Negotiated the agreement between UAE and Israel.
Main article: Israel–United Arab Emirates relations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–United_Arab_Emirates_peace_agreement
As early as 1971, the year in which the UAE became an independent country, the first president of the UAE Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan had referred to Israel as "the enemy."[13] The UAE and the United States had a strategic relationship since the 1990 Gulf War, growing to a significant US Air Force presence at Al Dhafra Air Base after the September 11 attacks.[14] In November 2015, Israel announced that it would open a diplomatic office in the UAE, which would be the first time in more than a decade that Israel had an official presence in the Persian Gulf.[15]
In the months leading up to the agreement, Israel had been working in secret with the UAE to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. European news media reported that Mossad had discreetly obtained health equipment from Gulf states.[16][17] Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, reported at the end of June 2020 that the two countries were in cooperation to fight the coronavirus and that the head of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, had traveled numerous times to the UAE. However, the UAE appeared to downplay this a few hours later by revealing that it was merely an arrangement among private companies rather than at state level.[18]
The move also comes in the wake of the Trump administration's repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal and following persistent Israeli suspicions that the Iranian nuclear program includes a program to develop atomic bomb capacities, something which Tehran denies. Currently, Iran and Saudi Arabia are engaged in backing different factions in proxy wars from Syria to Yemen, with the UAE supporting the Saudi-led and US-sponsored coalition against the Iran-aligned forces.[19][20] In recent years, the countries' informal relations warmed considerably and they engaged in extensive unofficial cooperation based on their joint opposition to Iran's nuclear program and regional influence.[21]
The agreement is also officially called the "Abraham Accord" in honor of Abraham, the patriarch of the three major Abrahamic religions of the world—Judaism, Islam and Christianity.[22]
The agreement represented a major policy reversal for Netanyahu, who had long pushed for increasing settlements in the occupied West Bank, with an objective of annexing the territory. Netanyahu faced political pressure to demonstrate flexibility, as three recent elections gave him only a plurality in a coalition government and he faced a criminal prosecution in 2021. In 2019, the Trump administration reversed decades of American policy by declaring that the West Bank settlements did not violate international law, a decision that threatened the two-state solution that had long been seen as the key to lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The Trump administration's Middle East policy, crafted by presidential senior advisor Jared Kushner and released in January 2020, approved Netanyahu's plan to annex existing settlements. After Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the United States, wrote a June 2020 opinion piece warning that annexation would threaten better relations between Israel and the Arab world, Kushner saw an opportunity and stepped in to facilitate talks. After negotiators had reached agreement, Trump, Netanyahu and UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed held a conference call immediately prior to a formal announcement.[16][7][23][24][25]
