Avi Shlaim writes:

At a press conference in the White House on 13 August, US President Donald Trump proudly announced the deal he had helped broker between the United Arab Emirates and Israel to establish full diplomatic relations.

He lauded it as “a significant step towards building a more peaceful, secure and prosperous Middle East”.

Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien told reporters that this deal should make the president “a front-runner for the Nobel Peace Prize”.

Reactions to this deal have been mixed. Major European political leaders and the mainstream media hailed it as a momentous, historic breakthrough. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called it “hugely good news”.

The Palestinian response, on the other hand, has been uniformly hostile, denouncing the deal as a betrayal of the Palestinian struggle for liberation and even as a stab in the back. The official daily newspaper of the Palestinian National Authority, al-Hayat al-Jadida, described the deal, in angry red letters, as “Tripartite Aggression against the Rights of the Palestinian People”.

Al-udwan al Thulathi, the tripartite aggression, was the Arabic name for the Anglo-French-Israeli conspiracy to attack Egypt in 1956. No Arab party was involved in the aggression against Egypt in the Suez war.

Today, the Emirati rulers stand accused of collusion with Israel and the US in diplomatic aggression against their Palestinian brothers. [Continue reading…]