[altacc]

There have been many different attempts to solve the Israel/Palestine conflict and its many associated issues. Every US president has a go and having yet another attempt doesn’t win anyone awards until real results & a resolution between the parties involved in the conflict is achieved.

There was no big win here, Bahrain & UAE already had relationships with Israel, they were not in conflict. At best it can be described as possibly a small contributing factor to a future solution, if many other, much bigger and more relevant arrangements can be made. In reality not much has progressed. If anything, the few handshakes and promises made were a smokescreen for the unhappy status quo to go on as it was before.

[bzbarsky]

I suspect the crux of the disagreement is whether the conflict is "Israel/Palestine", as you label it, or "Israel/Arab", as I suspect crusso labels it. The UAE/Bahrain peace deals are a big step for the latter, and not directly relevant to the former. So if you focus on the former, you are right that "not much has progressed", but that's a matter of what sort of progress you care about.

For a long time the two conflicts were sort of interlinked, in that the Palestinians were used as both a rallying point and a pawn in the more general Arab/Israel conflict. Part of the significance of the UAE/Bahrain deals is an ongoing de-linking of the two conflicts.

As a concrete example of a substantive changes that will actually affect the lives of a number of people that have happened recently in the larger Arab/Israel context, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are now generally allowing flights from Israel through their airspace. This and the other recent liberalization steps are worth considering in the context of the situation described in https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/the-peace-deal-is-a-big-de..., where quite recently references to Israel were routinely censored in textbooks and encyclopedias in the UAE.

It's a big change from that to where we are now, and importantly it's a lot harder to sustain hostility against people you interact with on a daily basis than against a mysterious and vilified "other" that you never experience in person. So to the extent that easier travel leads to the travel actually happening, a practical effect of the sort of normalization of relations we are seeing could be a reduction in hostility "on the ground". Though that's likely to take a generation or three; these things are slow to change.

Now how much credit _Trump_ should get for any of this, I dunno; I wasn't in those conversations. But I also don't think people should claim that the changes here are not important just because they (for excellent reasons!) dislike Trump.

[jacobush]

I have a fear the de-linking of the Israel/Palestine and the Israel/Arab conflicts will lead to Israel completely crush Palestine.

Which will be very unpalatable for the wider Arab community, and suddenly we will be back to square one.

I see no realistic solutions, unfortunately.

As for Trump, I know many who can acknowledge that thankfully he has not started any wars, yet see him as incredibly dangerous to the US, and by extension, the world. When the US shrugs, the world trembles.