(OPINION) Michael Snyder – Last week’s surprise announcement of a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates caught just about everyone by surprise. I hadn’t heard anything about a potential deal in the works, and the mainstream media in the western world was completely blindsided by the deal.
But this has become Israel’s pattern in recent decades. The Oslo Accords, Israel’s peace deal with Jordan and other agreements were negotiated under a cloak of total secrecy because officials didn’t want the public sentiment to potentially destroy negotiations. And there could potentially be other “peace deals” in the works right now that we don’t know anything about.
President Trump is touting this as a major diplomatic victory, and he is hoping that it will sway some votes in November. At this juncture, Trump is trailing badly in most polls and he needs another miracle as we witnessed in 2016. But it was really Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that was the driving force behind this deal.
He has been seeking to build relations with the UAE for many, many years, and this deal is the culmination of those efforts. In order to get this deal, however, Netanyahu had to agree not to annex any land in the West Bank…
The United Arab Emirates has normalized relations with Israel in a historic US-brokered deal that “suspends” Israeli annexation of occupied land sought by the Palestinians for their future state. The surprise agreement, initially announced by the US president, Donald Trump, makes the UAE the first Gulf country and only the third Arab nation in the world to have active diplomatic ties with Israel, joining Egypt and Jordan.
This is a very odd development because too many people it seemed like Netanyahu was dead set on annexing portions of Judea and Samaria. In fact, he specifically promised to do so during the last election. Could it be possible that all of that rhetoric was just a negotiating ploy?
If Israel had really gone ahead and annexed those lands, it would have killed any international efforts to create a Palestinian state. But now that annexation is completely dead, the potential for a “peace deal” that would create a Palestinian state is very much alive.
According to the New York Times, the relationship between Israel and the UAE “had been building quietly for years”, and according to a British news source this peace agreement will also open a door for “deals on direct flights, security, telecommunications, energy, tourism, and healthcare”… READ MORE
