Published: 24 December 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
In an interview with The Jewish Independent's editor about his explosive book, Israeli journalist Barak Ravid says Trump got sick of Netanyahu’s arrogance over annexation, but helped him save face with the Abraham Accords
IT’S HARD TO believe that one of most significant international peace agreements in recent memory started with a brief conversation in an airport taxi ride.
But that’s what happened in 2018, when the United Arab Emirates ambassador to Washington, Yousef Al Otaiba, rang Avi Berkowitz, deputy to US Middle East envoy Jared Kushner, en route to the White House after another frustrating trip to Israel.
“What do you think about proposing to the Israelis to drop annexation in return for normalisation with the UAE?” Al Otaiba suggested cheekily.
Berkowitz, who had just flown back from Israel after telling Benjamin Netanyahu that President Trump would not agree to his plan to annex the West Bank, replied: “you might not believe it but this is exactly what I thought the other day.”
This equivalent of a bar room chat between two friends, who happened to be influential diplomats, quickly developed into a landmark geopolitical strategy known as the Abraham Accords, which were announced to the world just 45 days later.
This revealing anecdote about how modern-day diplomacy operates is one of many memorable insights that Israeli journalist Barak Ravid has revealed in his bombshell book, Trump's Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East, which has been making news around the world since its release this month.
In an exclusive interview with The Jewish Independent last week, Ravid said “if I split the book into different stories, I could write front page headlines for three months”. The most shocking, in Ravid’s opinion, was Trump’s use of the F-word against Netanyahu, which revealed to the world that the so-called “bromance” between the two leaders was a myth, a cover for an intersection of pragmatic political interests.
