A senior Emirati policy analyst said Monday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has “embarrassed” Arab leaders and that no additional states are likely to sign normalization agreements with Israel in the near term.
“The latest government in Israel will not kill the Abraham Accords, the signatories will not pull out, but we will not have other signatories.
We were looking to engage more from the Arab world and the non-Arab world… [but] the latest government is putting everybody off,” Dr. Ebtesam Al-Ketbi, the founder and president of the Emirates Policy Center said at the Herzliya Conference at Israel’s Reichman University.
“My government and the other signatories are embarrassed in front of the Arab people, and they have to say something. And they want a solution for that because they invested heavily in the Abraham Accords,” she added.
One of Netanyahu’s main diplomatic goals is to strike a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia, the biggest country in the region, and to expand a regional alliance to buck the influence of Iran.
However, his vision suffered a major setback when Tehran and Riyadh agreed in April to a détente after a seven-year halt in diplomatic relations.
“It’s a big loss for Israel when the Saudis side with Iran,” Dr. Ebtesam Al-Ketbi told former lawmaker and Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council Ksenia Svetlova.
Dr. Ebtesam Al-Ketbi, who is the first female leader of an independent policy think tank in the Gulf, hailed far-reaching cooperation of the “warm peace,” spanning from artificial intelligence to intelligence cooperation.
In this picture released by the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, right, meets with his Saudi Arabian counterpart Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud in Beijing on April 6.Credit: Iranian Foreign Ministry via AP
“Normalization with Israel will create an arc of prosperity and no more conflict in the region,” she said.
On Monday, Netanyahu and Israeli President Isaac Herzog were invited by the United Arab Emirates ambassador to Israel to the UN’s international climate conference, which is scheduled for November in Dubai.
It is not yet known which of the two will represent Israel at the conference.
Netanyahu had planned to visit the UAE shortly after his government was sworn in, but the visit was postponed to an unknown date after National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir went up to the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa Mosque compound in a move widely deemed provocative in the first week of the government’s tenure.
Herzog visited the UAE last year, the first visit by an Israeli president to the country after the signing of the Abraham Accords.
If Netanyahu attends the conference, it will be his first visit to the UAE as prime minister.
Participation in the international climate conference, to which leaders from all over the world will be invited, is fundamentally different from a separate political visit by the prime minister.
Naftali Bennett visited the country twice as prime minister during his one-year term in office, and made another visit to the country as a former prime minister about two months ago.
Biden administration will enhance penalties for companies that comply with decades-old boycott of Jewish state
The United States is clamping down on companies that comply with the decades-old Arab League boycott of Israel.
Matthew Axelrod, assistant commerce secretary for export enforcement, detailed the Biden administration’s new rules at a meeting on Thursday of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) at the organization’s Washington, DC offices.
According to the updated rules set by the US Commerce Department, penalties will be increased, including requiring companies and individuals to admit wrongdoing before attempting to settle boycott charges and subjecting US companies to fines if their foreign subsidiaries participate in the boycott of the Jewish state.
AJC’s new CEO, former Democratic Congressman Ted Deutch, praised the Commerce Department’s move.
“Despite warming relations some Arab nations have with Israel, the Arab League needlessly persists in this boycott, which has done nothing to hinder Israel from becoming an economic powerhouse in the Middle East,” said Deutch.
“We applaud the Commerce Department’s efforts to sanction American firms that bow to the demands of, or seek to curry favor with boycotting nations.
They must be held accountable for activities that help spread anti-Zionist sentiment.”
The toughening stance against the Arab League boycott comes two years after the Abraham Accords were signed at the White House, in which the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel.
Morocco and Sudan later joined the accord, which has seen economic and business ties skyrocket since then, particularly between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco.
Egypt and Jordan have also signed treaties with Israel ending their participation in the boycott.
However, Axelrod pointed out that countries like Syria and Iraq still boycott Israel, including Baghdad recently voting to criminalize normalization with Israel.
Arab League,Abraham Accords,American Jewish CommitteeArab League, Boycott
AIPAC is now quickly advancing relations operating almost as a “shadow” US State Department.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) continues to lobby Congress for more support for the so-called “Abraham Accords.”
This Trump administration initiative sought to transcend the spectacular failure of the “Deal of the Century” initiative that called for Palestinian acquiescence to annexation and renunciation of sovereignty rights in exchange for vague and uncertain economic development projects.
After Palestinians rejected the deal, the Trump administration pivoted to forging a string of spectacularly corrupt deals with Arab dictatorships.
The so-called Abraham Accords attempt to fracture their formerly unified but tepid and inconsistent opposition to recognizing Israel until there was just solution to the violent settler colonization and expulsion of Palestinians that brought Israel into being.
