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History has really got back into motion and the Middle East risks being positively unrecognizable in a short time. Yesterday was a strange September 11th and after 19 years, not only were the dead of the biggest attack in the history of jihadism commemorated, but another peace agreement between Israel and an Arab Gulf country.
We had already written it on these pages last August 14th, arguing that the UAE would not be the only Arab country to normalize its diplomatic relations with the state of Israel.
And last night, not even a month after the historic agreement between Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi, Bahrain also decided to join the new Middle Eastern season of peace and innovation, announcing the full normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
For Donald Trump this is an undoubted diplomatic success, and the democratic candidate Joe Biden did not hesitate to express his full support for the work of the President and next September 15 at the White House the peace agreements that will be signed by Israel will therefore be two: with the United Arab Emirates and with Bahrain.
The Bahraini monarch Hamad bin Isa bin Salman al-Khalifa, and the prime minister of Israel Benjamin netanyahu yesterday they had a long telephone confrontation that concluded a process that began many months ago.
A few days ago Bahrain had granted, together with Saudi Arabia, the full use of its airspace to the Israeli flag carrier El Al, allowing the first direct flight between the emirate capital of Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv (the historic flight LY971, such as the international prefix of the Emirates), which has contributed significantly to reducing the isolation of Israel throughout the Middle East.
But if we go back a few months, the small monarchy of the island-state of Bahrain had already started an important process of support for the normalization of relations with Israel, hosting last December, the first meetings on the economic impact of the new peace proposal. between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority. In May of this year the Bahraini authorities had not authorized the holding of a Conference of several Middle Eastern NGOs promoting the boycott of Israel and a few months earlier the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Shlomo Amar had visited the capital Manama to meet the king of Bahrain Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and meet the small Jewish community still present in the kingdom. A few days later, Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khlalifa publicly supported Israel’s right to defend itself from the threat from Iran.
And it is precisely Iran that is the most important key to understanding the genesis of this second and important “deal”.
The normalization of relations between Manama and Israel certainly has an important commercial and economic component, but the key element that favored the normalization of relations was that of national security. Over the past 10 years, Iran has tried in every way to overthrow the small monarchy of Bahrain, relying on a majority Shiite population, with constant political and military pressure. The containment of Iran is the magnifying glass that must be used to fully understand this new one deal, as Israel’s Intelligence Minister Eli Cohen has recalled several times in recent weeks.
Iranian leadership in Syria with the military support of the Pasdarans for the Assad regime; the creation of the militias of Hasd al-Shaabi in Iraq who fought against the Kurds; the financing and arming of Hezbollah’s “state within the state” in Lebanon; Iranian support for Hamas terrorists in Gaza and finally the Iranian proxy war in Yemen through the Houthi militias, represented a series of alarm bells for the Gulf monarchies that led them to “radically change the game” and aim with decision on Israel and the West.
But Iran is not the only one defeated by the Bahrain peace initiative. At stake is the more general leadership of a Sunni world poised between innovation and reforming modernity and Islamist conservation. In this sense, the leadership assumed by the United Arab Emirates, also following the weakening of the credibility of Saudi Arabia after the Khashoggi case, represented an important acceleration for the containment of Turkey and Qatar. who have consistently used the international Muslim Brotherhood network to bring down moderate Arab regimes.
The other major loser of yesterday’s agreement between Israel and Bahrain is therefore Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with its authoritarian and Islamist turn and with its neo-Ottoman agenda of exporting instability in the Aegean Sea, Libya and the Gulf.
But now that the taboo of relations with Israel has been broken by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, other Arab countries will follow the innovative path of a new season of relations with the West in its various forms, from Israel, to the US to Europe. These are Oman, Morocco and Sudan which in the coming months will join the reforming turn of the two Gulf monarchies and normalize their relations with the State of Israel.
Oman has been hosting for years one of the few international organizations in the Arab world which includes the state of Israel (The Middle East Desalinization Research Center), which studies the most advanced techniques for the production of drinking water from the sea and has already hosted several high-level visits between the two countries, including Prime Minister Netanyahu visiting Muscat in October 2018. Morocco is the only Arab country that still hosts a significant Jewish community that is well integrated in the country and is perhaps the Arab country that has tried most organically in recent years to reform Islam to counter jihadist and Salafist deviations. Sudan after Bashir wants to definitively dismiss the international isolation caused by the genocide in Darfur, by the conflict with the Christian south and by having been the sanctuary of too many organizations in the jihadist galaxy (starting with Osama Bin Laden).
The Middle East is changing rapidly and positively and also for Europe new and great opportunities are opening up that can only be seized with greater political and diplomatic leadership, which is not yet seen in the region.
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