’s say in modern times, in the
last few decades–of those was Al-Qaeda, and then you have ISIS which
is 2.0, and there will be a 3.0. These Arab governments in the region are
very concerned about that. And I think the third factor frankly was the
perception that the United States was withdrawing from the region. On
both sides of the political aisle in the United States, nobody’s calling for
sending more troops to the Middle East, and the perception was that the
US was withdrawing from the region after Afghanistan and Iraq, so that
created this sense of the growing importance of Israel in the calculation
of these Arab states and in their understanding of their own security
interests.

Another element here is that Israel really is a global technological power.

13 The traditional Arab boycott towards Israel is a bit like Oregon, Nevada,
 Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona and half of Southern California
boycotting Silicon Valley. It makes no sense. But you do have some forces
within the Arab world that want to modernize their countries—certainly
the Emirates are one country that obviously has done a lot to embrace
modernity, and Mohammed bin Zayed is a leader who I think wants to
embrace it. Then when you have the second great center of innovation in
the world—Israel—in your backyard, it makes no sense not to cooperate.
I think all of those factors came together to set the table for a situation
where the Emirates would like to normalize relations with Israel. But
what we’ve had in the Arab world for some time is decades of poison
against Israel. Many forces in the Arab world have been poisoning their
populations because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 70 years of this
poison has an impact, so it’s hard for the Arab leaders to simply make this
shift, even when they would want to do so.

What happened in recent weeks is that Israel was moving towards

extending sovereignty in certain areas of Judea and Samaria, and the
Emirates understood that this could be an opportunity for them to
normalize relations with Israel. They went to the American administration
and they said, “Look, if Israel will suspend this move, then. . . .” and they
asked for a full cessation—to take it completely off the table forever.
But they did say that if Israel will just suspend it—because that’s what
eventually was agreed on—that they would normalize relations with Israel.
The United States administration then came to us and said, “Look, we have
something real in hand, we have something that hasn’t happened before.
The Emirates are willing to take this historic step. And we ask that you
not go ahead with the extension of sovereignty, and that you temporarily
suspend it to enable us, to give us the time and space, to take advantage of
this historic moment, which may even lead to several other breakthroughs
and several other peace agreements with Arab states.”

This is the first time that we’ve broken through this paradigm that has
existed for several decades. The paradigm says that the road to peace
with any Arab state goes through Ramallah, and it must go through
Ramallah. I cannot tell you how many times senior US officials, of both
Republican and Democratic administrations, would tell me, “If you
make peace with the Palestinians, you’ll get 22 Arab States to make peace
with you.” And I would always say, and the prime minister would say,
“Well, that would be great if the Palestinians wanted to make peace with
us. But what if the Palestinians don’t want to make peace? Then are we
giving a veto to the Palestinian leadership over Israel’s relations with the
Arab world?” Effectively that veto was there until Sadat in 1979. Even
the peace agreement with Jordan—which we’re blessed to have had for
25 years—happened only in the wake of Oslo, and it still reinforced the
argument that you needed some breakthrough with the Palestinians in
order to get peace with an Arab state. I think with this move here, even
though Israel is suspending its extension of sovereignty for now, Israel
is not making dangerous concessions. We’re not uprooting settlements.
We’re not engaging in reckless territorial compromises. We’re suspending,
14 temporarily, Israel’s extension of sovereignty into areas of Judea and
 Samaria.

Now we have the possibility of a peace agreement with the Emirates.

With the peace here, you might have full normalization in a way that,
unfortunately, we have not yet had with Egypt and Jordan. We would like
to have that. We have formal peace agreements with both countries, and
a cold peace is better than a hot war, but we would like to turn those into
warm peaces of people-to-people, business-to-business contacts with both
Egypt and Jordan. So in that way, this a breakthrough with the Emirates.
It allows for the possibility of a truly warm peace coming, not just from the
top down, but from the bottom up. With business-people going back and
forth, with people-to-people contacts.

How this was received with the Emirates is also a great harbinger of what
is to come once we get travel and tourism and direct flights between Tel
Aviv and Dubai. It might be that you’ll go to the Emirates in a couple of
years and you’ll be in a hotel there, and you’re going to hear more Hebrew
than Arabic in the hotel. And you might find yourself in Tel Aviv in a hotel,
and you might hear more Arabic than Hebrew. So this offers enormous
opportunities because the Emirates is a financial and commercial center in
the Arab world—there is a sovereign wealth fund of about a trillion dollars
there. And in Israel you have a great source of innovation and technology,
so when you marry the entrepreneurialism, this commercial center, and
the power of investments in the Emirates with Israeli technology and
innovation, the sky’s the limit. We’re very excited about it, and we think
that, as I said the day it happened, there is more to come.

You opened up a lot of big questions that I want to return to, but first,
just to get the sense of the timeline straight. On the one hand, there
were some security reasons for the Gulf Sunni nations and Israel to
cooperate in the context of the JCPOA and the Iran nuclear deal, and
the threat that American withdrawal would be more serious in the
years ahead. There’s also a more immediate timeline having to do
with annexation. So let me just ask you, when did the prime minister
start thinking about this?

We’ve been thinking about this for years. The prime minister has been
talking about normalizing with the Arab states even in public speeches
for several years. Even if you’re talking about this year, the prime minister
did not believe his move to extend sovereignty was going to undermine
any prospects of normalization in the future, and I don’t think that either.
That’s the wrong way to look at it.

It may be the case, as Ambassador Friedman said, that you may not be able
to do both simultaneously. But our hope was, as part of the peace plan that
was put forward, to move ahead to extend sovereignty. And as that moved
ahead, many people who were critical of it said that Israel is destroying
any possibility of peace with the Palestinians. That we were destroying any
possibility of a two-state solution. But that was not true. In fact, I wrote
15 a column about this in the Washington Post, where I said that Israel’s
 move would destroy the two-state illusion, and it would actually open the
possibility of a realistic two-state solution. We were not going to take any
step that was going to preclude the possibility of a political settlement with
the Palestinians in the future.

Take the timeline for moment. The peace plan is put out. Israel says yes to
this peace plan— Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gantz
both embrace it. The Palestinians of course rejected it. That was not a
surprise because they’ve rejected every plan for the last century. But at
the event where they launched the plan, you had three ambassadors: you
had the Emirate ambassador, the Omani ambassador, and the ambassador
from Bahrain. After that event, the question is: what do we do now? Now
you have a peace plan that’s on the table. And for the first time in the
history of this conflict, a plan was put forward that Israel could accept and
that the Arab states would not reject, for which I give great credit to the
Trump administration. That was new. That had never happened before.
It doesn’t mean the Arabs agree with every element that’s in the plan, but
they didn’t reject it. The Emirates even put out a fairly positive statement,
encouraging the Palestinians to go into negotiation, saying it was a good
first step.

So again, the question after the plan was put forward is: what do we
do? We didn’t have a Palestinian partner that was willing to negotiate
on that basis. What do we do? Israel and the United States decided to
work together on a plan to extend sovereignty to the parts of Judea and
Samaria—the West Bank—that would remain part of Israel according to
this Trump plan. And in exchange, we were not going extend sovereignty
to territory that the Trump plan designates as being Palestinian, for
a Palestinian state in the future, if they ever deigned to come to the
negotiating table and actually negotiate a real compromise based on the
framework that President Trump had put forward. We were moving ahead
with that plan, and perhaps the Emirates realized this was an opportunity
for them to normalize with Israel and—from their point of view—get
a suspension of Israel’s move to extend sovereignty. Through that
suspension, they were able to come into this peace agreement with Israel.

And I don’t think they did it against the Palestinians. They say they’re
committed to the Palestinians; they’re committed to a two-state solution.
They support the Palestinians’ desire for self-determination. But I think
they took advantage of this opportunity, and when it presented itself to
Israel, we took advantage of it as well.

Our hope is that other countries are going to come on board. Ultimately,
those who want to see Israeli-Palestinian peace should be very excited
about this development because by taking away the veto power of the
rejectionists, we empower those within Palestinian society who would like
to see a compromise, who would like to see a historic settlement of the
conflict.

16 Once several Arab states move towards peace with Israel, then the
 rejectionists can no longer say that they have the whole Arab world behind
them, because they don’t. They’re on the other side. The Arab world is
moving towards Israel. Hopefully those forces within Palestinian society
who would like to make peace with Israel will be strengthened by this, and
they’ll confront those who don’t want peace, saying, “Look, the Arab train
has left the station, so to speak, and we should get on board.” The more
the Arab world moves towards Israel, the greater the likelihood is for a
breakthrough with the Palestinians as well.

So you see it not as a disincentive for the Palestinians to come to the

table and to make it harder, but actually as a source of leverage to
bring them to the table.

There are people who think the Arab world is going to force the
Palestinians to make peace with Israel. I don’t think that’s true. I think
you need to have a historic change among the Palestinian leadership
and frankly, within Palestinian society, because it runs very deep: they
don’t recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state in our historic
homeland. They have to cross the Rubicon that they’ve never crossed.

I think if there are 20 Arab states sitting on that side of the Rubicon with
them saying, “We won’t cross to the other side until you do,” then we’re
just strengthening the forces of rejection in that society. But as those other
Arab states come across, then those Palestinians who would like to come
across as well will be able to point to that. That changes the whole dynamic
in the region.
We have an Arab-Israeli conflict and we have an Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Sometimes people confuse those two. There are interconnections;
in the Venn diagram there is a space where they both connect, but they’re
still separate. We could look back at this move by the Emirates, if it leads
to several others as well (and I hope it does), as something Churchill might
say: the beginning of the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Now that will hopefully lead to the beginning of the end of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict too. But I think first we have to deal with the Arab-
Israeli conflict to be able to strengthen those forces within Palestinian
society who’d like to make peace with us. That’s why this was such a
historic event. What’s interesting too is the reception that it has received in
the region. When Sadat did what he did, it was tremendous act of courage.
He received an important concession from Israel—we left the Sinai, which
is territory about three times the size of the state of Israel, and has energy
resources. And we left it. But, in the dramatic moment when he came to
Jerusalem, he punctured an entire wall of Arab rejectionism.

What you’re seeing in this move is that we’ve punctured a proforma

rejectionism. But underneath the surface, the relationship between Israel
and the Arab world has been building for some time. As I said, the prime
minister spoke about it publicly. The prime minister has worked on it
constantly. I’ve told people over the years, if you knew who the prime
17 minister has met with, where he has been and everything else, you would
 be shocked. He’s been doing all of it underneath the surface and nothing
has leaked out. And then occasionally things like this pop to the surface,
puncturing that formal rejection of Israel. And I think it can happen
much quicker than people think for the next countries to come, precisely
because of the response you’ve seen in the region. Bahrain has said
something positive. Oman has said something positive. The Saudis, if you
understand the intricacies of diplomacy, their response can be interpreted
as something positive. This agreement has been met in a different way
than was the case with Sadat, and I think that tells you about the shift that
was already underneath the surface in the Arab world. Now hopefully we
can bring it to the surface. We have just a little bit, and hopefully we can
get many now to follow.

