Trump’s Middle East Peace Pageant
The agreement between the UAE and Israel will ultimately accomplish nothing
Conservative media outlets were eager to just go ahead and hand Trump a Nobel Peace Prize after he declared that his meeting with ambassadors from Israel and the UAE and Bahrain signaled a turning point for relationships between nations in the Middle East. Trump heralded the signing of the Abraham Accords as a turning point in history. But, when you look at all the details of what this agreement really means, it becomes quite clear that it will be ultimately meaningless.
For one thing, agreements like this come and go in the Middle East, with previous iterations being signed in 1979 and 1994. For another, the major conflict between Israel and Palestine is basically being ignored, with the United States throwing their full support behind Israel and completely abandoning the desires of the Palestinians.
This is why, while the very agreements were being signed today and all of the pageantry and propaganda of Trump and Netanyahu’s statements and declarations of what this means for the future, rockets were being fired out of Gaza and into Israel.
There’s also the matter of what each country hopes to achieve with this agreement, and the odds are that all the promises made today will not be kept. The UAE asks that Israel pause their plans to move into the West Bank. Israel agreed to do this, but they make no promises as to how long they will hold off on it. And then there’s the matter of the UAE military wanting to purchase F-35 jets from the US, something that would greatly improve their air power, and that Israel would really rather not happen.
None of this improves relations between the countries that are really in conflict, and it actually may destabilize relations with Iran and Turkey even further, as the Palestinians have the support from those nations. Saudi Arabia also backs the Palestinian cause, and they are a huge player in the region. Trump has already destabilized the Middle East by ending the Iran nuclear deal. He then moved an American embassy into Jerusalem, something that was taken as a huge insult by Palestinians.
At the end of the day, all this pomp and circumstance is meant to do one thing and one thing only, and that is to make it appear as if Trump accomplished something, when in fact he has accomplished much of the opposite. Today’s goal was merely a manipulation of public perception, meant to give Trump a boost before the election. The Middle East remains as far from peace as it has ever been, and as long as the humanity of the Palestinian cause is ignored, the turmoil in the region will remain far from ever being peacefully resolved.
