Morocco has agreed to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel, bringing a third nation into the bloc of Arab-Israeli deals known as the Abraham Accords.
“This has been held back for so long by old thinking and by stalled process, and we finally had a breakthrough four months ago, and we’re continuing to push the region forward,” White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and point-man for Middle East issues, told reporters.
The Abraham Accords have emerged as a legacy item in the waning months of the Trump administration, as first the United Arab Emirates and then Bahrain agreed to sign the deals despite decades of animosity related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. The president announced Morocco’s decision to join the group in conjunction with the United States’s recognition of the monarchy’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara, the formerly Mauritanian territory where an independence movement has struggled to establish a nation for decades.
“The United States believes that an independent Sahrawi State is not a realistic option for resolving the conflict and that genuine autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty is the only feasible solution,” Trump said in a formal declaration released after his announcement of the Morocco-Israel agreement. “We urge the parties to engage in discussions without delay, using Morocco’s autonomy plan as the only framework to negotiate a mutually acceptable solution.”
A ceasefire in the Western Sahara fell apart last month after Moroccan troops cleared a road-closing protest launched by the Polisario Front, which began in 1973 as a leftist insurgency against Spanish rule of the Sahara. Spain relinquished most of its Saharan territory to Morocco, leaving the remainder for Mauritania. The Mauritanian government ceded the land to the Polisario attempt to establish the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in the Western Sahara, but Morocco responded by occupying the territory.
Another HISTORIC breakthrough today! Our two GREAT friends Israel and the Kingdom of Morocco have agreed to full diplomatic relations – a massive breakthrough for peace in the Middle East!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2020
The pairing of those announcements is consistent with Trump’s penchant for transactional foreign policy. The original Abraham Accords agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel resulted in the green-lighting of the UAE’s longstanding request to purchase F-35s — a deal slated to receive official approval this week after the Senate voted down an attempt to block it.
“We have peace sprouting in the Middle East,” Kushner said. “President Trump took a contrarian approach, one that was different than not just Democrat but also Republican administrations, just a different approach than the experts have been taking in the region, and the fruits of these efforts have been very apparent.”
Kushner defended the concession to Morocco as deference to the “inevitable,” given the monarchy’s long-term control of the territory.
Arab and Israeli officials have pointed to the threat posed by Iran as a key driver of the geopolitical shift, along with the perception that U.S. strategists want to diminish American military involvement in the region.