So I want to come back to the question of Saudi Arabia, but I want

to just linger for another moment over Prime Minister Netanyahu’s
personal engagement in this issue. Has he been to the Emirates?

I think it was Begin who said, you never ask an Israeli prime minister
where he’s been, you know? So the prime minister would not say. He’s
been in many places that people think he’s not been. And I have great
admiration for the fact that over the years, he’s been able to conduct
very successful diplomacy with many, many leaders in the region that
we don’t have formal relations with, and he’s done it very quietly. In this
breakthrough, one of the reasons why it happened is that it was held very
closely on the Israeli side. There were very, very few people on our side
who knew about it, and I think that prevented leaks. And that’s important
because most of the breakthroughs happen that way. It was the case with
Egypt in a positive way, and it wasn’t the case with Oslo, which turned
out to be a negative. Whenever there’s leaks, all the opponents will attack
it, and you never get the positive side to come out because everything’s
already been undermined. We were able to do it very quietly this time.

The prime minister has invested an enormous amount of time and effort
and now we’re getting this breakout. There’s other things that have
happened too. You may recall a couple of years ago that he actually visited
Oman. Sultan Qaboos, the late Sultan there, hosted him in Oman in a
public visit. There was a meeting with the leader of Sudan, which was not
made public at the time, but afterwards it was reported that they had met.
We had a meeting in Warsaw where you had the foreign ministers of Saudi
Arabia, of Bahrain, and of the Emirates in the room, and other officials
from Arab countries with the prime minister. It wasn’t a public event, but
that in itself was a breakthrough. So these quiet things have happened
underneath the surface, but here finally you have a real breakthrough.
Mohammed bin Zayed deserves a great deal of credit for having the
courage to do that.

Ambassador Dermer, do you have any insight that you can share
about the relationship between the Saudis and the Emiratis, and
about whether they’re coordinated or if this move puts any pressure
18 on Mohammed bin Salman? Or whether Mohammed bin Salman and
 MBZ have together orchestrated the sequencing here so it’s like the
Emiratis are acting as a kind of Saudi vanguard in making peace?

There’s a very strong relationship between Saudi Arabia and the Emirates
and between the crown princes of both countries. But because I’m a
sitting ambassador, I don’t want to talk about those specifics. I’m not a
commentator on events. We deal with a lot of different countries and a
lot of different things, so I think the best thing to say right now is that the
relationship is good. I don’t think the Saudis were surprised by this, and
I think it helps improve the chances of other countries moving forward
towards a normalization with Israel. There’s no question about it.

You mentioned something interesting about the differences between

the growing relationship between Israel and the Emirates on the one
hand and the peace treaties that Israel has with Jordan and Egypt on
the other. How do you think they’re alike and how do you see them as
different?

First of all, we’re alike now because you have that formal agreement and
you can have embassies and you can have direct flights and you have a
certain level of formal ties that are important in diplomacy. There are
certain things that you can do underneath the table—secret talks, working
on certain security issues and intelligence issues. But I think once you
surface it like this and you have a formal structure, there’s so much more
potential, not only on security and intelligence, but frankly on commercial
ties too.

We would like to see deep and warm peace between Egypt and Israel, and
Jordan and Israel, and we will work to advance that. We’ll have to see how
the peace with the Emirates will compare with the peace between Israel
and Egypt and Israel and Jordan. But I think there are possibilities for
it to expand quickly, not only top-down, but bottom-up. I don’t see a lot
of forces—cultural forces, economic forces, political forces—inside the
Emirates that are working to stop those ties, that are trying to prevent
reconciliation. Everything suggests that the forces are a tailwind for
strengthening those ties. On the other hand, I think there have been forces
in Egypt and in Jordan that have worked to prevent that. There can be
cultural boycotts and there can be economic boycotts, and I can’t tell you
that when an Egyptian or a Jordanian businessman would make a deal
with Israel, they were applauded in public.

We are definitely blessed with this peace agreement for forty years
with Egypt and twenty-five years with Jordan and we’re thankful that
President Sisi has worked to strengthen the relationship with Israel, and
also King Hussein and King Abdullah have worked to strengthen this
relationship’ but there were times when, within Egypt and Jordan, you had
countervailing forces. I don’t see those forces right now in the Emirates.
Everything suggests, based on what we’ve seen in the last four or five days
since this was announced, that there was going to be a tailwind in favor
19 of it. There were contacts before, where Israeli businessmen would come
 back and forth, but it was always done indirectly and sometimes with a
second passport or other mechanisms. But once you open up business,
once you have full direct flights, I think you’re going to see a tremendous
positive change happen very quickly there because you don’t have that
animosity or opposition within society. I just don’t see it there right now.
I expect as the Emirati public understands the benefits of peace with
Israel, and as Israelis see the benefits of peace with the Emiratis, it will
only get stronger. I would hope that it would lead to a deepening of peace
between Egypt and Israel and Israel and Jordan too, because I think those
publics could benefit greatly from real strong commercial ties, real cultural
exchange and everything else. And so maybe it will expand peace that we
don’t have, and deepen the peace agreements that we do have.

That’s such an interesting point. One would have just wondered if

in 1979, if the Egyptians had seen the potential for their relationship
with Israel, as it seems very much like the Emiratis do, and what kind
of benefits for them in trade and entrepreneurship and medicine and
high tech and everything else could have been part of their growth
over the last 40 years.

There’s no question. You saw that in the statement that President Sisi
put out supporting it. And had there been deeper ties, I think it would
certainly have been to the benefit of Israel and I think it would have
been even more to the benefit of Egypt. It’s a different scenario with
the Emirates because we don’t share a common border, we haven’t had
wars. When you’re dealing with a bordering state, when you’re dealing
with active military engagement all the time, that is obviously a different
scenario and it’s harder to have this shift happen. But I do think that it is
possible, and my hope would be that the nearly one hundred million or
so people in Egypt will see the benefits of peace between Israel and the
Emirates.

Of course, they’re different countries. They also have different resources.

And the UAE is a commercial and financial center in the entire Middle
East, where Egypt has been a political, cultural, and traditional leader in
the Arab world and even beyond. So there’s a different dynamic that goes
on, but the hope would be that the people of Egypt will look and say, “Hey,
look at the benefits that we’re having, let’s work to strengthen ties with
Israel.” And the same thing would happen with the people of Jordan.

If there’s two Arab countries in peace with Israel, when you have three it
strengthens the two that are already there. Once you have four and five
and six and seven, it creates a whole dynamic that ultimately changes the
conflict, and hopefully can bring the Arab-Israeli conflict to an end. That
I think would be a great thing. We moved, as I said, from a hot war with
Egypt to a cold peace—which is certainly better than a hot war. And you
could say with Jordan, we moved from this almost cold war from 1970 to
1994, to a cold peace. Now we have an opportunity now to create a warm
peace with the Emirates, and then maybe we can move the cold peace that
20 we have with Egypt and Jordan to a warmer peace.
 Let me ask you some about the security tradeoffs as you think about
them and as the prime minister thinks about them. One need only
look at the map to see where the Emirates are in relation to the Strait
of Hormuz and Iran. It’s an extremely significant strategic advantage
to have this partnership for Israel. Has there been any discussion
about possible naval exercises or any other kinds of military
cooperation?

I don’t want to get into it, but let’s just say the prime minister has a very big
map behind him in his home office and a map on the sidewall of his work
office and he knows exactly where the Emirates are and exactly who’s on
the other side of those straits. So it hasn’t escaped our attention, but we
have to let this process take its natural course. I think you’re going to see
the security and intelligence cooperation, and also civilian cooperation
in health and medicine, and agriculture and in water. In many areas,
you’re going to see this expand very, very dramatically, and soon. There
are great strategic benefits for Israel, and there are great strategic benefits
for the Emirates, as they seek to diversify their economies as well. You’re
going to see a lot of investment from the Emirates into Israel. And you’ll
see that vice versa, a lot of partnerships happening from the ground up.
In fact, once we make these sorts of formal agreements, even if they’re
skeletal agreements, everything will happen from the bottom up, which
is very different from a top down process where you’re really pushing the
private sector to do things. Here, I just think if you build it, they will come.
So we just have to create that framework to allow for the natural affinities
between Israel and the Emirates to take their course.

Let me ask you a question about America. Of course I understand

there are limits to what you can tell us, and I understand it’s
necessary for you to protect the trust and discretion you’ve built up
with particular members over the years, but in general, can you tell us
about the reaction that this deal has been received with in the House
and the Senate?

I can tell you I’ve had many calls at this point, maybe some two dozen,
since it happened. I usually start those calls saying, “I hate to be the bearer
of good news. . . .,” and usually that has been met with a great laugh,
because there’ve been times where members did not see eye to eye with
Israel on a certain policy. The position regarding Iran and the nuclear deal
is the most obvious one, but there’ve been others as well. But it’s nice to
see the strong bipartisan support for Israel in this agreement. The former
vice president and Senator Harris came out with a statement supporting
this. Especially when it’s a time of a real great partisan divide for a really
long time, to do something like this shortly before a US election and to see
that level of bipartisan support is very heartwarming.

And I’ll tell you something else that’s important, something I’ve told
many of the people I’ve spoken to, particularly the ones who have been
21 champions of Israel on both sides of the aisle for a long time. And that is:
 they also have a share in what has happened now. Everybody’s trying to
find the straw that breaks the camel’s back—what was the last meeting that
led to the breakthrough that made this possible? But the truth is that every
straw on the camel’s back breaks the back. The last one is one, but all the
ones underneath it also do it. There is no question in my mind that a pillar
of Israel’s strength is the alliance that we have with the United States. For
decades, you have seen support for Israel on both sides of the aisle. So for
some members of Congress and the Senate, those who’ve been there for a
long time, some of them two, three decades, we are very grateful for their
consistent support for Israel.

The only way you have breakthroughs like this is that if Israel remains
very, very strong. We waited 30 years to have a peace agreement with
Egypt. We didn’t sit on our hands and mourn our faith. We built the
country and unfortunately we had to fight wars as we were building the
country, but ultimately that led to a breakthrough. The understanding that
Israel could not be defeated in war ultimately led to a breakthrough and
the move of Sadat to make peace with Israel. Since then, we’ve continued
to build our strength, and in the last couple of decades I think the prime
minister deserves enormous credit for really turning Israel into a rising
power in the world. In security and in technology, in military power and
intelligence power, cyber capability, and in really liberalizing Israel’s
economy and allowing the enormous brain power that we have among
our people, the human capital we have, to be unleashed to make Israel the
center of innovation.

Israel’s strength has led us to the precipice of this moment. And a pillar
of that strength is the US-Israel alliance. And those people, on both sides,
who have worked year after year to support Israel, they have actually put
a lot of straw on that back. Then when these days happen, I think they
deserve a share of that credit. I see it as my role as Israel’s ambassador to
say thank you for making this day possible.