To date UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan have signed onto the Abraham Accords because of corrupt “side deals” that further degrade the already rock-bottom international reputation of the United States.
The deals accurately boost the perception that Israel’s U.S. lobby exercises vast and undue influence over American foreign policy.
There was initial hope that the Biden administration would take a principled stand and refuse to honor the side deals. That hope has been dashed.
For UAE the side deal was approval of a $23 billion advanced jet fighter sale to UAE. On April 13, 2021 the Biden administration approved the deal.
Members of the Israel affinity ecosystem such as the American Jewish Committee are fighting hard for the Biden administration to not abandon other equally unsavory Abraham Accord side deals.
Sudan signed onto an accord in a joint ceremony with former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin after the US promised to remove Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.
This “removal in exchange for Israel recognition” revealed yet again the entirely political, rather than fact-based, nature of such US designations.
The US further promised a $1 billion bridge loan to help move Sudan back into the realm of acceptable international borrowers.
In the case of Morocco, the “side deal” was recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.
When Spain left its former desert colony in the 1970s, Morocco secretly negotiated to take over half the territory with the other going to Mauritania.
An ensuing guerilla war by Western Sahara inhabitants and Morocco’s occupation led to the deaths of tens of thousands.
The Trump administration exited a longstanding policy of considering the area disputed territory and intervened to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.
The overarching reason was to win Morocco’s signature on an Abraham Accord rather than any US interest or new diplomatic breakthrough.
The US thus became the only country in the world to recognize sovereignty, while upending any hope for UN efforts to secure a more just and fair outcome.
In January David Schenker, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs opened a US consulate in occupied Western Sahara, even as Western Sahara renewed a request for U.N. membership.
The US also pledged $5 billion in US International Development Finance Corporation funds to Morocco.
The US State Department under Anthony Blinken has “welcomed Morocco’s steps to improve relations with Israel and noted the Morocco-Israel relationship will bring long-term benefits for both countries.”
Clerk of the House of Representatives AIPAC Quarterly Lobbying Reports
The irony is, that even as American pundits continue to fret over Russian and Chinese influence, Israeli foreign influence in the US has only grown.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) quietly raised $1.1 billion over the past decade to advance Israeli government policies from within the US.
This order came after millions in Israeli funds gushed into US public relations and lobbying campaigns.
Although AIPAC directors maintain close and ongoing ties to Israeli government officials in order to better translate their aid and policy requests into US law, the US Department of Justice has long refused to properly enforce its own order and regulate the lobbying group under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Combined with overt coordinated and stealth political action committees funding Congressional candidates, AIPAC has achieve massive undue foreign influence over Congress, making Israel the leading recipient of US foreign aid, even though it is unlawful under US law regulating aid to rogue nuclear weapons states.
Although US opinion polls continually signal public opposition to foreign aid to Israel, Congress remains captive to what historian Walter Hixson has recently determined is “the most powerful lobby advancing the interests of a foreign country in all of American history.”
Israeli Knesset member briefs AIPAC’s Board of Directors on January 12, 2021, Source: Twitter
It is doubtful the US would have recognized Moroccan claims over Western Sahara if Israel and its US lobby had not gotten involved.
AIPAC is now quickly advancing relations operating almost as a “shadow” US State Department.
On May 6, AIPAC will hold a three-way video conference between Morocco’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Nasser Bourita and Israel’s Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy and Water and the Israeli Ministry of Defense and an official from Nobel Energy which is developing liquid natural gas from the Israeli Leviathan fields.
AIPAC has ramped up Abraham Accord direct lobbying expenditures over the past three quarters as a top priority and it is no wonder why.
Most of the proposed US expenditures on the Trump-era “peace” accords were destined to accrue mostly to Israeli recipients.
An opaque fund arranged by the US International Development Finance Corp based in Israel received 25 applications and chose 15 projects for funding.
By September of 2020, Israel had three active projects totaling $580 million in US backed loans.
In 2019, DFC committed $480 million to two “Egyptian projects” – except they were not truly projects accruing to Egyptian interests but rather schemes to transport and sell Israeli liquid natural gas from the Leviathan fields being developed by Noble Energy.
Morocco is now surely in line for even more US taxpayer – backed Israeli energy export projects.
The plurality of Americans would cut aid to Israel after compelling studies released by Israel’s B’Tselem about its apartheid practices and more recently Human Rights Watch.
The White House has already dismissed those findings. But even as it touts itself as a leader in racial justice, the unconditional support the Biden administration and Congress give Israel are actions that speak far louder than words.
