New Israeli government underpins the Abraham Accords
Israel's new government has already begun diplomatic contacts. The new foreign minister, Yair Lapid, wasted no time in announcing his first official trip abroad to the United Arab Emirates shortly after swearing in the new Israeli government, which brings to an end 12 years of leadership by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The choice of an Arab country is not random and reflects the new government's intention to reinforce the resounding Abraham Accords brokered by former US President Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister at the time. These accords involved the normalisation of relations between four Arab countries and the Hebrew country, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United States: United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and the latest to join the list was Morocco.
Since the agreements were signed, the Jewish state has made successive economic and cooperative arrangements with these Arab countries. These negotiations also broke the historic consensus among Arab countries that any official recognition of Israel had to be conditional on an end to the occupation of the Palestinian territories and the establishment of the two-state solution on the 1967 borders. Israel's new government is aware of the importance of these agreements, which is why its first official visit abroad will be to the United Arab Emirates, where the Israeli foreign minister plans to meet his Emirati counterpart Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and inaugurate the Israeli embassy in Abu Dhabi and the Israeli consulate in Dubai.
Following this foreign policy line, he will meet his counterparts from the United States and Bahrain in Rome on Sunday, according to Lapid's office. However, the statement does not specify what Lapid is scheduled to discuss separately with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif Al-Zayani during his one-day visit to Italy.
The announcement of the visit to the United Arab Emirates as well as the meeting with Bahrain's foreign minister confirms Israel's foreign policy trend of reinforcing the Abraham Accords that brought the country out of its regional isolation. Yair Lapid made his intentions clear in his inauguration speech on 14 June: "Part of our work will, of course, be to strengthen our presence in the region. Great things happened last year. We have to continue the development that started with the Abraham Accords, work to strengthen peace with the Gulf states, with Egypt and with Jordan. We will work to sign agreements with more countries in the region and beyond. It is a process: it will not happen in one day, but the foreign ministry will coordinate these efforts".
Yair Lapid's visit to the UAE, as well as the meeting with his Bahraini counterpart, mark the first face-to-face meetings between a senior Israeli government official and diplomats from these two Gulf countries. After the signing of the Abraham Accords, then Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi was invited by his Bahraini counterpart, Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani, to participate in the international conference Manama Dialogue 2020. In the end, however, the visit did not take place, as then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided that no minister would visit either Bahrain or the UAE before he made the trip.
But on 11 March, shortly before his departure, Netanyahu was forced to cancel his visit to the UAE, as Jordan had delayed its approval for the plane to pass through its airspace, and the UAE objected to the visit as it did not want the issue to become politicised.
Unlike the previous government led by Netanyahu, Naftali Bennet, Israel's current prime minister has delegated all foreign policy decisions and actions to Lapid, while Bennet will focus on the country's internal affairs. Although the new government has tried on several occasions to dissociate itself from Netanyahu's government, it is taking on the legacy of the Abraham Accords, which it fervently intends to revitalise.