Everybody wants ultimately to see peace between Israel and all our
neighbors, including the Palestinians, but it is definitely peace through
strength. In fact, the story of Israel, the 72-year story of Israel, is a story of
peace through strength. The stronger we are and the stronger we become,
the more likely we are to bring peace. The opposite idea—which I reject
and certainly the prime minister rejects—says Israel should weaken itself
and make concessions. I think that will actually make peace harder to
achieve and actually undermine the alliance that we have with the United
States, because the stronger Israel is as an ally, the more people will
gravitate towards it. No one makes peace with the weak. They make peace
with the strong, and no one seeks weak allies, they seek strong allies. That
has positioned Israel in a way where our Arab neighbors see Israel as a
strong ally, are moving closer to us, and the Emirates basically created a
bridge now to move over and formalize this relationship that a lot of other
countries in the region seek. We will work in the weeks and months ahead
to see if we can have more countries that would like to cross over that
22 bridge.
 David Friedman, U.S. Ambassador to Israel, speaks during a briefing on the Emirates deal at
the White House on August 13, 2020. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images.

The Role of American Policy and Personnel in the

Israeli-Emirati Deal
An American National Security Council veteran explains how the
U.S. pressured Iran and built trust to broker last week’s accord, and
the effects it will have throughout the region.

RICHARD GOLDBERG
AU G 2 0 2 02 0
About the author
Richard Goldberg is a senior
advisor at the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies and
previously served on the U.S.
National Security Council.
I
n the wake of the historic agreement brokered by the U.S. between
Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver
spoke with the American national-security expert Richard Goldberg,
a veteran of the National Security Council, to understand how he
interprets the strategic underpinnings of the deal, the role that the Trump
administration played in bringing it about, and what it reveals about
America in the Middle East.
This transcript has been lightly compressed and edited.

Last week, Israel and the United Arab Emirates concluded their
historic, U.S.-brokered peace agreement. Tell us how we got here.

This agreement was a long time coming. It represents a generational

shift after many decades of conflict. It’s a major step between two nations
that thought they would always be enemies but now realize that they
share mutual adversaries, commonalities and, frankly, a future that’s
interdependent—not just for reasons of security, but also because of
their economic needs over the course of this century. In a world of
constant technological change, Israel has become a hub for research and
23 development, economic and technological innovation, and startups. The
 UAE and other Arab governments want their countries to have the same
things, and understand that they need to wean themselves from their
dependency on oil, and that cooperation with Israel can help them do so.

Why do you think that the Emirates were the first to take this step?
Why not Bahrain, for instance, with which Israel has been in dialogue
with for quite some time?

There have certainly been rumors that Bahrain has been moving toward
some sort of a peace treaty or nonaggression pact with Israel. Below the
radar, there has been dialogue between Jerusalem and Manama for years,
with delegations going back and forth between the two countries. Bahrain
has been very outspoken in its support for normalizing relations with
Israel. Thus many people really thought that Bahrain would go first.

But I think Bahrain didn’t want to be the one to make the first move. Their
country is located very close to Iran, and has a sizable Shiite population,
so the government fears Iranian influence both through propaganda
and through cultivating potential revolutionaries. Because of these
vulnerabilities, it doesn’t want to be the first to make peace with Israel. But
it might be happy to be the second.

It makes a lot of sense that the UAE was willing to take this step before the
other Gulf states. Its economy has been liberalizing. Israeli representatives
have even appeared there to take part in international forums. We know
that security ties between Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi have been quietly
strengthening for years, just as they have been between Jerusalem and
Riyadh.

What role did the Obama administration play in this development?

There was a widespread perception in the region—and not an unfounded

one—that the Obama administration was hostile to America’s traditional
allies in the Persian Gulf. The 2015 nuclear deal with Iran was part of a
strategic realignment in American Middle East policy based on the
assumption that there are a lot of bad actors in the region in conflict with
one another, and that instead of supporting the least bad side, or the one
that most shares U.S. interests, Washington should cultivate relationships
with all of them. A corollary to this approach is that the conflict between
Iran and its neighbors is an age-old sectarian conflict between Sunnis and
Shiites, and the best thing America can do is help achieve equilibrium
between the two groups.

An additional element of the Obama administration’s view is that Iran

feels legitimately threatened by Israel’s nuclear and ballistic-missile
programs, and that here too America’s responsibility is to achieve
balance. (This is not my view, obviously.) The final assumption is that the
Palestinian issue is the core conflict in the Middle East.

24 From the perspective of Israel and most Sunni Arab states, the United
 States committed to funneling billions of dollars to Iran, their mortal
enemy, and then said, “Okay, you’re on your own now. Good luck.” The
natural result is that the Israelis and the Sunni Arabs came together for a
security partnership, which opened the door for other forms of dialogue
and cooperation, and broader realization of how much they have in
common.

In this context, the Palestinian cause is no longer a top concern for the
Sunni Arab world. I think this has been increasingly clear to anyone
involved in diplomatic dialogue in the region. Moreover, Sunni Arabs
have come to see the Israel-Palestinian conflict as a prison of their own
creation, and one that they are growing ever more frustrated to be trapped
in. In 1948, and for many years thereafter, the Sunni Arab powers hoped
to reconquer all the territory of the new state of Israel while turning the
plight of the Palestinians into a political weapon to keep the conflict
raging—mostly by putting Palestinians into refugee camps and not
allowing them to integrate into the various Arab countries.

The result? Two more wars, which the Arab powers again lost. Fast forward
a few decades, and Palestinians have taken on their own narrative, one
created for them by these Arab powers. And they now hold the cards in
that they get to determine the agenda. The conventional wisdom for many
years among Arab rulers was that if they were to betray the Palestinians, if
they were to cease to stand with them and against Israel, they would face
serious domestic problems.

Just to clarify: you’re saying that the Arab nations who originally
outsourced to the Palestinians the task of destroying Israel are now
trapped because until the Palestinians believe that Israel has suffered
enough, they can’t form real relationships with Israel. And now those
Arab nations are regretting that.

Exactly. These are not democratically elected governments. They’re not

afraid of losing elections; they’re afraid of unrest in the streets, of being
overthrown. And their populations watch the news every day on Al Jazeera
and other Arab media outlets and see Palestinians suffering. They’ve been
fed a steady diet of hatred of Israel, often by their own rulers. And then
these rulers start to understand that Israel is not going anywhere, that
it’s the strongest military and economic power in the region. They need
its help in defending against Iran, especially with America in retreat, but
they’re prevented from doing so by the Palestinian problem—which these
regimes have themselves created.

And, as I mentioned before, it’s not only about Iran. It’s also about
economics. Look at the Vision 2030 plan that Mohammad bin Salman
rolled out for Saudi Arabia, which is based, quite correctly, on the fact that
oil won’t sustain the kingdom forever. It needs to innovate, to develop
high-tech sectors that offer people opportunities, rather than leaving them
dependent on government subsidies that come from petroleum revenue
25 that will one day start to dry up. But economic progress requires trade, and
 that means opening a country to its neighbors, especially the prosperous
ones. People need to be able to travel in and out of Israel.

All these changes of perspective are taking place in Arab capitals

simultaneously in 2016, in part under the influence of President Obama’s
policies. And then the system receives another shock: Donald Trump is
elected after saying that the nuclear deal is the worst deal in history, and
signaling that he will be much more pro-Israel than his predecessor. Once
in office, President Trump starts rebuilding relationships both with Israel
and with the Gulf states.

The White House then appoints people very close to the president to make
this a reality—Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt especially. Amazingly,
unlike most anything else in the Trump administration, their work doesn’t
leak out for years.

During this time Kushner, Greenblatt, Brian Hook, and others are
building relationships—and in the Middle East personal relationships are
everything—and showing that the U.S. commitment to its allies isn’t just
rhetoric. I think the Israel-UAE agreement is a product of the trust the
White House managed to establish.

Why then does it take until August 2020 for the deal to happen? In my
opinion, it’s partly because the presidential election is fast approaching.
The UAE and the other Gulf states want to hedge against the possibility
that Trump will lose, and that, in foreign-policy terms, a Biden presidency
might amount to a third term of the Obama administration. Meanwhile
the behind-the-scenes relationships between the Sunni governments and
Israel are no longer so secret. Iran already criticizes Arab governments for
talking to Israel and for supposedly abandoning the Palestinian cause. The
costs of normalizing relations with Israel are largely sunk at this point. Abu
Dhabi realized that it’s time to collect the benefit.

I’m struck by your observation that there were no leaks—not from

the American side, and not from the Arab or Israeli side either. That is
amazing. Why?

It is amazing. A little less so with regard to the authoritarian governments

in the Arab world, where there’s no real free press. But it’s almost
unbelievable that there weren’t leaks from Israel or the U.S. The old joke I
once heard from a very high-ranking Israeli politician is that in Israel, “off
the record” means you can print it in two weeks.

The only explanation is that these deliberations took place at the highest
levels, without much delegation of responsibility to the staffs, which is
usually where the leaks come from. It’s likely that most of the interactions
happened among a small group of very senior people who have all come to
trust each other.

26 Do we know who the principals were in each of these three parties?

 On the Arab side, you have the crown prince of the UAE, the crown prince
of Saudi Arabia, and the crown prince of Bahrain—and their ambassadors
in Washington. On the American side: the president, Jared Kushner, Jason
Greenblatt, Ambassador David Friedman, Brian Hook, and a handful
of other key players both in Washington and Jerusalem. And in Israel,
Prime Minister Netanyahu and a few of his closest advisers, including
the outgoing ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer. I’d guess that you could
count on two hands all the people who really knew all the details at any
given moment.

Peace negotiations have often been conducted much more

transparently, under the assumption that media and public
attention would put pressure on the parties and push them closer to
predetermined outcomes. Why do you think that these three parties—
Prime Minister Netanyahu, his Arab counterparts, and President
Trump—decided against that?

Well, I think it has been proven time and time again that this is a failed
strategy, particularly during the Oslo peace process and what followed.
When you have big summitry and elaborate pageantry, you think you’re
building trust, but in fact you’re building distrust. Politicians tend to
shape their politics based on the audience in front of them at any given
moment, and they’re constantly worried about the perceptions of people
back home. So leaders would say one thing in a room and then come home
and say another thing to their population. Meanwhile, hordes of reporters
would descend on the summit and be on the lookout for a staff member
who could give them any sort of quote or off-the-record statement. The
statement would show up in the newspaper the next day and cause
consternation for the other parties, which would lead to friction with their
interlocutors.

Don’t forget that not all parties involved necessarily want a particular
outcome, and that people have political opponents who want to see them
fail. The fewer people who are involved, the fewer opportunities for leaks
or damaging news coverage, and the more opportunities to have frank
conversations, to work out differences, to come out at the same time and
say, “This is the agreement. It’s a done deal.” The people in charge get to
own the story that way.

Are there other ways in which the current administration’s policies

contributed to this development?

Yes. Let’s think about the level of commitment President Trump

demonstrated to our allies. Under a different administration, if Netanyahu
began talking about declaring sovereignty over parts of the West Bank,
the State Department might go wild issuing statements of condemnation.
Likewise, another administration wouldn’t have reversed the State
Department’s determination that the settlements are illegal per se. Never
mind moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Jerusalem as
27 the capital of Israel and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan
 Heights. These steps have built up enormous capital with Netanyahu and
the Israeli people writ large.

