| 12/12 Links: Israel normalizes ties with Bhutan; How the Trump administration banished the ghosts blocking the path to peace; Washington Wizards launch new Israeli Twitter account Posted: 12 Dec 2020 05:00 PM PST Israel normalizes ties with BhutanIsrael established full diplomatic relations with Bhutan for the first time on Saturday night.
Ambassador to India Ron Malka and his Bhutanese counterpart Vetsop Namgyel signed the final agreement normalizing ties on Saturday night. The countries' foreign ministries held secret talks over the past year towards the goal of forging official ties, which included delegations between the two capitals Jerusalem and Thimphu.
The effort to make relations between the two countries was not connected to the Abraham Accords, in which four Arab countries – United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco – normalized ties with Israel in as many months, with American mediation. In fact, Bhutan does not even have official diplomatic relations with the US.
Bhutan is a Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas, bordering on India and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. It has gone to great lengths to keep itself isolated from the rest of the world in order to avoid outside influences and to preserve its culture and natural resources. The country limits tourism, especially from outside South Asia.
The landlocked country has formal diplomatic relations with only 53 other countries – a list that does not include the US, UK, France or Russia – and has embassies in only seven of them.
Neither does the country have ties with China, having closed its border to the country on its north after China's 1959 invasion of Tibet.  August 2019: Kingdom of Bhutan: Israel's new friend in the Himalayas?At first glance, the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Bhutan — two small Asian countries separated by nearly 5,300 kilometers of bone-dry deserts and snow-capped mountains — appear to have little in common besides the fact they occupy the same continent.
Highly urbanized Israel, no bigger than New Jersey, is one of the most wired countries on Earth. Of its nine million inhabitants; 88% have smartphones and 75% are Jews. Immensely popular with tourists, Israel will receive 4.7 million foreigners of all religions this year.
Isolated Bhutan, by contrast, is nearly twice Israel's size but has barely 800,000 people, all of them Buddhists. Fewer than 200,000 tourists annually visit this Himalayan Shangri-La, which as late as 1980 had just 1,200 phone lines in service. Television came to Bhutan only in 1999.
Despite mutual feelings of admiration, the two countries don't have diplomatic relations … not yet. But the day that happens, Yeshey Tshogyal — who prefers to see similarities instead of differences — would make an ideal choice as the Forbidden Kingdom's first ambassador to Israel.
"The people here are very warm and welcoming. They're also open-minded, at least the ones I've met," the 22-year-old told me in Tel Aviv just before her flight back to New York, where she's pursuing a double major in psychology and intercultural communications at Baruch College.
Last week, Yeshey wrapped up a two-month internship at the Israel-Asia Center, a nonprofit organization based in Jerusalem. Seth Mandel: How the Trump administration banished the ghosts blocking the path to peaceIn July 2009, President Barack Obama met with Jewish leaders at the White House. America, he told them, had been mistaken in trying to adhere to its goal of "no daylight" with Israel. During the previous eight years of the George W. Bush administration, Obama told Jewish leaders, "There was no space between us and Israel, and what did we get from that? When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states." Obama wanted to put some space between the U.S. and Israel, and proceeded to do exactly that. His experiment was a flop: He was the least successful president regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict since the end of the Cold War.
Trump sought to correct this. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moved the U.S. Embassy there. Trump also had the U.S. recognize Israeli sovereignty over its Golan Heights in the north. When Friedman was announced as the pick for ambassador to Israel, liberal figures insisted he was too pro-Israel and too supportive of what they viewed as the Israeli Right. But success followed.
Kushner, thus, began his push for peace with the wind at his back: Pundits and so-called "experts" had all promised there would be bloodshed from Trump's Jerusalem moves, but none had materialized because they fundamentally misunderstood the region's politics. The Palestinians rejected Kushner's "economic peace" model out of hand, just as they have rejected every peace plan before it. But it turned out he had some surprising takers.
The Palestinians' legitimate drive for statehood and self-determination had taken on an outsize role in the region's affairs. Ramallah effectively was given a veto over Arab normalization with Israel. But when Trump called their bluff over Jerusalem, it shattered the myth that you had to go through the Palestinians if you wanted public cooperation and reconciliation with Israel. Trump's decision to leave the Iran nuclear deal also showed America's Sunni Gulf allies that he could be trusted to restore the bonds broken by Obama's attempts to favor Iran over traditional allies.
