Bahrain Recognizes Israel in U.S.-Brokered Deal

UAE, Bahrain sign an agreement to recognize Israel at the White House (Wikipedia)

Bahrain became the fourth Arab state to normalize ties with Israel after a U.S.-brokered agreement established formal diplomatic relations between the two countries on October 18. 

“Today is just a first step for Israel, Bahrain and the U.S. and an important step for strengthening stability in the region,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said at the event. Analysts say this agreement appears to make up part of the broader U.S. regional strategy to hedge against Iran, a major goal of the Trump Administration since it pulled out of the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2018. The Administration hopes that convincing more states to recognize Israel and oppose Iran will boost the administration’s “maximum pressure” policy against Iran and force it back to the negotiating table. 

Following the agreement, the Trump administration can now claim a diplomatic victory against Iran heading into the November elections.

Announcing the deal to his people, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remarked that even though it took 26 years to establish a peace arrangement with a second Arab nation, it took just 29 days to reach deals with a third and fourth country. Netanyahu voiced confidence that “there will be more” peace deals to come. 

The recent recognition of Israel by the United Arab Emirates and now Bahrain suggests that support for the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which called on Israel to withdraw from territories captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict in exchange for normal relations with Arab countries, has lost momentum. 

For example, despite Saudi Arabia’s authorship of the Initiative and its ardent support of the Palestinian cause, the Kingdom permitted the Israeli delegation to fly over its airspace on its way to Bahrain, a move experts believe signals tacit support for Bahrain’s decision. Analysts say that due to Bahrain’s high dependence on Saudi Arabia, Bahrain’s monarch Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa would never have made a foreign policy decision of this magnitude without first garnering Saudi approval. Although recognition of Israel from Saudi Arabia remains unlikely, these signals demonstrate a willingness on the part of the Kingdom to tolerate Israel so long as their overarching ambition to counter Iranian influence continues unimpeded.

For its part, Palestinian leadership condemned Gulf normalizations with Israel as “a stab in the back.” Every Arab state that normalizes relations with Israel, in the view of Palestine, decreases the amount of leverage the Palestinian Authority can wield in its fight for statehood.

Sympathy for the Palestinian cause of statehood remains high across the Arab world, and Bahrain’s decision to normalize relations with Israel has drawn anger from Bahraini citizens who see this decision as a betrayal.