In recent months, Trump has hinted that Saudi Arabia may normalize relations with Israel in the near term.
By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News
President Donald Trump announced on Monday that more Arab and Muslim countries will join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel in the near future.
In 2020, Trump brokered the historic agreement, which saw the Gulf kingdoms of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, along with Morocco and Sudan, officially recognize Israel for the first time since the Jewish state was established in 1948.
“You’re going to see countries start to fill up the Abraham Accords; more and more countries want to join,” The National quoted Trump as saying during a recent cabinet meeting.
“So countries are starting to want to get involved very much with the Abraham Accords again,” Trump added.
Vice President J.D. Vance charged that the Biden administration had failed to expand the Accords over resentment that the agreement had been brokered by Trump.
“If you think about what happened with the Abraham Accords, one of the great diplomatic breakthroughs under the first Trump administration, really in the last 30 or 40 years of American history in the Middle East, and the Biden administration did absolutely nothing with it,” Vance said.
“Built on it, not at all; added zero additional countries,” he continued, adding that the Biden administration’s failure to capitalize on the momentum of the agreement was “purely out of political spite.”
According to an analysis from the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center, trade between Israel and Abraham Accords signatories reached $10 billion in the first three years after the agreement was established. Trade between Israel and the United Arab Emirates alone is estimated to be worth some $1 billion annually.
In recent months, Trump has hinted that Saudi Arabia may normalize relations with Israel in the near term.
Saudi Arabia is widely considered to be the most influential country in the Arab and Muslim world.
Should Saudi Arabia recognize Israel, other countries that may have been reticent toward normalization with the Jewish state would likely follow suit.