Less than two weeks after a controversy involving an impromptu meeting between Israel’s Foreign Affairs Minister Eli Cohen and his Libyan counterpart Najla Mangoush, Israel has opened up a new embassy in Bahrain, and the two countries have agreed to boost trade. The ceremony in Bahrain to inaugurate Israel’s new embassy included Eli Cohen and an Israeli business delegation “of more than 30 companies working in high-tech, logistics and real estate.”
The agreement is a continuation of the Abraham accords negotiated by Donald Trump, which also includes the United Arab Emirates and Morocco. The accords benefit all parties despite the surrounding political pressures.
Eli Cohen stated to the Bahraini newspaper Al-Ayyam: “No one in the world is more interested in ending the issue with the Palestinians than Israel.”
But the founding charters of the principal Palestinian political organizations still include the stated goal of obliterating Israel in an endless jihad (“resistance”). That jihad has continued since well before the day Israel declared independence.
Although the Biden administration has been in talks with Saudi Arabia about a normalization agreement with Israel, in early August, Israel ruled out any unreasonable concessions to the Palestinians to secure that normalization. That rules out a return to the pre-1967 borders, a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and making East Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state.
As it stands today, Saudi Arabia finds it a “provocation to all Muslims around the world” when Jews visit the Temple Mount.
One needs to recognize a key difference between Saudi Arabia and the small Arab countries which have normalized with Israel: Saudi Arabia is the keeper of Sunni Islam and is founded upon Wahhabism.
Saudi Arabia also recently resumed ties with Shia Iran, and in April, the Saudis hosted top Fatah and Hamas delegations.
“Israel opens new embassy in Bahrain, agrees to boost trade relations,” Al Jazeera, September 4, 2023:
Israel’s foreign minister has agreed with his Bahraini counterpart to boost trade relations, during his first visit to one of the two Gulf Arab states to establish ties with Israel.
“The foreign minister and I agreed that we should work together to increase the number of direct flights, the tourism, the trade volume, the investment,” Eli Cohen said during a ceremony to inaugurate Israel’s new embassy in Bahrain on Monday.
The embassy in the capital Manama will replace the first embassy Israel opened in 2021, a year after it established diplomatic relations with Bahrain as part of the United States-brokered Abraham Accords.
Under the accords, Israel also established ties with the United Arab Emirates and Morocco.
Monday’s ceremony was attended by Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani, who said the “new embassy assumes a pivotal role” in growing collaboration between the two countries.
Zayani said his talks with Cohen on Monday resulted in an agreement on advancing “relations across the broadest range of fields, including, economic, investment, trade and other areas”……
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Actually, during the Trump administration, Saudi Arabia was on the right trajectory of normalizing relations w/ Israel. It just didn’t wanna be one of the first, but wait until maybe 15 of the Arab League members had signed such treaties. There’s also the small fact that King Salman is opposed to this until the “Pali issue” is resolved, whereas MbS doesn’t care about the Palis and is more open to this
However, once Biden came in and did all his stunts about Khashoggi, and what’s worse, turned off the US spigot, the Saudis had no incentive to do things right. What w/ the US trying to revive the Iran deal, playing footsie w/ the Palis & so on. So the Saudis turned around & started doing deals w/ China, culminating in their agreement w/ Iran. So as long as there is a (D) in the White House, don’t count on Saudi Arabia being a US ally
Also, the reason we used to pamper Riyadh, including looking the other way on any involvement their government had in 9/11, was that by insisting that all transactions for the sale of oil be in ?, they essentially ensured that it was the world’s reserve currency. But they had already been loosening that rule w/ China, and once the Ukraine war started, they were among the first to do deals w/ other countries that allowed them to transact business in other currencies. So the #1 strategic reason the US had to keep Saudi Arabia in our good books is gone, partly our fault, partly theirs
Therefore, I’d not be opposed to the US opening the book on the Saudi involvement in 9/11: in the past, there may have been reasons to go either way, but not any more. Similarly, the Saudis can work out for themselves whether it’s a net benefit or not to have Israel in their corner, now that their issues w/ Iran are resolved (although I suspect their issues w/ Turkey may still remain)
As for the US, we need to get back into the oil business & dry up the money the Saudis & the Russians are making. It can only happen under Trump next year (I’ll ignore the fiction that any of the other candidates will be the nominee), and hopefully, the war in Ukraine will be ended before we find ourselves in WWIII. Once all that happens, we’d hopefully start shrinking China in a big way so that all these rogue countries lose their #1 patron