Thread by @OferZalzberg

If the Trump Team sought to advance Arab-Israeli rapprochement through the Bahrain workshop it has achieved the opposite.

The one-off entry of a handful of Israeli journalists to Bahrain and photos of Israeli and Gulf businessmen should not distract from four central dynamics:

1. ALL attending Arab countries do so after declaring unyielding commitment to the traditional peace making positions which the Trump administration worked to shift (Arab Peace Initiative). This includes Arab governments who were willing to bend before the Jerusalem Proclamation.

2. Some Arab governments seemingly conditioned attendance on Israel’s absence. This most pertains to Egypt and Jordan which already signed peace treaties with Israel and are hence most susceptible to accusations of normalizing relations with Israel at the expense of Palestinians.

US attempts to normalize Arab-Israeli relations with seemingly flagrant disregard to the Palestinian national project thus setback the overt facets of Israel’s relations with Egypt and Jordan.

3. If anything, one should underline that even though PLO and Hamas are on one of their weakest historic moments, and though Israel and Gulf threat perceptions are both eclipsed by Iran, Palestinians succeeded to prevent holding an Arab-Israeli ministerial summit in a Gulf state.

The shared Iranian enemy was (barely) sufficient for an anti-Iranian US-convened Israel-Gulf meeting (Warsaw) but proves insufficient for a US-convened Israeli-Gulf summit regarding Palestinians, let alone for articulating peace parameters Palestinians would be forced to accept.

4. Bahrain workshop’s place in history, if any, may be for setting back Arab-Israeli rapprochement, underlining Israel’s overt acceptance in region requires resolving Israeli-Palestinian conflict and emphasizing region’s deep commitment to traditional peacemaking parameters.