Something similar has happened with the Gulf States. Trump went
straight to the Gulf for his first trip abroad as president. When Congress
was pushing to cut off military assistance to Gulf allies and even to impose
sanctions, Trump could’ve easily given into the political pressure—
but he didn’t. Some of Congress’s concerns were legitimate, others the
product of Iranian disinformation. But, despite bipartisan pressure, the
administration has consistently stood by its Gulf allies. That matters to
Arab leaders. In addition, the White House has created a lot of goodwill
through its Iran policy. The combination generates significant trust and
allows the president, or someone close to him, to get on the phone and say,
“We have been by your side. We have stuck with you. This is the time to do
something bold.”

What do you think the Palestinians might learn from this

arrangement?

The Palestinians are probably somewhere between just being very upset
and panic. They’ll panic if they see a cascade of other countries following
the UAE. At that point, they’re going to understand that the leverage
they’ve had for decades is diminishing very fast. That these countries
have decided that they will no longer be hostage to the Palestinian
narrative. Therefore, they better cut the best deal they can get as quickly as
possible, because if they wait another 25 years and watch the Arab world
integrate with Israel, they will be left behind. Even if Israel doesn’t declare
sovereignty in the West Bank for 25 years, but maintains the status quo, at
some point will anyone care what happens so long as people are treated
with respect and dignity?

If what you said is right, what that means is that the administration
has just created a new source of leverage over the Palestinians to try
to force them to the negotiating table. In other words, contrary to the
conventional wisdom, it’s precisely by ignoring the demands of the
Palestinians that you can get them to make peace.

That’s right. And I’ll go one step further: not just ignoring their demands,
but actually slaughtering their sacred cows. What do I mean by that? The
decisions to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, to recognize Jerusalem
as the capital, to delegitimize and even to defund the agency set up for
so-called Palestinian refugees that helps them maintain their permanent
refugee status. Now a Sunni Arab state is making peace with Israel in spite
of those steps being taken. What message are they taking away from that
in Ramallah? That the Palestinians don’t matter as much as they used to in
Sunni Arab capitals. Arab rulers are focused on their populations, on their
future, their security, their economies.

The Arab states are not going to allow bad things to happen to the
28 Palestinians, but they’re not going to be held hostage by ridiculous
 demands or obsessions over symbols like the embassy. That should
resonate at some point with the Palestinian leadership, and might
motivate it to do something. But it’s possible that it won’t. I’ve seen several
instances in recent years when I really thought that someone in the
Palestinian Authority leadership would say, “Okay. We need to get serious
here. We need to climb down from our tree. Otherwise, history is going to
pass us by.” But they never did.

If that continues, a generation will pass, and a new generation of

Palestinians will grow up seeing a very different Middle East, and that will
have consequences in 25 years.

And what’s the message for Iran?

Iran has to believe that this throws a major monkey wrench into its plans
to create a Shiite crescent in the Middle East. But I think that Iranian
leaders are still hoping that Joe Biden will win the election and return to
the nuclear deal. I don’t think Arab states making peace with Israel will
change the thinking in Democratic foreign-policy circles about Iran.

That being said, I believe that by making peace treaties with Israel,
Arab countries can insulate themselves from a cutoff of U.S. assistance.
If anything, their relationships with Washington will be cemented for
another generation to come because we now depend on them for Middle
East peace and integration going forward. Every Arab or Muslim country
that signs a peace treaty with Israel before January of next year will have
punched its ticket for U.S. protection and support for the foreseeable
future—regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office. That’s bad news for
Iran, which was hoping that the U.S. might revert to distancing itself from
the Sunni Arab states.

But what if Trump is reelected? Definitely bad news for Iran. His
administration’s maximum-pressure campaign is doing significant
damage to Tehran’s ability to project force beyond its borders. Alongside
that, the continuous drumbeat of military strikes by Israel on Iranian and
Iran-backed forces in Syria, the interdiction of Iranian weapons going to
Yemen and elsewhere, and other measures continue. An integrated Arab-
Israeli security architecture fits perfectly into the president’s strategy of
rolling back Iran in the Middle East.

So whoever wins the election, it’s not good news for the Islamic Republic;
it’s just less bad if Biden wins.

Let’s go back to what the UAE can expect from this deal. How do they
stand to benefit? Not only in terms of the security dimensions we’ve
been talking about, but also in terms of trade and so forth, what does
this mean for them in practical terms?

Most obviously, access to Israeli-made military hardware might be on

29 the table for discussion, as well as cooperation on certain key security
 measures—these are Abu Dhabi’s priorities. I think that the Emirates also
sees the deal as a guarantee that they will continue to receive American-
made arms, which they depend on, and that U.S. troops will remain in the
country.

On the economic side, there are a range of opportunities for the Emiratis
to partner with the Israeli high-tech sector: energy, water, transportation,
infrastructure, healthcare technology, and so forth. You will also see
private-sector investors in America willing to invest in joint ventures
between those countries. And the same will apply to any other country
that steps up and says, “We want to sign a treaty as well.” I think the
tourism industry will benefit. But the sky is truly the limit.

Looking at a map, you see the location of the Emirates, on the Strait
of Hormuz—one of the most valuable strategic choke points for the
flow of fossil fuels around the world, and crucial for confronting and
containing Iran. Do you think that somewhere along the line there
might even be some kind of Israeli military presence established in
the Emirates?

The United States should propose, if not convene, a joint military exercise
somewhere that’s safe, but close enough to Iran to send a clear message—
perhaps in the Arabian Sea. I think that would be a game-changer. In the
past U.S. officials have talked about whether it would ever be possible to
include Israel in certain Gulf maritime operations, such as anti-piracy
efforts and the protection of commercial shipping. One problem is that in
the past it wasn’t clear whether the Israeli navy could operate that far from
home. But even it could, would the Arab governments ever allow it? The
answer to date has been no.

But it would be easier to do if this were an American-run exercise, where

we get to invite, say, five countries to participate. Perhaps this could be
done next year. Perhaps it’s better to wait for other Arab countries to follow
Abu Dhabi’s lead. But we’ve already seen joint training between the Israeli
Air Force and the Jordanians. And there have obviously been very quiet
bilateral security dialogues between Israel and Arab countries, conducted
through the intelligence services. So I think this is a very real possibility.
Military personnel and equipment, operating together, with several Arab
flags flying alongside the Israeli one, all under a U.S. umbrella—what a
message that would be to Iran.

30
 Palestinian protesters in Hebron on November 13, 2018. HAZEM BADER/AFP via Getty Images.

Anti-Semitism Is at the Core of the Middle East’s

Dysfunction. The New Agreement Promises a Break
From Both.
Arabs are finally concluding that they need to move past the toxic
legacies of Arab nationalism and Islamism—which means moving
past the mythology of Palestine too.

HUSSEIN ABOUBAKR
AU G 2 1 2 02 0
About the author
Hussein Aboubakr is an
Egyptian American educator
and a former political
refugee. He works for the
Center for Combating Anti-
semitism and is a graduate
student in international
affairs at George Washington
University.
L
ast week’s peace and normalization agreement between the United
Arab Emirates and Israel has rightly been described as one of the
most significant events in modern Middle Eastern history. The UAE
is not the minor Arab confederacy of bedouin sheikhdoms it once was,
but a leader of an entire Sunni Arab bloc, which means that its formal
acceptance of Israel paves the road to wider Arab action.
There’s more going on, though, than even that. The agreement is actually
the signal of perhaps the single most important transformation of the
modern Middle East since the end of the colonial era: it marks the formal
beginning of a new regional order. Since the end of that era in the middle
of the 20th century, Arabs have been defined by two successive political
orders, Arab nationalism and Islamism. Today, many of them are rightfully
concluding that they need to break away from those orders and their toxic
legacies. And to do that, they are concluding further, they need to break
away from the mythology of Palestine that came alongside them.

Let’s jump back in time for a moment. At the eve of the departure
31
 of European colonial powers in the years after World War II, Arab
revolutionaries were plotting out the foundations of what became in their
countries the political reality of the second half of the 20th century. The
rising political and social consciousness created by these revolutionary
forces, known as Arab nationalism, was a mixture of Arab romanticism,
hyper-nationalist European-style fascism, and Eastern Bloc socialism.
The Arab nationalists claimed that every inch of land where Arabs are to
be found was actually a part of the “great Arab homeland” and of a “single
Arab nation with an eternal message,” and they called for a unified Arab
polity that would transcend any national borders.

The 1950s and 1960s were particularly tumultuous, with various

revolutionary camps like the Baathists in Syria and Iraq and the Nasserites
in Egypt engaging in brutal competition among themselves and against
the traditional monarchical forces that still ruled their countries. The
first revolutionary military coup the region witnessed, in Syria in 1949,
set a precedent; by the 1970s, no single Arab country was spared a coup,
multiple coups, or a failed coup attempt. Arab nationalism had become
the prime political and social force, forming the only ideological option for
Arab masses and intellectuals and seriously threatening the monarchies
still reigning in Saudi Arabia, the Arab Gulf, Jordan, and Morocco. While
the internal conflict between the different revolutionary camps, evident in
the failed attempt at unity between Egypt and Syria, did slow down Arab
nationalism’s march, the movement was halted only by an external shock:
the Six-Day War. The Arab states’ demoralizing 1967 loss to Israel forced
the revolutionary Arab nationalist movements and republics to accept a
measure of coexistence with the traditional monarchies.

It was within this tumultuous context that the mythology of Palestine was
conceived and that the Arab nationalists chose it as their signature cause.
Their choice served two purposes. First, by declaring that Arab lands and
lives in Palestine were under assault, they successfully evoked nationalist
sentiments in the masses. Second, it crowned the nationalists as the sole
guardians of Arabness. This, in turn, created an additional effect. It meant
that identification as an Arab became intricately tied to hostility towards
Israel, pressuring everybody—including Arab royalists who were opposed
to Arab nationalism—to heighten their anti-Israel rhetoric so as to seem
better Arabs.

In this way, national liberation and the fight against imperialism and
Arab divisiveness all became expressed in the language of hostility to
Israel—language increasingly steeped in the most toxic European racial
ideas. Anti-Semitism in the Middle East had historically been religiously
motivated and creed-based. No longer. New Arab history textbooks, still
currently in use, introduced the idea that Arabs were the descendants
of the ancient Canaanites, Phoenicians, and Philistines, and the now-
widespread notion that Jews were a foreign ethnic group engaged in
systematic and conspiratorial efforts to undermine the mystical union
between the people and their fatherland.
32
 After the Six-Day War, Arab nationalism was a movement without
momentum, yet its political, institutional, social, intellectual, and folkloric
legacy remained. The death of Arab nationalism might have started a
gradual breakaway from the no-longer-useful mythology of Palestine,
if it wasn’t for the sudden rise of Islamism in the 1970s to replace and
even surpass it as the primary force shaping Arab social and political
consciousness. Islamism, though a religious rather than a nationalist
creed, nonetheless benefited from the unitary regional consciousness
created by Arab nationalism and positioned itself as the true and natural
successor ideology. Along the way, Islamists picked up the already-
established mantra of “Palestine!” and made it their own.

