The Story Behind the Israel-UAE Deal

Tell us how this all started.

A little bit over a year ago, at the president’s direction, Jared Kushner started working on this. And we saw an opening [for normalization.] Jared had a very productive conversation with [UAE] Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba in Washington.

And despite the best of intentions of everyone, some complications arose with the Israeli elections, and then came the coronavirus, and numerous other things came up that were nobody’s fault — it ultimately ended up slowing things down a bit. And about six weeks ago and a half weeks ago, the conversations began to materialize again in an extremely substantive way.

Obviously, the application of Israeli sovereignty to areas of the West Bank was something that was covered widely throughout the region.

And it created an effect in numerous Arab countries, many of whom reached out to me, some with thoughts, some with suggestions. And the Emirates reached out to Jared with the suggestion that perhaps now would be a time to go forward with normalization, so long as the application of Israeli sovereignty was suspended to focus on this historic opportunity.