Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced this week that Israel is closing in on four more peace agreements with Arab countries in the region, in an interview with Ynet, adding that he spoke with one of the nation’s leaders Monday.
The announcement signals that the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict may be nearing its end.
Netanyahu did not specify which countries are expected to normalize relations with Israel, but there are speculations that Saudi Arabia, a country the Biden administration has begun distancing itself from, may be among them.
The announcement came a week before Israel’s elections are set to take place and aligns with an op-ed written by former Senior Advisor to President Trump Jared Kushner in the Wall Street Journal.
Kushner mentions Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and Mauritania as countries that are “on the brink of joining the Abraham Accords” alongside Morocco, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain who normalized relations with Israel through the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords.
These new “relationships should be pursued aggressively,” says Kushner, as “every deal is a blow to those who prefer chaos,” particularly the Iranian regime, which has recently escalated its pressure campaign against the Biden administration in an effort to obtain sanctions relief and regain regional power.
Kushner believes we are seeing “the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
“The estrangement between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East over the past 70 years is not the norm. As Jews and Muslims now travel more freely through the region, they return to the tradition of ages past, when members of the Abrahamic faiths lived peacefully side by side.”
Earlier this month, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo emphasized at the first-ever Combat Anti-Semitism Movement (CAM) Annual Summit that the Abraham Accords would not have been a possibility if the Trump administration did not withdraw from the 2015 JCPOA, a deal that would have “created an inevitable pathway for a nuclear weapon for the Iranians.”
With a new administration in place, it is likely that U.S. policy towards the Middle East will shift; however, alongside Kushner, Pompeo does not believe this will hinder the momentum already started by the historic Abraham Accords.
The geopolitical shift in the Middle East between Arab states and Israel “will change the face of the globe for decades and decades to come,” said Pompeo, who predicted there would be “other nations too that can join [the Abraham Accords]…Muslim nations, not just in the Middle East but places like Indonesia as well.”
