by Jonathan Reisman

“If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”- Moshe Dayan
“You can only end a negotiation for peace if you begin it”- Benjamin Netanyahu
“It’s a distraction”- Nancy Pelosi

Last week President Trump signed the Abraham Accords, a peace agreement between Israel and two Sunni Arab Gulf States, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Similar agreements were last brokered by President Clinton (Jordan, 1994) and President Carter (Egypt, 1979).  A number of other Muslim and Arab nations, including Oman, Morocco, Chad, and perhaps even Saudi Arabia seems poised to join the emerging alliance. The Abraham Accords are a tremendous accomplishment for peace, prosperity, and freedom, the Jews, Sunni Muslims, and (few remaining) Christians of the Middle East, American foreign policy, President Trump, Secretary of State Pompeo, and Prime Minister Netanyahu. The accords are a tremendous defeat and rebuke for the Iran enablers and appeasers of the Obama/Biden administration, the foreign policy deep state establishment who opposed President Trump’s initiatives, the Iranian mullahs, the recalcitrant Palestinians, and the domestic Resistance to President Trump. That explains Speaker Pelosi’s dismissive and derisive comments.

Over the last 50 years, the Palestinians have consistently rejected every opportunity to make peace that required recognizing Israel’s right to exist, insisting on a Palestine from “the (Jordan) river to the sea”, hurling rockets and terrorism into Israel, and teaching their children a virulent anti-Semitism. The returns on that policy are isolation, poverty and alliance with only Iran, Turkey and assorted terrorism enablers. The Palestinians may well resist until all they have to hurl at their neighbors is stones.

The Abraham Accords are the fruits of two Trump actions that the left, the Resistance and the deep state derided: the rejection of the Obama/Biden appeasing Iranian nuke deal which gave the mullahs billions to finance terrorism while approving their temporarily delayed acquisition of nukes and the congressionally approved but never implemented move of our embassy to Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem. The accords signal an alliance of Israel, the US and Sunni Muslim states against the Iranian mullahs and their terror-supporting ways. Hopefully, just as NATO stood up the Soviets until they crumbled from within, the Abrahamic alliance will stand against the mullahs until the Iranian people successfully revolt.

The accords may have a small marginal effect on the election. Jews as a group overwhelmingly vote Democratic, with the exception of the small cadre of the orthodox. Polling indicates a small percentage of the Jewish vote has moved rightward towards Trump, but the overall numbers and geographical distribution of the Jewish vote suggest it is unlikely to matter much, with the possible exception of Florida. New York and California will be blue regardless, but the Jewish vote in battleground Florida may be important - but not as important as the increasing but still minority Latino and Black support for President Trump.

The President has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the Abraham Accords, but it will never come to pass. The therapy costs for Resistance fighters’ Trump Derangement Syndrome would be astronomical, not to mention Speaker Pelosi’s hairstyling and Botox bill.

Jon Reisman is an associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of Maine at Machias. His views are his own.Mr. Reisman welcomes comments as letters to the editor here, or to him directly via email at [email protected].