https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZckK_5xyulc
Welcome to my YouTube channel and podcast, Ambassador Dermer. And I’m pleased that you’re here and willing to talk to me. And I’d like you to take over the conversation here and introduce the audience who is watching and listening to the Abraham Accords and your understanding of their nature and significance and the process by which they came to be. So it’s a pleasure to be with you, Jordan. And I’m also thrilled to be here because there is a slight chance that my children will actually watch this. So they can be my audience as well, because they won’t listen to me around the dinner table, but they are big fans of yours. So I’m looking forward to them actually listening to their father for a change. So the Abraham Accords, if we’re trying to understand the Abraham Accords, which happened in the summer of 2020, it’s very interesting because Israel had its first peace agreement with Egypt in 1979. So we waited for 30 years. Israel was established in 1948. It was three decades before we had our first peace agreement with Egypt, which was definitely a breakthrough and I think changed Israel’s not only the military equation regarding Israel and its neighbors, but had a huge impact on Israel’s strategic position in the region. Then we had to wait another 15 years in 1994 when we had a peace agreement between Israel and Jordan. And between the second and the third, we had to wait over a quarter century, 26 years, until 2020, on August 13, 2020, there was a phone call between Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Trump, and Mohammed bin Zayed, who then was the Crown Prince of the Emirates, the United Arab Emirates, and today is the ruler of the United Arab Emirates. And that was a breakthrough. Well, we only had to wait about 25 days for the next breakthrough to happen, which happened in early September with a call with the King of Bahrain, the Prime Minister and the President. And then you had the Abraham Accords, which were formally signed on September 15, 2020. So we had two. Immediately after those accords were signed, two more countries, Sudan and Morocco, increased the number to four countries, four Arab countries, that had done peace or normalization agreements with Israel. And what is striking is how little attention is paid to the fact that in the first 72 years of Israel’s history, we have two peace agreements with Arab countries. And in a four or five month period in 2020, you had four agreements. Now, how did that happen? Now, there’s a lot of reasons why this has been dismissed by a lot of people around the world, because it actually, I think, breaks a paradigm that it existed for many, many decades, and also maybe will give political credit to people that they don’t want to give political credit to. But in understanding what changed in the region and what enabled, ultimately, the Abraham Accords. And by here, the Abraham Accords is specifically the surfacing of Israel’s relations with our Arab partners, particularly in the Gulf. If you want to understand, in my view, the Abraham Accords, you really have to go back about 20 years. I’ll take you back to 2002. You may remember, I don’t know if you were following the Middle East in those days, but in May 2002, the Saudis put forward what was called the Arab Peace Initiative in May 2002. Now, a lot of people thought that was a breakthrough for the region. I didn’t. I actually thought that that was a con job, in the sense that a few months earlier, about eight or nine months earlier, on September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers had flown planes into a building. The World Trade Center had downed the plane in Pennsylvania. And 15 of those 19 hijackers were Saudis. And they were responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. So they faced enormous pressure on them to do something. And if you know a little bit about the history of Saudi Arabia, there was a bond that the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, the Saud family made with the Wahhab family, which are the Wahhabis. And part of that deal that they made enabled the Wahhabis not only to control the education system within Saudi Arabia, but also to promote a particularly virulent brand of Islam all over the world through the mosque that they had funded. That was the deal that the Saudis made. And 9-11 was a product of that, not because the Saudis directly were involved in it or directly ordered it, because the Saudi regime had actually enabled this infrastructure of radical Islam to develop. And ultimately, it blew up on September 11, 2001. Now think about the situation if you’re Saudi Arabia, how much pressure you have on you to do something. So about eight months after those September 11 attacks, they called in the reporter from the New York Times, a columnist, Tom Friedman, I believe, who went to Riyadh. And he