Much like the ancient ghosts of ethnic conflict that haunt the Balkans, the Middle East was a place where the Palestinians didn't hold the only veto; history had one too. But the Trump administration approached it with an unsentimental proposal: Don't be ruled by inherited rivalries and the trauma of the past; if you have the chance to make your lives better right now, take it. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain did, striking recognition deals that include trade and civil aviation plus joint efforts to combat anti-Semitism. Sudan joined the party, agreeing to normalize relations with Israel and having the U.S. remove it from a list of terror-sponsoring states. On Dec. 10, Morocco entered the normalization-with-Israel parade in return for the U.S.'s recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony.
None of this is to say this tack will always work — it won't. But in several fraught regions weighed down by the bloodshed of history, it offered a path out of the desert. Future administrations, very much including the incoming Biden White House, should study these lessons carefully, adding one more tool to America's diplomatic arsenal. Saudi Arabia said to have played role in Israel-Morocco normalization agreementSaudi Arabia played a role in the Trump-brokered normalization agreement between Israel and Morocco, diplomatic sources told Channel 12 on Friday.
The report did not detail the Saudi involvement in the US-brokered deal, announced Thursday, and Riyadh has not officially reacted to the accord. However, Saudi Arabia plays a central role in the region, particularly among Sunni states, leading many analysts to speculate that none of the recent normalization deals would have been allowed without a green-light from Saudi Arabia.
In a sign of Saudi support, a prominent newspaper associated with the Saudi royal family put the Israel-Morocco deal on its front page, Channel 12 also noted.
Unnamed Israeli diplomatic sources told the TV channel that it was "very possible" that Riyadh would also be prepared to normalize relations with Israel soon. This is despite Saudi Arabia reportedly being furious with Israel over the leak of a meeting that took place last month between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Saudi resort city of Neom.
A report on Channel 13 TV, meanwhile, said that Saudi Arabia was working together with the Trump administration to get several other nations to sign normalization agreements with Israel, possibly before the Biden administration takes over next month.
The unsourced report said that bin Salman was following the matter closely in an effort to prepare the ground for an eventual Israel-Saudi deal. The report speculated that Oman, which praised the Israel-Morocco deal, would be next.
It also said that Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, was eager to have public ties with Israel. U.S. Moves Forward With Jerusalem Embassy Construction Amid Questions About Biden's Israel PolicyThe United States is expanding its embassy in Jerusalem, according to a new State Department notification transmitted to Congress and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The move comes amid speculation that incoming president Joe Biden, who has said he will not move the embassy, will reverse other Trump-administration policies in the region, such as recognizing Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, cutting off aid to the Palestinian government, and withdrawing from the landmark nuclear agreement with Iran.
The Dec. 3 notification, which was submitted to Congress as part of reporting requirements under the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, reveals the United States plans to expand its office space in Jerusalem in 2021 and will continue its search for "a permanent embassy office building" in the holy city. Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May 2018, bucking years of conventional American foreign policy by recognizing the city as Israel's official capital.
Given that incoming president Joe Biden has indicated that he will leave the embassy in Jerusalem, Trump's embassy move could be a lasting victory for the administration on its way out.
Other Trump policies may not share the same fate. Biden has shown an openness to adopting harsher policies toward Israel. He discussed the possibility of opening a U.S. consulate in east Jerusalem, giving legitimacy to Palestinian claims on this portion of the city. It is also likely a Biden administration will resume aid to the Palestinian government, which was cut by Trump amid revelations the Palestinians were using aid funds to pay convicted terrorists and their families. Further, Biden wants to reenter the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which the Israeli government has rejected over concerns it enabled Iran to fund its regional terror proxy groups.
Anti-Israel organizations are pushing Biden's transition team to tap scores of officials who are critical of the United States' close relationship with the world's only Jewish state. And some of the more radical elements of the Democratic Party have called for conditioning U.S. aid to Israel on territorial concessions to the Palestinians in a bid to restart peace talks.
|
אין תגובות:
הוסף רשומת תגובה