The rise of Islamism forced Arab states and establishments—both

the republics formed by Arab nationalism as well as the surviving
monarchies—to work together to maintain a status quo of power, a goal
that became absolutely vital after Islamists achieved victory in the Iranian
Islamic Revolution and after they assassinated Anwar Sadat. Nothing less
than their survival was on the line. This meant that they had to maintain
tangible support for Palestine, a rhetorical commitment to its liberation,
and, at least in public, a clear distance from Israel. This more than
anything explains why post-Sadat Egypt never warmed further to Israel, its
new partner in peace.

Meanwhile, Islamists continued to push Palestine to the Arab masses.

Because of its theological and transnational nature, the Islamist
movement cared less about the ethnonationalist claim of the Palestinians
against that of the Israelis, preferring instead to reframe the conflict in the
older terms of religious-based anti-Semitism. Hatred toward Jews was thus
reintroduced as not just part of Arabness but also as part of Muslimness.
Likewise, in attempting to bring Islam to the center stage of Arab political
life, Islamists had to make the Palestinian cause about Islam, not Palestine
itself. In popular culture, to oppose Israel became not just an Arab
duty but also an eternal moral truth; the political cries against “Zionist
colonialism” became theological ones as well. At this point, things became
so overloaded with ideology and cross-bred hatred that Arab states lapsed
into a kind of stunned silence, unable to deal openly with Israel or even
to speak its name in public. (Hence the introduction of absurd formulas
like “the Zionist entity.”) Arab public opinion about Israel likewise became
something of an obscure inarticulate mess.

This had terrible effects not for Israel, which would do just fine, but for
the Arab states and publics themselves. Because anti-Zionism and anti-
Judaism were so core to the prevailing ideologies of Arab nationalism
and Islamism, inarticulacy and inability to cope spread to all matters of
state. Things lasted in this stuck, frozen phase for decades. The political
rhetoric of the Arab establishments could not free itself from the legacy
of Arab nationalism; visions of the unity of the Arab nation still loomed
large, however empty they were. Eventually, the official statements of Arab
unity, usually uttered during Arab League summits, became the subject
33 of ridicule within every coffee shop, while the continuous condemnations
 of Israel followed by no meaningful action created only suspicion and
frustration with Arab rulers. This situation, in turn, only empowered
the Islamist polemic against the establishment and armed it with more
ammunition for attacks against the insincere and hypocritical Arab states.

On the back of decades of economic failures and administrative

corruption, the breaking point of the freeze finally arrived in 2011, with
the Arab Spring. Almost all the republics created by Arab revolutionaries
faced complete collapse, and Islamist forces emerged as immediate
replacements, aided by imperialist and anti-Arab neighboring powers like
Iran and Turkey. The states that survived the Arab Spring were the same
traditional Arab monarchies that had survived Arab nationalism half a
century earlier. Indeed, of all political arrangements in the Middle East
over the last century, it is the monarchies that have proved most resilient.
In the past decade, they’ve together formed a new rising bloc hoping
to stabilize the region. In their efforts, they have successfully reached
the most logical and pressing conclusion in Middle East politics: the
mythology of Palestine is at the core of the entire toxic legacy of the 20th
century and of the failed pathologies of Arab nationalism and Islamism. If
the Middle East is ever to become stable, it needs to break away.

The transition into a new Arab political and social landscape is, to be sure,
not limited to the issue of Israel and ideology. It touches every aspect
of society. The new Middle East requires a new political consciousness,
which begins with the death of the old one. The necessity of such a new
order has only increased as the future and lesser role of the United States
in the region has become clearer and clearer over the last ten years. And
this requires an overhaul of Western understanding and analysis of Arab
politics. The traditional Arab political fondness for a totalizing ideology
with solutions to all issues does not exist anymore. Where they once
marched for pan-Arabism, Egyptians now march only for economic and
political reform. Once inflamed about sectarian tension, Lebanese and
Iraqis now rise to protest corruption. Many Arabs no longer speak of
the question of tradition versus modernity but of the discrete issues of
economic development, human rights, the condition of women, and so on.
A growing new class of Arab thinkers is increasingly convinced that what
is needed is social transformation and not the promotion of Jeffersonian
democracy. Religion too is increasingly being seen as a component of
social life and that it will only increase in health if social life does.

It is in this historical context that the major significance of the UAE-Israel

agreement becomes clear. By announcing its acceptance of Israel, the
UAE, along with its regional allies and clients, formally signaled that the
Middle East is entering its post-Arab nationalist and post-Islamist phase—
which is, of course, why the agreement has been met with such hostility
from Islamists, Arab nationalists, and imperialist regional powers like
Iran, Turkey, and Qatar. The agreement isolates these actors politically;
that is already well known. What is less well known but far more important
is that the agreement isolates them ideologically as well. It is too early to
34 speculate on the future shape and structure of a self-liberated and less
 inarticulate Middle East. One thing, though, is certain; it will be based on
individual national identities rather than on a vision of collective Arab or
Islamist political action.

One more thing. This new reality clearly poses to the Palestinians a
profound problem that nonetheless offers them hope. The present
leadership of the Palestinian cause is either the product of mid-century
Arab nationalism—as with the Palestinian Authority—or of Islamism—as
with Hamas’s Islamic resistance. With this agreement and the new Middle
East it signals, the Palestinians receive an ultimatum: if they wish to have
an independent state, they must find new leadership that belongs not to
the last century but to this one.

35
 A man in Tehran looking at a Farsi newspaper with a headline declaring “The UAE has become
a legitimate and easy target.” AFP via Getty Images.

What Happens Next with the Israeli-Emirati Accords?

It forestalls annexation and deals a blow to the longstanding
Palestinian veto on Israel’s relationship with other countries. It
promises even more, but that depends on hard work.

AMOS YADLIN
AU G 2 1 2 02 0
About the author
Amos Yadlin, who formerly
served as chief of Israel
Defense Intelligence, is the
director of the Institute for
National Security Studies
(INSS) in Tel Aviv.
T
his year’s “October surprise” may have arrived several months early,
in the form of last week’s historic demonstration that the Middle East
contains not only threats but also opportunities. Peace has returned
to the agenda through a U.S.-brokered Israeli-Emirati agreement that kills
two birds with one stone. Besides dealing a major blow to the longstanding
Palestinian veto on Israel’s relationship with other countries in the region,
the agreement has delayed annexation of parts of the West Bank, which
would have imposed considerable costs on Israel and imperiled its future
as a secure, Jewish, and democratic state.

Unlike previous peace agreements Israel has struck with Arab states,
this one may lead to a true warming of relations. Egypt and Jordan have
maintained peace with Israel for decades, including very close cooperation
in the security realm, but much of that remains low-profile, behind
closed doors, and limited to security alone. In contrast to those instances
of “cold peace,” the Emirates already appears interested in taking more
public and long-term steps to bring the two countries closer together,
including the recently publicized agreement to embark on joint research
and development for a coronavirus vaccine and the expressed desire to
promote “closer people-to-people relations.”

The timing of this step was hardly coincidental, and was the result of
36 a convergence of interests between the three involved parties, all of
 whom have their eyes on the upcoming U.S. elections in November. First,
the White House’s self-described “deal-maker” needed a diplomatic
achievement to present to voters, as his foreign-policy gambits vis-à-
vis China, North Korea, Iran, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict have so
far failed to yield concrete results. Second, Prime Minister Netanyahu
had promised his right-wing base annexation of parts of the West Bank,
but was aware that such steps could place Israel’s national security at
risk, bury President Trump’s peace plan, and become a major point
of contention with Washington should Joe Biden win the upcoming
election—and thus sought an off-ramp.

Third, the UAE has much to gain, not least by being able to take credit
for halting annexation. It also believes that a peace deal with Israel
can solidify its standing in Washington and help to deflect criticism
regarding a variety of activities which future administrations might find
problematic: its involvement in the war in Yemen, its close ties with China,
and its outreach to Iran to reduce tensions in the Gulf. In addition, the
Emirates may be taking such steps to protect itself better from regional
threats in the event of Washington’s continued retrenchment from the
Middle East—by enabling itself to buy more advanced weaponry from the
U.S. and seeking closer security cooperation with Israel, a leading regional
military power.

Looking ahead, Israel can now focus its efforts on the more pressing
national-security challenges it faces. At the top of Jerusalem’s agenda
is preventing Iran from producing nuclear weapons. President Trump’s
“maximum-pressure” campaign has succeeded in building up economic
leverage against Tehran, but the Iranian nuclear program continues to
creep toward the threshold. Second on the list is coping with the Islamic
Republic’s efforts to build up stockpiles of advanced weaponry along
Israel’s northern front. Israeli airstrikes—what the IDF calls the “campaign
between wars”—are a partial solution, but maintain a continued risk of
unwanted escalation and may not be able to stop the advancement of this
project indefinitely.

The third priority is the risk posed by Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hizballah,
which has stockpiled over 100,000 rockets and missiles and gained
extensive combat experience in Syria and Yemen. Lastly, there is the
concern that another round of fighting will erupt with Hamas in Gaza.
Based on the hostile responses to the Israel-UAE agreement from Iran,
Hizballah, and Hamas, it seems safe to assume that those adversaries see
the consolidation of this anti-Iranian and anti-Islamist bloc as a threat to
their sinister designs for the region.

Without putting a damper on the celebratory mood, it is still worth

recalling that the task of translating the groundbreaking announcement
into practical cooperation in a wide variety of fields remains ahead of us.
Because the devil is in the details, the existence and continued nurturing
of mutual trust between the countries will be critical for the success of this
37 process. Much will depend on the interpersonal dynamic that develops
 between Prime Minister Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohamed bin
Zayed.

One foreseeable complication stems from the differing assessments of the

agreement’s implications for annexation: according to Trump it is now
“off the table” while Netanyahu asserts it is “just a delay.” The question of
whether annexation is on hold for months, years, a decade, or more, could
become a point of contention between the parties. Although Netanyahu
may not have any qualms about breaking coalition agreements with
Israel’s Blue and White Party, he could find that going back on his word
to the U.S. is quite a bit more complicated and has the potential to derail
progress in Israeli-Emirati relations.

As mentioned, one of the UAE’s motivations for this agreement is its

desire to obtain more sophisticated weaponry from the U.S. Until this
point, its acquisitions have faced a glass ceiling imposed by the American
commitment to maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge over the
Arab states. Now that a path to normalization is being charted between
Abu Dhabi and Jerusalem, presumably Washington will allow for this edge
to be narrowed and may consider selling the Emiratis more sophisticated
military technologies. Based on the UAE’s geographic distance from
Israel, its history as a responsible actor contributing to regional stability,
the fact that it has never fought against Israel in the past, and its need to
defend itself from Iran, it would be reasonable for Washington to sell it
advanced weapons systems. Nevertheless, it is critical for Israel’s ministers
of defense and foreign affairs to take an active role in coordinating with
their U.S. counterparts on the question of what systems should be made
available in order to promote the UAE’s stability and self-defense.

