Anti-Trump foreign policy pundits set aside partisanship and politics to praise the president’s new peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which was announced in the White House on Thursday morning.
Tom Friedman of the New York Times called the agreement a “geopolitical earthquake,” noting that it opened the door to future peace agreements and further isolated the Iranian regime, which had been waging terrorist wars across the region:
For once, I am going to agree with President Trump in his use of his favorite adjective: “huge.”
The agreement brokered by the Trump administration for the United Arab Emirates to establish full normalization of relations with Israel, in return for the Jewish state forgoing, for now, any annexation of the West Bank, was exactly what Trump said it was in his tweet: a “HUGE breakthrough.”
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It was Trump’s peace plan drawn up by Jared Kushner, and their willingness to stick with it, that actually created the raw material for this breakthrough.
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The U.A.E. and Israel and the U.S. on Thursday showed — at least for one brief shining moment — that the past does not always have to bury the future, that the haters and dividers don’t always have to win.
David Ignatius of the Washington Post — who once published information that led to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn being fired and prosecuted — was similarly effusive, noting that Trump’s peace plan had notched a big win:
For once, Trump didn’t need to manufacture any superlatives. This was, as he tweeted, a “HUGE” achievement.
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[Jared] Kushner didn’t specify what Arab countries might be next. But State Department officials said likely prospects include Oman, Bahrain and Morocco. For now, officials say, Saudi Arabia will resist formal recognition of Israel.
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Kushner’s peace plan, when it was finally announced, seemed stillborn. But Kushner argued that if he could peel off several countries that were ready to make a pragmatic deal, the process of Arab normalization with Israel — a dream since the Jewish state was founded — might finally get some traction.
Trump’s surprise announcement might be an “August surprise” in the presidential campaign. But it’s welcome news for Israel, the Arabs and the United States.
In Israel, the left-wing Ha’aretz also praised the deal, despite its none-too-hidden contempt for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
A generation of Western diplomats who thought that Israel needs to pay in hard currency for any such breakthrough with the Arab world were tearing their hair out last night. During the Oslo years, they tried so hard to get such a statement from one of the major Arab nations in return for Israel’s compromises with the Palestinians. Now Netanyahu has got it for nothing. In 2018 the Saudis for the first time allowed overflights of its territory to Israel, and now the Emiratis are talking about direct flights from Tel Aviv to Dubai.
Even former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic opponent in November, praised the deal — and tried to take some credit for it.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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