‘Trump “peace” deals for Israel, U.A.E. and Bahrain are shams. They boost oppression, not amity.’
Dissenting from the mainstream American foreign policy consensus, Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, argues that the deal had very little to do with the danger posed by Iran, which he contends the United States and Israel have exaggerated for decades to serve politically unpopular ends.
“What binds Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. together is not so much the threat from Iran but the threat of the United States military leaving the Middle East,” he writes. “These three states have been the foremost benefactors of America’s military domination in the region, gifting them a beneficial power balance that they could not have achieved on their own.” That impression is reinforced by reports that the Trump administration quietly rewarded the U.A.E. with an arms sale for its cooperation with Israel, the type of exchange that Mr. Parsi says some Gulf States view as informal defense pacts that compel U.S. military protection. Jason Pack predicts in Foreign Policy that quite the opposite of being a peace deal, it will only embolden the U.A.E. to escalate its proxy conflicts in Libya, Syria and Yemen.
Viewing the deal in this light, Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and an assistant professor at Rutgers University, argues that “this is not a peace agreement but rather an accord to join forces to suppress struggles for freedom.” She notes that Bahrain, which also stands to benefit militarily from improved relations with the United States and Israel, is a minoritarian monarchy with a brutal record of domestic repression and complicity in the Saudi- and U.A.E.-led bombing of Yemen, which has pushed 10 million Yemenis to the brink of famine. “The Bahraini people, still in a struggle for their own freedom, understand the deleterious impact of the U.S.-brokered deal on their lives,” she writes.
[Related: “The War Pact Among Jim Crow States of the Middle East”]
In The Times, Diana Buttu, a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization, argues that the same can be said for Palestinians. The decision to forgo any preconditions for a Palestinian state was “a slap in the face,” she writes, and the one ostensible concession that was extracted from Israel — a promise not to illegally annex the West Bank — was revealed by Mr. Netanyahu to be only temporary. And all the while, Israel has started planning the construction of a road that will allow for the creation of new settlements near the Palestinian city of Ramallah and pass through areas that Mr. Trump’s peace plan had designated for a future Palestinian state.
“For Palestinians, this deal is not, as some have suggested, a reassuring step forward,” Ms. Buttu says. “Rather, it’s an indication of how the major parties in earlier peace attempts — the U.S., Israel and Arab countries — are willing to move ahead with plans that disregard Palestinian rights.” Going forward, both she and Mr. Friedman argue that Palestinians will have no choice but to abandon the idea of a two-state solution and to push instead for equal rights within Israel.
‘It’s not meaningless, but neither is it a transformative, landmark event.’
Is it possible that this deal actually isn’t very significant? Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, thinks so. The formalization of diplomatic ties between Israel and the U.A.E. is largely symbolic, he says, and won’t have much of a material effect on the relationship. And while Arab governments have historically championed the Palestinian cause in name, most of them long ago abandoned it in deed.