There is now a great deal of hope in Jerusalem and Washington that the
Emiratis have “broken the ice” and other Gulf states will follow their
lead. Among those frequently mentioned as the next candidates for
normalization with Israel are Bahrain, Oman, Sudan, and Morocco—
countries with which Israel has maintained quiet cooperation for many
years. Whether these states or others decide to move forward and
formalize relations with Israel will depend on three key parameters: 1) the
Arab and Muslim world’s reaction to the UAE’s steps, 2) their national-
security challenges and the degree to which they believe that shoring
up relations with either the U.S. or Israel can help them to cope, and 3)
their ability to create a pretense to claim that normalization serves the
Palestinian cause.

For the time being, Riyadh has remained silent, though it almost certainly
acquiesced to the Israel-UAE deal in advance and is carefully examining
the reactions when considering the possibility of “going public” with
its own sub rosa cooperation with Jerusalem. Even more so than the
Emirates, the kingdom is keenly aware that it has a public-relations
problem in Washington (and America more generally) that is likely to grow
more severe if Biden should emerge victorious in November. The Saudis,
38 however, face several constraints on openness to Israel: competition for
 leadership of the Muslims world (and the desire not to give ammunition to
such rivals as Turkey or Iran), their monarch’s role as “custodian of the two
holy sites” (Mecca and Medina), their commitment to the 2002 Arab Peace
Initiative, and the sentiments of an older generation more sympathetic to
the Palestinian cause than their younger compatriots.

As for the future of Israel-Palestinian peace, the “Abraham Accords”—as

the new agreement is being called—upend the longstanding demand,
made explicit in the Arab Peace Initiative, that “first Israel should make
peace with the Palestinians, and then Israel will enjoy normalization with
the Arab world.” That has not proved itself to be a productive formula, as
is evident from the fact that after nearly two decades it has yet to yield an
agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. If anything, the Israel-UAE
agreement highlights the fact that some Middle Eastern states, despite
popular sympathy for the Palestinians, are tired of having their agendas
hijacked by Palestinian rejectionism; the recent peace deal constitutes a
major blow to Palestinian veto power over Israel’s relationship with the
Arab world.

That said, the expectation among Arab states for some progress on the
Israeli-Palestinian track remains. In keeping with the Emirates’ laudable
track record as a responsible actor promoting regional stability, its latest
steps have put annexation on hold and kept the Trump administration’s
Israel-Palestinian peace plan from becoming a cover for unilateral action.
The Palestinians now have an opportunity to return to the negotiating
table without any preconditions—and it would be yet another wasted
opportunity if they fail to do so.

39
 The launch of a new shipping-container alliance running between the Middle East and China in
Qingdao on April 7, 2020. Costfoto/Barcroft Media via Getty Images.

How the Israel-UAE Deal Demonstrates the Need for

American Leadership in the Middle East
An American-led alliance can be a strong deterrent to Iran and
China.

JOHN BOLTON
AU G 2 5 2 02 0
About the author
John Bolton served as the
U.S. National Security Advi-
sor from 2018 to 2019.
N
ot every diplomatic breakthrough is a home run, but solid singles
and doubles, added together, make for winning (and sometimes
championship) seasons. The recent Israel-United Arab Emirates
agreement falls into this latter category. So saying does not diminish its
significance, but actually helps demonstrate that “normal” diplomatic
progress between former adversaries is, in the Middle East, a considerable
success.

Regional experts rightly agree that the deal, years in the maturing, reflects
the clearly emerging reality rather than representing an unexpected new
departure. The corollary is that moving toward normalized relations
hardly means all contentious issues before the two parties have been
resolved. The Palestinian question is deferred, not answered, to the dismay
of some and to the relief to others. The UAE embassy is not likely to be
in Jerusalem. The reactions of Turkey and Iran show that some already-
fraught relations will grow even worse. And unsurprisingly, enthusiasm in
Europe was notably subdued, meaning that considerable hard diplomatic
work remains to prove the obvious in continental capitals. Middle East
peace is not at hand.

Nonetheless, recognizing, signifying, and absorbing reality, as the Israel-

UAE deal does, is one more step forward. Especially in confronting Iran’s
40 regional threats, which are urgent and palpable, it matters that Abu Dhabi
 and Jerusalem (Israel’s capital no matter where embassies are located)
will achieve full diplomatic recognition. And the worldwide menace of
China, this century’s existential issue for the United States and the West
as a whole, will hopefully face stronger, more coherent opposition in the
Middle East.

The Israel-UAE agreement thus represents not only progress locally, but
the region’s inexorable transformation from a place where great power
rivalries are fought out, to one that takes its part in larger global struggles.
Ironically, many in the region undoubtedly would prefer not engaging in
these larger battles, but that luxury is fast disappearing.

The deal’s timing was also important, particularly given November’s

presidential election in America. There is, unfortunately, far more at
risk in our upcoming voting than the regional players may have realized.
Locking in elements of the Middle East’s new correlation of forces (as the
Soviets put it) is an insurance policy for all involved.

There is little doubt, for example, that a Biden victory will revive dreams of
a new nuclear deal with Iran. While it’s hard to imagine something worse
than the 2015 JCPOA, there will be those in Biden’s White House working
feverishly toward that goal. And, as with most Europeans, the two-state
solution for the Palestinians has near-eternal life in the mainstream
Democratic party. Much worse lies in the party’s left wing; its influence in
a Biden administration is presently unknowable, but it will doubtless be
unhelpful to whatever extent it manifests itself.

No one, however, should assume that Trump’s re-election would be much

better. Whether, in a few years, any U.S. forces will remain in Syria, Iraq or
Afghanistan, or even long-standing bases in the Arabian Gulf, is very much
open to question. Remember what Trump said in announcing (and taking
credit for) the Trump/Abraham Accord:

“We don’t have to be there anymore. We don’t need oil. We don’t need
anything there except friendship. . . . It started off when we had to be
there, but as of a few years ago, we don’t have to be there. We don’t
have to be patrolling the straits. We’re doing things that other countries
wouldn’t do. But we put ourself [sic], over the last few years, in a
position where we no longer have to be in areas that, at one point, were
vital. And that’s a big statement.”

On Iran, just days before these remarks, Trump said, not for the first time,
that “we will have a deal within four weeks” of his re-election. Despite the
president’s assurances of amity, in my view U.S. national interests require
a sustained political, military, and economic presence in the region.
Normalization between Israel and any Gulf Cooperation Council member
makes military and intelligence activities regarding Iran easier and more
productive. U.S. and Israeli diplomacy should therefore focus on securing
additional new recognitions, perhaps Bahrain and Oman (or, farther afield,
41 Sudan and Morocco). The more instances where Tehran’s adversaries
 enhance their national-security cooperation, the harder it is for Iran to
advance its interests by driving wedges between them.

The Trump administration’s efforts to invoke “snapback sanctions” under

Security Council Resolution 2231 will play out in the coming weeks. As I
recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, I oppose this course of action.
But whatever the outcome, there is no prospect of any future agreement
with Iran that conceivably precludes it from achieving deliverable nuclear
weapons, whether negotiated by Trump or Biden. Iran has not made a
strategic decision to renounce nuclear weapons. Quite the opposite. The
evidence is unmistakable that Iran’s 2015 objective was to achieve the
lifting of economic sanctions while making as few concessions as possible
on its nuclear program, and it largely succeeded. Tehran’s goals in a
second nuclear deal will be the same as the first.

Right now, some unidentified actor is systematically destroying parts

of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile-programs. This, together with the
prospect of regime change ousting the ayatollahs, is the only certain
way to preclude an Iranian nuclear capability. One important reason for
so doing is preventing further nuclear proliferation in the Middle East,
where several Arab states (and Turkey) are stirring as the potential Iranian
threat becomes more concrete. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Price Mohammed
bin Salman could not have been clearer in 2018, announcing that “if Iran
developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.” It
would in fact be better for the region if no other power developed nuclear
weapons, but the Arab leaders will believe that only if they see U.S. staying
power.

Israeli relations with the Emiratis can be a major factor here. One of the
less remarked but nonetheless badly flawed aspects of the 2015 deal was
allowing Iran to have any uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing
capability. America and Israel will have to work with the UAE and others
looking at developing truly peaceful nuclear programs to uphold the “gold
standard” for U.S. consent: such peaceful programs are permissible, but
must not include the front and back ends of the nuclear fuel cycle. Israeli
technology can play a significant role here.

On China, realigning Middle Eastern attitudes will almost certainly be

more difficult, but even more essential. The United States is not now
entering a Cold War with China in the same ideological sense as with the
Soviet Union, but the ongoing contest is epochal nonetheless. China’s
concepts of “civil-military fusion”; social metrics by which its citizens
are to be judged; repression of the Uighurs (which should be noteworthy
for Islamic countries); the crushing of the “one country, two-systems”
concept in Hong Kong; China’s aggressive nuclear build-up; development
of blue-water naval capabilities; offensive cyberwar programs; territorial
belligerence in the South China Sea, along the frontier with India and
elsewhere; and more, demonstrate what China is up to. This is not the
“peaceful rise” of a “responsible stakeholder,” as China’s advocates have
42 long argued. The United States, along with Europe and the Middle East,
 can either respond to this now, or pay the price later.

Israel itself has been tempted by potential sales into China’s market for
weapons systems and other high-tech items. And like the West as a whole,
America included, Israel missed early signals of Beijing’s broad efforts
to jeopardize Western military capabilities, and specifically to exploit
for intelligence purposes fifth-generation telecommunications systems.
Britain, for example, only recently reversed course to preclude China’s
Huawei from upcoming UK telecoms infrastructure projects. Prime
Minister Netanyahu has undertaken yeoman efforts to undo the damage in
Israel, but for the West generally, much remains to be done.

So too, the Emiratis and the Saudis have been tempted by China’s
“peaceful” nuclear energy capabilities, and ballistic-missile products.
Recent reporting on China’s participation in constructing a Saudi Arabian
facility for milling and refining uranium ore into “yellowcake” (U3O8
in solid form) is only the latest example. Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and others
have pursued weapons contract with both Moscow and Beijing, and will
continue to do so if Congress legislates restrictions against their ability to
purchase American weapons. And there is no mistaking China’s strategic
objectives in the multi-billion-dollar agreement for port construction
in Abu Dhabi as part of Beijing’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” a worldwide
Trojan Horse of enormous proportions.

Mutual diplomatic recognition between Israel and the UAE is

unquestionably good news. If the two countries, their neighbors, and the
United States play the game wisely, history will likely characterize it as a
“milestone” in the changing geostrategic environment in the Middle East.
The region will continue to change, but bilateral Israeli-Emirati relations
will now become more stable. Stability is not in the regional or global
forecast in the foreseeable future, even as the instability of past conflicts
recedes or disappears.

43
 President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with leaders of Israel and UAE announcing
a peace agreement to establish diplomatic ties with Israel and the UAE on August 13, 2020 in
Washington, DC. Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images.

Jared Kushner on How American Diplomacy Created

the Conditions for the Israel-UAE Deal
An interview with the senior adviser to the president on the
thinking behind the deal, and America’s role in the Middle East.

