President Trump praised the Abraham 2020 agreements which have established official ties between Israel and four Arab countries as one of the greatest achievements of the foreign policy of his first mandate.
Now he pursues his long -term objective to ask Saudi Arabia to join the agreements – but he may have just made him a serious setback. Mr. Trump’s proposal to transfer the two million Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip, then rebuild the enclave, because the “Riviera du Middle East” has anthvem some of the very people he needs to seal the agreement.
Gaza’s idea was quickly rejected by the Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia. The power of the Gulf published a statement before dawn just after Trump launched the proposal on Tuesday evening alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Washington.
The kingdom clearly indicated that it was at the request that a Palestinian state was established first before normalizing relations with Israel. The prerequisite, on which the Saudis insisted in the last year, is “non -negotiable and not subject to compromises,” said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs a declaration Wednesday.
The declaration directly contradicts Mr. Trump, who had just told journalists in Washington that Saudi Arabia had abandoned the prerequisite. A Royal Saudi Senior said that the American leader proposed equipping an “ethnic cleaning” of Gaza.
By offering to “clean” Gaza, Trump has gained little, but suspicion and anger in the Arab countries. The efforts of the US administration to soften the position, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggesting that the Gazans would only be relocated temporarily, did not do much to appease them.
The Palestinian state question is at the heart of the controversy on Mr. Trump’s Gaza’s proposal. For many Arabs, moving the Palestinians is an anathema because it would shred their hopes for an independent state.
Egypt and Jordan, the countries that Mr. Trump suggested could be persuaded to take gasans, have been publicly categorical that they would never accept a mass movement of Palestinians. Officials, journalists and analysts from the two countries said that history had spoken of itself: when the Palestinians were forced from their home, they were not allowed to return.
Since the war in Gaza, the two countries have welcomed the Palestinians who need medical care. Egypt has accepted at least 100,000 medical evacues and others who fled the neighboring enclave. Jordan, a large part of the population is of Palestinian origin, deals with dozens of people injured in Gaza.
But participating in any forced or permanent displacement of the Gaza Palestinians would be “morally and legally horrible,” said Abdel Monem Sieed Aly, Egyptian political analyst and chronicler.
Given the broad support of the Saudi population to the Palestinians, it would be difficult for the government to accept any agreement which does not deal with their aspirations in the State. The public’s indignation in the kingdom during the war, and now about Mr. Trump’s proposal to empty Gaza, has complicated the prospects of an agreement with Israel which was already going to be difficult to achieve.
Before Mr. Trump took office for his second term, there was a cause of modest optimism that the normalization of Israeli Arabia could go ahead. A ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas was contacted on the eve of Mr. Trump’s inauguration of January 20. And the new American president for years has had a good working relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto sovereign of Saudi Arabia.
But now, some strains seem to emerge in this relationship.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, former spy chief of Saudi Arabia and former ambassador to the United States, said Trump on Wednesday “would be given the direction here” not only on the lack of wisdom in What he offers, but also the injustice of “ethnic cleaning”.
As if to underline his point, he wore a Palestinian black checkered kaffiyeh instead of his traditional white hairstyle.
The four Arab governments that signed the Abraham agreements – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan – have done so despite criticism that they had abandoned what had been the Arab prerequisite for decades for decades Link with Israel, the establishment of a Palestinian State.
When Bahrain and the Emirates became the two First Nations to sign the agreements, the president of the Palestinian authority, Mahmoud Abbas, called him “a stab at the back of the Palestinian people”. Mr. Abbas governs certain parts of the West Bank occupied by the Israelis.
After 15 months of war in Gaza, it is unlikely that indignant Arab audiences will accept similar compromises now and the Israeli government led by Mr. Netanyahu firmly opposes the Palestinian State.
“If standardization with Saudi Arabia depends on progress towards a Palestinian state, even by a millimeter, this will not happen. Period, “said Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich last month, the Minister of the Israeli Army.
The Saudis seated the historic signing of the Abraham agreements, but when the agreement spread to include Morocco and Sudan, the Saudi Crown Prince called Israel “Ally potential” In an interview in 2022 with the Atlantic.
In September 2023, the crown prince became the first head of the kingdom to openly discuss the possibility of establishing relations with Israel in exchange for a defense pact with the United States and helping to develop a civilian civil program . He did not mention the Palestinian state as a condition.
In an interview with Fox News at that time, the crown prince declared that such an agreement would require “a good life for the Palestinians”. The indications at the time stressed the possibility that Saudi Arabia could also be willing to release its insistence on a Palestinian state before forging links with Israel.
Then came the attack led by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023, which killed around 1,200 people. The 15 -month -old Israeli military campaign that followed has killed more than 46,000 people in Gaza, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The war has devastated the territory densely populated and impoverished.
Since the war, the Saudi government has changed its tone, claiming that the region must be on an irreversible path to the State for the Palestinians.
“We have red lines,” said Prince Khalid Bin Bandar, Saudi ambassador to the United Kingdom last month. “And for us, to finish the last 75 years of pain and suffering caused by a problem, we must include a Palestinian state.”
It is possible that Mr. Trump and Saudi leaders have maximalist positions as a starting point in a negotiation and will move at some point to reach a compromise.
Many people in the four countries have normalized links with Israel were horrified by the war in Gaza and publicly protested by the agreement. While freedom of association and the assembly remain very limited to Bahrain, the government has granted the demonstrations.
Although Egypt and Jordan have had peace treaties with the Israelis for decades, their audiences have never warmed themselves in Israel and the links were seriously tense by war.
Egyptian officials told foreign diplomats in Cairo this week that their rejection of Gazan’s displacement was unshakable. In public, they reiterated that Egypt was focused on the implementation of the ceasefire agreement and the supply of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.
Egypt “affirms its complete rejection of any proposal or concept aimed at eliminating the Palestinian cause by derail or moving from their historic homeland and its seizure, whether on a temporary or permanent basis,” said Thursday in a press release .
Political analysts close to governments in Egypt and Jordan suggested that the leaders of the two countries would try to persuade Trump to accept another Gaza recovery plan involving the aid and help of their countries.
“Egypt and Jordan have historically participated in the Palestinian cause, and they must be an integral part of any solution,” said Khaled Okasha, director of the Egyptian Center for Thought and Strategic Studies, a reflection group aligned by the government. “But not the one Trump suggests.”
Fatima Abdulkarim Contribution of Ramallah’s reports, in the West Bank.
