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Ambassadors of UAE and Bahrain on Their New Peace with Israel

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Ambassadors of UAE and Bahrain on Their New Peace with Israel WTH is going on with peace in the Middle East II? Ambassadors of UAE and Bahrain on their new peace with Israel Episode #72 | October 1, 2020 | Danielle Pletka, Marc Thiessen, Amb. Yousef Al Otaiba, and Amb. Shaikh Abdullah bin Rashid bin Abdullah Al Khalifa Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. Marc Thiessen: I'm Marc Thiessen. Danielle Pletka: going on? Marc Thiessen: Well, we've got part two of our podcast series this week on the historic peace deals with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Israel and the United States. This is, as you've said, one of the most seismic events in the history of the Middle East. And maybe it's because of who brought it about and people who don't like him, or maybe it's because we've moved on to the fight over the Supreme Court, and we're in the middle of an election. But this deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten. We've got the ambassadors of the UAE and Bahrain here today. Can you ever have imagined, when we started this podcast, that we'd have the ambassadors of Israel, UAE and Bahrain with us on the podcast, talking about peace? Danielle Pletka: As I said in the interview with the Israeli ambassador as well, this is truly ... It's a watershed. And it is a mark of a change in the Middle East that I don't think anyone would have predicted. And that the professional class of Middle East peace processors has never managed to achieve. Marc Thiessen: But Jared Kushner did. Danielle Pletka: I know. Look, well I said this to you earlier ... I think I was among those who was just sort of gobsmacked, the president's son-in-law. Really? What is this, the Kennedy administration? I didn't have confidence in him, and I didn't have confidence in his team. And I was wrong. And you know what? Everybody else was wrong, too, on this one. This Bahrain/UAE peace deal with Israel is something incredible. It is a testament to how much the Middle East has changed. It is a testament to how scared everybody was by Barack Obama's favoritism towards Iran. It is a testament to how scared everybody in the region is of what's happening in Iran, and what is happening in Turkey. And it just opens all sorts of doors. It could be the beginning of a really great new era. Marc Thiessen: I think it's also a testament to the value of having outsiders, a team B take on a 2 challenge that has eluded the experts for a long time. Everyone talked about how Jared Kushner said he was reading 27 books on the Middle East, like learning about it. And people- Danielle Pletka: That didn't sound good. Marc Thiessen: And people made fun of him about that. But he and the president didn't come in attached to all the conventions that have governed how we do business in the Middle East, and how we pursue peace in the Middle East, both by Republicans and Democrats, for decades. And the conventions were that, "There's no separate peace. It has to go through Ramallah. That you can't move the US Embassy to Jerusalem because that'll upset everything. You can't actually put sanctions on Iran and push back on Iran, because that'll start a cataclysmic war." Marc Thiessen: And the Trump administration came in, and they were like, "We didn't sign up to all these conventions. I understand that's how it was done, but we're going to do things differently." And they started breaking china, and everybody set their hair on fire, that this was going to inflame the region. And it did the exact opposite. Certain things just in government happen because that's always how it's been done. And sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and say, "Well, that's not how I'm doing it." And that's what happened here. Danielle Pletka: I said exactly what you just said when the US moved the embassy to Jerusalem. If we can just go back in the way-back machine, when the United States and the Trump administration finally decided to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem ... not to East Jerusalem, disputed, but to West Jerusalem ... There was an absolute outcry. Not so much from the Arab world, but from American aficionados of the peace process and of the left. And the predictions about what would happen, and the Arab street would rise up ... None of that was true. So, you are right. A lot of the truisms, a lot of the conventions, a lot of the frozen thinking of people who are in my business, the Middle East people, has really been upended. Danielle Pletka: Not only that, but another thing worth discussing is just the gross partisanship that this has, again, revealed. You know what? I couldn't stand Barack Obama. But when he made some hard decisions on Afghanistan, I applauded him. And I applauded him because I thought it took courage to stand up to the people in his own party and to do the right thing. No one, almost no one, is standing up courageously on the left, and saying, "This was an unbelievable accomplishment." Danielle Pletka: Instead, I got asked, "Isn't the United States really just bargaining away Israel's qualitative military edge, and just buying the Emiratis by selling them F-35s?" I'm sorry, what? There's just so much garbage out there. Attacks on Israel, as I mentioned in the Dermer interview, attacks on Israel for not caring about democracy in the Arab world, and making peace with these two autocratic regimes, number one. And then, number two, that the US doesn't care about Israel's qualitative military edge because we're selling these advanced aircraft to the Emirates. This is just grasping at straws, trying to deny Trump and Jared Kushner, the credit that they deserve for this. AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org 3 Marc Thiessen: Well, good for you for not denying them credit. But again, the partisanship, Nancy Pelosi called this a distraction. You know, seriously? Literally Donald Trump could nothing right, including ... It would have been a joke two years ago, if Trump had come out and said, "I could come out and have peace in the Middle East and they'd attack me." And we'd all laugh, "Ha, ha, ha, ha." He did come out and have peace in the Middle East and they still attack him. Marc Thiessen: And here's the other thing I want to get into with you, and I want to get into with our guests, is that unlike the previous peace deals, there are two previous peace deals. One with Egypt in 1979, one with Jordan in 1994. In both of those cases, there really wasn't a huge deepening of relations between the country, huge exchanges, true peace between the peoples. This strikes me as something that's going to be a lot more substantive and a lot more real. That there really is a desire on the part of these two Arab countries to deepen their relations and deepen people-to-people relations with the countries. Deepen economic relations between the countries with Israel which is something that was absent in previous accords. Marc Thiessen: You said to me at one point that the 1979 deal was really a fake deal. Talk about that. Danielle Pletka: It was a deal that created peace between Israel and a country with which it had gone to war multiple times. And so, in that sense it was a breakthrough in the sense it took a lot of courage for Sadat. Don't forget Sadat not only signed the Camp David Accords, he then went to Israel. I mean, that was just something else. That's something even our friends in the UAE and Bahrain have not done. It was remarkable for its time. I don't want to take credit away from that, either. But it involved a real quid pro quo, right? Israel gave back territory, now let's all note that Egypt didn't want Gaza back even though... Danielle Pletka: But at the end of the day, it wasn't a real peace. And it was also a peace that has caused the United States in too many ways to look away at how the Egyptian government has behaved towards its own people. Our measure of a government shouldn't just be whether they make peace with Israel. It should also be the kind of government they are. We've given hundreds of billions of dollars to the Egyptian government and they're an okay ally, they're in a very cold peace with Israel, but damn. These are not good, these are not democratic leaders. Marc Thiessen: Amen. Well let's turn to our guests, because we have the ambassadors of the UAE and Bahrain with us today. Danielle Pletka: Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba is the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United States. He's been in that job for 12 years now and I know he's extremely well regarded in the diplomatic community. Prior to that, he was an advisor to Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, the Crown Prince in the UAE.
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