TIKVAH PODCAST AT
MOSAIC AND JARED
KUSHNER
AU G 2 6 2 02 0
About the author
A weekly podcast, produced
in partnership with the
Tikvah Fund, offering up
the best thinking on Jewish
thought and culture.
Jared Kushner is a senior
advisor to the president of
the United States.
T
hough substantial progress is rarely made, peace in the Middle East
is the holy grail of every American presidential administration and
the subject of endless analysis and discussion. The amount of time
and effort that government officials, foreign-policy experts, and diplomats
have put into solving the conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbors is
probably incalculable. But this month, the United States managed to help
them achieve a breakthrough, brokering what’s being called the Abraham
Accord between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
The path to this accord was not conventional. One of the key
administration officials who led this effort, Jared Kushner, drew on
his experience in the private sector, and reevaluated the interests and
alliances of the region. Until five years ago, Kushner had little political
experience, but his team achieved something that has confounded peace-
process professionals for decades.

In this interview, Kushner joins Mosaic’s Jonathan Silver for a

conversation about how the deal came to be, about how he thinks about
America’s role in the Middle East, and about the administration’s approach
to diplomacy in the region. Covering everything from the relationship
between the Gulf states and the Jewish state to China’s growing role in the
44 Middle East to the president’s unconventional approach, this conversation
 offers a rare look behind the scenes of American diplomacy in the Trump
era.

Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.

The Trump administration just helped negotiate the first peace deal
between Israel and an Arab state in decades. What do you think that
you and the president have learned—and what do you understand
about the region, about the nature of the conflict, about the people
and the leaders of the Middle East, that the experts don’t?

Well, I don’t know if I would say that we know something that they don’t,
but when the president asked me to work on the Middle East and to try
to figure out how to bring the region forward, I approached it like I would
anything else: we went to the region, we met with all the different players,
and we listened. And I think that that was really the most important thing
to do. Try to, instead of telling people how things should be, really try
to understand their perspective. We studied the historical approaches.
We tried to understand why things didn’t work in the past. The board
became pretty clear to us, and we quickly realized that there were a lot of
people who wanted similar things. We thought that the battlefields that
diplomacy had been fighting on were just the wrong battlefields and the
wrong approaches, and they weren’t going to lead to different outcomes.
So we really took a step backwards and we charted a new course. A lot of it
was moving some of the big tectonic plates around, about rebuilding trust,
rebuilding relationships.

Keep in mind that in Israel, they were very distrustful of the past
administration. They obviously hated the Iran deal. And if you think about
what happened in the region at the time, over the course of eight years,
you had the Arab Spring, which led to a lot of chaos and turnover in their
neighbors. Syria devolved into civil war. Libya became a mess. Iran became
very emboldened. Iran’s proxies became much better financed, thanks to
the money that America gave it through the Iran deal. Yemen obviously
fell apart as well, so the region really went backwards in a big way. And
obviously the biggest one is that Islamic State (IS) was formed in Iraq and it
grew tremendously. When President Trump came in, it had a caliphate the
size of Ohio; it was beheading journalists and looking to plot terror attacks
on the U.S. from within the caliphate.

President Trump came in and tried to corral everyone around common

objectives. The first trip was to Saudi Arabia, where he got together
the leaders of the 54 Muslim and Arab countries and laid out his clear
priorities for the region. Where a lot of people always said, “Let’s focus
on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict first,” he said, “The first issue is Iran.”
Right? For as long as they’re chanting, “death to America” and “death to
45 Israel,” and they’re funding their proxies and all the instability, the region
 will never get to a new paradigm. The next topic was obviously IS. And he
said, “Look, we have to all come together to defeat ISIS.” The third topic,
which is very critical, was countering the extremist ideology, as well as
the funding that was going to terrorism. That was something that a lot of
administrations ignored. They didn’t want to insult people, so they would
allow people to play in the gray.

We launched two centers in Saudi Arabia on that trip. The first one was the
Counter-Terror Finance Center, which has led to a lot less money going
to terror groups—it’s dried up tremendously. The second one was to fight
extremist ideology, and we launched in Saudi Arabia, the custodian of the
two holy Islamic sites, the Counter Extremism Center, where they really
attack negative online content and push out a much more positive and
realistic view of the Muslim religion. That was critical.

And then finally he came to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. But the president
said, “We need to try new things and approach it in different ways.” That
really set the table, and then the president went from there to Israel and
then from Israel to Rome to meet with the pope. By doing that, he wanted
to really signify that this is a clash where people have used differences
between religions as points for division, and we need to bring the three
faiths together to focus on how we can really make progress instead.

I think that that was the start. And then over the years, President Trump
rebuilt a lot of the trust with Israel. Obviously, we recognized Jerusalem as
the capital and moved our embassy. We also recognized the Golan Heights.
President Trump moved the embassy A: because it was the right thing to
do, and B: because he promised. But what we ended up getting for it was
the trust of the Israeli people and the Israeli politicians. He also showed
people in the region that when he gives his word on something, he’s going
to keep it. So obviously, throughout the region, he’s done a lot to stand
with America’s allies.

We rebuilt the relationships. And then after we did that, we started to

bring people together and refocus the discussion. We tried to change
the paradigm of how people viewed the objectives in the Middle East, to
show that there was much more alignment. Instead of using the historical
context, we started shifting it around common interests. Most people
want to live better lives. For people in the Middle East, everyone’s got cell
phones today, and on the cell phones you can see videos of how people in
other places live, so the myths and the division that people have used for
so long to divide is less easy to do today, because people see that they can
live better lives. And that’s what the younger generation wants.

Whether you’re in Israel, or you’re in Egypt, or you’re in Syria, young

people want the opportunity to have a job and to deliver a better life.
Parents want their kids to live better than them. But in order to have that,
you need to have security. Attacking the people who are trying to distort
the Islamic faith, to push for extremism, and then creating a security
46 apparatus where there could be an environment for economic opportunity
 to flourish, that’s a critical commonality.

What we’ve done then is created a coalition of the pragmatic and a

coalition of those pushing for moderation and progress. Bringing them
together was a natural evolution. The Israeli-Palestinian issue we worked
very hard on for years. We worked largely with Israel—obviously the
Palestinians chose not to talk with us after the embassy move, but we’d
gotten out of them all that we needed at that point. We put forth President
Trump’s vision for peace and prosperity, laying out 180 pages of detail
about what we thought a good solution, a technical solution, could be for
the conflict. When I used to do business deals, what I find is that it’s very
easy to agree or disagree on concepts, but you can only solve complex
problems in the details. That was how we got through criminal-justice
reform, and that’s how we got through the Mexico-Canada trade deal.
You had to get into the details and solve it there. We were able to get an
opening offer on the table that Israel agreed to negotiate on the basis of,
and a lot of European and Middle Eastern countries said it was a great
basis, but the Palestinians rejected it before even seeing it. But that showed
a lot of people in the Middle East that Israel actually was serious. If we
were willing to have a pragmatic plan and if we were going to protect their
security, then that would be something that they would go forward with.
And it was also about making the lives of Palestinian people better. That
was something that we laid the groundwork for, whether it was at the
Warsaw conference or the Bahrain conference, where we brought Israeli
and Arab partners closer together. And all of this led to the culmination of
getting Israel and the United Arab Emirates to take this big step, which led
to the first peace agreement in the last 26 years in the region, which really
was a historic breakthrough.

Let’s return to the question of trust, which I found interesting too.

It’s amazing how few people knew what was happening. And even
until it was announced, how few people were really involved. And the
few people that were involved in putting this together really had to
develop trust in one another. So I just ask you, how did you go about
building that trust with key figures, particularly in the Arab world,
over the last few years?

Mostly by going and listening, and then having them see that our meetings
never got out to the press, that nothing ever leaked. I don’t talk to the
press very often. And so, that builds trust. When you want to talk about
things that are uncomfortable, people need to know that they can show
vulnerability and brainstorm ideas that may be unconventional without
having the blowback. If you look at Israeli-Palestinian issues, the deals
always die when there’s a leak to the press. And then what happens is
everyone has to run back into their corner to deal with their domestic
politics. So the trust that we built was really instrumental. It’s funny,
because over the years, there were a lot of negative press stories about me,
where you would have diplomats who were excluded from meetings, who
would then go to the press and complain that I kept them out of meetings.
47 But obviously the reason I kept these people out of the meetings was
 because they were the type of people who were going to run to the press
and say something.

I worked with the national security advisor and said, “Look, I want to
make sure I have the right staffing for this so that I’m keeping with all
the protocols, but I really need to hand-select the people who are going
to be working with me and be on my team and be in those meetings so
that my counterparts can feel comfortable knowing that the information
we’re exchanging always stays between us.” And so we were able to do
a truncated process. One other thing I’ll say is that the peace process
always leaks. It’s just something historically; details always leak one way
or the other. But we kept our document—which was a very substantial
document—fully confidential, and nothing ever leaked out to the press.
I joke that one of the ways we did that is we didn’t classify the document.
We just kept it as a regular document between us. Because it wasn’t in the
system, we controlled it and we wrote it and we worked with it and we
did it that way. We were able to keep things from getting out. I think that
when you’re trying to get people to do things that are uncomfortable and
they have domestic constituencies that may not be ready for big dramatic
changes, when there’s antibodies that will try to fight progress, secrecy and
controlling the narrative and controlling the message is essential.

It strikes me that thinking about the last few years, surely there have
been opportunities along the way for you and the administration to
gain political advantage at home, by, say, speaking out more forcefully
against human-rights abuses or other things you may not have liked,
but that you may have refrained from doing in order to build the trust,
building towards some larger vision of the Middle East.

Yeah. The president’s view is that he’s not looking to be in the lecturing
business, he’s in the results business. And when you think about a lot of
these countries, if you have the ability to make an impact privately by
conveying your thoughts and hopefully asking people to make progress
on different issues, you’ll get a lot more. You only lecture when there’s
nothing you can actually do. You do it sometimes as a tactic. But for
example, I think the president’s gotten over 50 hostages released, which
is, I think, more than any president during the same duration. That’s
because he’s built strong relations with a lot of the places where people
are hostages. And so he’s been able to use the goodwill that he has, not by
getting up and giving a speech that will earn him favor at home, but by
doing what it takes to keep people safe. He’s pragmatic.

I think that what we’ve done is, when we have things we don’t agree with,
or things we’d like to see changed, we’re very strong in our discussions
with our friends. And we can be very frank because again, we’re not
politicians, we’re not reading cue cards and talking in diplomatic speak.
We speak very plainly and we speak very firmly. With the president, you
know where he stands, and he’s not going to go and try to showboat and
lecture people for the sake of lecturing people. He’s about achieving
48 results, and he’s always thinking: “What’s in America’s best interests?”
 We’re not going to agree with every country on everything, but we have to
find our areas of common interest, and pursue those.

In areas where we disagree, let’s try not to let that hinder our ability to
make progress on the areas where we can benefit our citizens, our security,
and our economic prosperity for Americans by jointly pursuing that.
And each country determines, one way or the other, who its leader is. It’s
not our job to pick who’s running a country, but it’s our job to build that
relationship and work collectively to determine what are our common
interests, what do we want to accomplish, and how do we get there? And
that’s what we’ve done.

In order for the Emiratis to agree to this accord, the Israelis agreed to
suspend annexation in the West Bank. What do you think it will take
for the Saudis to bring their security and intelligence cooperation
with Israel above board and for Israel and Saudi Arabia to come to a
similar kind of bilateral official relationship?