met with one of the senior Saudi leaders and he opened a desk drawer and pulled out a peace plan. And all of a sudden, the Saudis, in the public imagination, went from being terror masters to peacemakers. But the real question, Jordan, is this. If you would have asked the leaders of Saudi Arabia in 2002, if you would have asked them, if you could wave a magic wand and end the Arab-Israeli conflict or end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which are not the same conflict which we’ll get into, but if you could wave a magic wand and end those conflicts, would you? And the answer in 2002, in my view, was no. I think they had no desire to do it. I think the conflict served their purposes. It helped divert from a lot of bad things that were happening in the kingdom. And I think a lot of the British and the French and the American diplomats fell for the nonsense that the center of all the problems and maladies of the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So they had no strategic interest in solving the conflict, period, full stop. Now let’s fast forward 10 years, not to 2020. Let’s talk about 2012, maybe even a little bit beforehand. But around 2012, if you would have asked the leaders of Saudi Arabia, if they could wave their magic wand, would they end the Israeli-Arab conflict? Would they end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The answer then was yes. Now what changed in that decade? I’ll tell you what didn’t change. They didn’t translate Herzl, who was the visionary of modern Zionism, they didn’t translate his Jewish state, his famous book, into Arabic. And you didn’t see a wave of Zionism spread across the sands of Arabia. What changed was a fundamental shift in their understanding, not only in Saudi Arabia, but throughout the Gulf, of what their interests are. And this was a result of several factors that came together to, I think, change their approach to Israel and to many other issues, even internal issues, we can get to, but certainly to Israel. One of the changes that happened was the Arab Spring. You remember that in 2010, you had Tunisia underwent this revolution. You saw it in Egypt, you saw Libya, you saw Syria. Some of them were violent, some of them were not violent. In Yemen, in Iraq, all across the region, things were starting to get unstable. And so regimes that were certain of their hold on power for decades to come were less certain. That’s the first thing. Second thing is you had the rise of Iran as a very dangerous power in the region. And that was happening before 2012, but it sort of shifted into overdrive in those years as Obama, the Obama administration, pursued a policy of appeasement with Iran rather than confrontation with Iran. And Iran is a Shi’ite radical power. They not only threaten the state of Israel, which everyone knows, with destruction, but they also threaten their Sunni Arab neighbors. And as I would sometimes tell my Arab friends, they want riyadh for breakfast, they want Jerusalem for lunch, and frankly, they want New York for dinner. I don’t know if Toronto may be a midnight snack, but the Shi’ite radical power of Iran threatens them. And you see Iran getting stronger and stronger as they feel less certain. Now you had another factor, which is the rise of Sunni radicalism. And that would be in the form of ISIS. Now Iran, as I said, is a Shi’ite radical power. There are also Sunni radical forces. Al-Qaeda, who perpetrated 9-11, that’s Sunni radicalism 1.0. ISIS is 2.0, and there’ll be a 3.0. And these regimes in the Gulf are also frightened of them. So you’ve got this Iranian tiger whose claws are getting longer and teeth are getting sharper. You’ve got this ISIS leopard that is roaming throughout that region, chopping off heads, decimating populations, and instilling fear in a very wide swath of territory. And here is another factor that is critical to understand the change in the Middle East. When that Iranian tiger, an ISIS leopard, is rising and becoming stronger, the 800-pound American gorilla is leaving the building. So the withdrawal from the Middle East of the United States, at least the reduction of the military footprint of the United States in the Middle East, I think that helps seize the minds of plenty of people in the Gulf. Because if there is one thing, Jordan, that connects Obama, Trump, and Biden, and they don’t want to be in the same sentence with one another on nearly anything, none of them are looking to send more American troops to the Middle East. So when you see these threats, that tiger and that leopard getting stronger, and the 800-pound gorilla has left, so they say there’s a 200-pound gorilla with a kippah on called Israel, let’s work in closer cooperation with them. So the fundamental thing to appreciate is they had a different understanding of their most vital security interests, and working closely with Israel helps them advance the interests.