A former Trump adviser says it is a strategy to evade Palestinians, separate Iran and build political capital with Gulf states.
The Trump administration decided to go around the Palestinians to create normalization agreements last year between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, a former Trump official said.
Robert O’Brien, national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, said the Trump administration was trying to build “political capital” with Israel first by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
“We could not allow the Palestinians to stand as an obstacle to wider peace in the Middle East,” O’Brien said, referring to the strategy for the first time since leaving office. behind Trump’s diplomatic movements.
“So we went to our friends and partners and our friends and we built political capital. And one way of building political capital in Israel was by moving the embassy to Jerusalem, one way we did it was by recognizing Golan Heights, as an Israeli region, ”O’Brien said.
Former President Trump forged so-called “Abraham Accords” normalization agreements between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in September 2020. Further agreements were reached to include Morocco in December and Sudan in January.
National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien outlined the thinking behind the Trump administration’s campaign to negotiate a normalization deal between Israel and Arab and Muslim states. [File: Leah Millis/Reuters]
Trump had announced in 2017 that the U.S. would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The move was celebrated in Israel but has been widely criticized elsewhere as a negative impact on Palestinian interests with international support.
Trump unilaterally recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan in 2019, in violation of international law. Israel captured the area from Syria during the 1967 Six Day War.
“Those were facts that never changed on earth. Jerusalem was never changing to be the capital of Israel. Israel was never going to bring the Golan Heights back to Assad or any other regime in Syria, ”O’Brien said.
“We did the same.” We built political capital with Bahrain, with Morocco with the UAE by telling them that we would stand with them, by getting out of “Iran’s nuclear deal” which was a serious threat to the region, ” O’Brien.
The UN-backed agreement in Iran 2015 “gave so much money, so much money to the Iranian regime, to export their revolutionary ideology,” O’Brien said.
Trump retreated unilaterally in 2018 from Iran’s nuclear deal negotiated with former President Barack Obama. Now, President Biden is moving to open talks with Iran to revive the agreement.
“We then took that capital and used it to bring the parties together and to see if we could bring them to some sort of agreement, which we did,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien’s comments came at a panel discussion held by the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington that included President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
Other Arab states are likely to join the Abraham Accords as they see economic benefits and the new alliance should allow the U.S. to pull down some of its armed forces in the region, O’Brien said.
Among the benefits, O’Brien said the boxes should allow Israeli entrepreneurs to raise capital from the wealth funds of Arab sovereignty.
“It boxes China out of the Israeli tech sector to some extent, which I watched carefully,” O’Brien said.
Adviser Biden Sullivan said the new administration plans to build on the Abraham Accords. The new president is “thinking about how we will ensure that the seeds sown grow into the kind of full cooperation” that was promised, he said.
Separately, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the U.S. Parliament on Jan. 19 that the Biden administration would take a close look at the incentives Trump had offered the UAE and Bahrain to get into the boxes.
O’Brien said he still hoped for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and suggested that other Arab states like Saudi Arabia come together in the future.
“We could not get the Palestinians. I wish we had been. But there are a number of carrots and sticks to bring to the table, ”said O’Brien, adding that he believes European countries will help when they see the” success “of Abraham’s treaties.