Well, Israel made the right decision, right? Prime Minister Netanyahu put
the interests of Israel above any one political bloc. And he did something
that will make Israel—long term—much more safe, much more accepted
in the global community. And I do believe that this move will lead to peace
with other countries and eventually peace with the Palestinians. I think
that the areas in Judea and Samaria that we were talking about are areas
right now where Israelis live. Israel controls them from a security point
of view. And realistically in any final deal, these people are never going
to leave those positions. So not applying Israeli law, in my mind, it’s a big
concession, but it’s also a small concession. I think that it sets the table
for what ultimately could be a proper resolution in a way that makes the
whole region go forward in a better way.

With regards to other countries though, I think people have been watching
this very closely and seeing that the younger generation in the Muslim
world just wants to go forward. They’ve had twenty years now of chaos
and instability and lost opportunity. I think that we’re talking about the
relations that Israel has with Saudi Arabia now, and, in contrast with
three years ago, we’re not whispering anymore. And I believe that it’s an
inevitability that all of the countries in that region will come together
because they care about their people. And you’ve seen very strong
leadership by King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman to
modernize their society. They’ve restricted the religious police; they’ve
given a lot more rights to women. They’ve allowed them to drive. They’ve
restricted the guardianship rules. They’ve really gone after a lot of the
imams in the mosques who were really radicalizing youth, and they’ve
cut down tremendously on the amount of funding that was going to terror
groups.

We have a joint interest with them as Americans and Israel has that joint
interest as well, to push to combat terrorism, to have a more stable region,
49 to push back on Iran’s aggression. And they’re doing it because it’s better
 for the Saudi people. It’s better for the region. And Israel does what it does
because it’s better for Israel and better for the Israelis. So, the president
likes to find win-win deals where people are doing things because it’s in
their interest to do it. He just finds common areas of interest and that’s
where you can create the most progress. So I do think it’s an inevitability
at this point, especially because of this breakthrough, but whether it will
happen in the short term, medium term, or long term is really going to be
up to the leadership. It’s going to be up to a different set of circumstances
that will arise.

But I think that, again, the big wildcard in the region now is Iran. It’s lost a
tremendous amount of influence over the last few years. And everywhere
the Iranians are in the Middle East, it’s a mess. They’ve had a stronghold in
Lebanon, which is basically a failed state now. They destabilized Yemen.
Syria—they’re there, not helping make it better. And Iraq is now rejecting
Iran and pushing it out because Iraq wants to be for Iraq and doesn’t
want to be a vassal state of Iran. So I think that Iran is being very much
constrained both financially and regionally. Hopefully it will make the
right decision, which is to stop this foreign policy of trying to destabilize
the region. Let’s stop trying to expand, let’s just focus on our country, focus
on our wellbeing, stop making the whole rallying cry around death to
America, death to Israel. And I think that if they focus on that, the whole
region could come together in a much more substantial way, and there’ll
be absolutely incredible potential there.

You could say that the Middle East is starting to be seen as an arena
where a proxy conflict is beginning to take shape between America
and the American-led order and China. I’m thinking about Belt
and Road investments in the extraction and movement of oil,
infrastructure investments throughout the region, the construction
of commercial ports, large cash investments in various places. How
do you see this deal in relation to that?

If you think about the macro conflict in the world right now, it is the
liberal democracies against countries that are using capitalism against
liberal democracy. World War II was really liberalism against fascism and
then liberalism won. And then, in the eighties you had liberalism against
Communism and liberalism won. But you had a reconstitution of some of
these more authoritarian governments, where they’ve used democratic
means, or some form of faux democracy, to cloak their ability to have
more a state-controlled system, by controlling the economy or tightly
controlling their populations. And that is a clash.

Now in the Middle East—with the exception of Israel, which is the only
true democracy there—you have a lot more monarchies. And I guess
that leads to a system that has to think more long term than perhaps the
democracies that we deal with and that Europe deals with mostly. So I do
think there is a conflict in that regard. I think that these countries, long
term, want to be with America. But I think that, unfortunately, if you think
50 about what happened in the last administration, many of these countries
 felt very betrayed by America. One of the leaders said to me, “We’ve
been with America for 30 years, for 40 years. And then all of a sudden
America asks us to put on all these sanctions on Iran and then behind our
back America goes to Persia, and they make a deal and that’s a massive
betrayal.” So that led to a lot of our traditional allies turning to China and
thinking about how to form a stronger relationship with Beijing.

Russia also has a longer-term governance structure in place right now

too. And they built strongholds with Turkey and obviously they deal with
Iran and they’ve made inroads there, whereas Russia and Saudi Arabia
used to be at loggerheads for many years. Obviously you had the war in
Afghanistan where they were on different sides and there’s other history
there. Now they’re working together and that’s been, I think, productive
for the global oil market. Actually President Trump was able to negotiate a
deal with King Salman and President Putin, which I worked with him on,
to get the largest cut in history for oil prices. And that was when obviously
the big depression hit, thanks to COVID-19.

It’s definitely a middle world right now, but I think that these countries
would prefer to be with America and they want a more empowered way
of life. I think they look at it and say, “We’ve almost lost a decade and a
half.” And if they think about between 2001 and today, China’s become
a behemoth by having a very well executed, state-run capitalist system.
And these countries have been stuck in a quagmire because of all the wars
and the infighting and the conflicts. So they’re waking up now. If you
go through history, you have thousands of years of pendulum swinging,
but all countries are learning and evolving. I believe that the countries
in the Middle East are looking for a brighter future and I believe that the
Abraham Accords, this breakthrough that we were able to make between
Israel and the UAE, is a very strong signal to the region and to the world
that we don’t want to allow the conflicts of the past to hold us back from
seizing the opportunities of a very bright future.

That’s what our Bahrain conference was about. We basically laid out a
$50 billion plan where, we believe for the Palestinians, we could double
their GDP, create a million new jobs, decrease their poverty rate by 50
percent. We built the whole business plan. And actually it’s not even that
hard because it’s just five million people and they have a lot of natural
advantages. But you can’t want people to achieve prosperity more than
they want to do it themselves. The thing that was inhibiting all the
investors from going into the West Bank and Gaza was not Israel; it was the
fact that there’s not a strong system of governance. There’s not a judicial
system where they can feel comfortable making investments. And there’s
not a security regime where they feel comfortable making long-term
capital investments. So, if people want to create jobs and they want to have
better lives, you need to create the environment to do that.

President Trump’s critics and admirers I think both agree that

America’s never quite had a president like him—they both see him
51 as operating in an unorthodox way. That makes me wonder if policy
 innovation and political breakthrough require leadership that’s just
not formed by the inherited codes of behavior.

I think he has courage because he has courage. He has lived a life where he
hasn’t always played it safe. He’s succeeded, he’s failed. He’s been through
ups, he’s been through downs, and he has a lot of world experience.
He’s been through deals; he’s run companies. And so his tolerance for
disruption is probably much greater than a lot of career politicians whose
whole goal in life has been to not screw up. I find in Washington that
you’ve got a lot of people who are very good analysts, who can tell you
why a something is wrong and why the status quo is no good. But in order
to change the status quo, you need to try to make something better. In
Washington, when you try to put something in play—which you have
to do—you have to take some degree of risk in order to make something
better. Everyone gets very nervous about taking any risk and they all freak
out about what the downside is going to be. And it becomes paralyzing
to making any progress. The president is willing to eliminate the status
quo because once you’ve done that, then people will change and they’ll
move. And they will inevitably, especially when you try to mitigate the
downside and do everything you can to lubricate the upside. One of
my favorite quotes is that change is like heaven. Everybody wants to go
there, but nobody wants to die. You hear a lot of people complaining all
the time about all the things he’s doing, but what he’s really doing is he’s
pushing people towards progress, and you think about the results. Again,
I find that with President Trump, you really have to judge him by the
accomplishments. And the metabolism of the federal government, since
he’s been here, has been extraordinary.

I define his ideology as that he’s a common-sense president; he’s

pragmatic, and he’s flexible. And I see that as an asset. I think he’s very
good at keeping people on their toes and furthering America’s objectives.
Obviously we’re talking about the Middle East today. Most presidents
saved the Middle East for their second term because it’s so impossible.
And at the end of their second term, when they’ve lost all their capital in
Congress and they’ve run out of things to do at home, they say, “Hey, let’s
get involved in the Middle East because maybe I can solve the unsolvable
whale and that will help me with the legacy.” President Trump took it on
from day one because he wasn’t afraid to fail.

There’s an understanding out there in the American Jewish

community—I’m sure you’re aware—that President Trump is, if
not anti-Semitic himself, that he’s put the wind in the sails of anti-
Semites. On the other hand, if you look at how he’s strengthened
religious freedom in America through judicial appointments, and
strengthened the U.S.-Israel relationship, he’s arguably one of the
friendliest presidents to the American Jewish community. Why do
you think there’s such a divergence of views of your administration
among America’s Jews?

52 Again, I was not that involved in politics before I got involved in the
 campaign, but what I’ve come to realize as somebody who was living
and operating in a fairly liberal world, is that one of the things that the
liberal group think does is use terms like anti-Semitism and racism way
too liberally. They throw those terms around whenever they don’t like
somebody. And so unfortunately, there are cases of anti-Semitism and
there are cases of racism in this country. But when you overuse those
phrases, they lose their meaning for the times when it’s real. And so I just
think that people have thrown those definitions at the president without
cause. And I just say, judge him by his actions and look at what he’s done.

The president’s been incredibly strong on anti-Semitism. He issued a

strong executive order to fight anti-Semitism on college campuses, which
was very, very impactful. He obviously has been very, very pro-Israel.
He’s been unashamed with what he’s done and what he’s fought for with
religious freedom. So I just feel like people make wild accusations, but it’s
really to pry at people, to try to make an emotional argument, whereas
President Trump’s love language is his action and what he does. So you
have to look at the way that he operates and the results that he brings. And
at the end of the day, it’s very hard to find any action he’s taken that’s anti-
Semitic.

If you want to make the argument about his actions to show that he’s done
a great job for the Jewish people, that he’s done a great job for Christians
and that he’s done a good job for minorities, the list of actual actions that
he’s taken is quite long. We’re in some ways in a post-truth world and
people are in their different echo chambers and they believe more what
they want to believe. But I think it’s all of our obligation to try to see the
other side. Again, for me, my beliefs now are based on really listening
to people of all sides. I was not deep on a lot of the political issues that
I’ve been dealing with for the last years. But if you talk to people and you
explore and you see everyone’s opinion, then you can form a reason-based
view. But President Trump is a person of action and he’s had a real action-
oriented administration.

We’re here talking about the Middle East today. A lot of the steps he took
were unconventional. They were ones that the career Washington folks
thought were wrong. He took a lot of criticism along the way, but he also
produced a result that nobody thought he would achieve and that nobody
else could achieve. So I just find that, time and time again, you have the
Washington way of thinking. But the Trump presidency is not about left
versus right. It’s about inside versus outside. And particularly with the
Middle East, he set the table for people to think about things differently.
And there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity for what more good can
come.

53
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