Bonus Episode: Check-in on the Abraham Accords - with Aryeh Lightstone
The Abraham Accords were signed in September 2020. This agreement between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, marked the first full normalization agreement between Israel and an Arab country since the 1994 Jordan-Israel agreement. Soon after the September 2020 signing, Morocco and Sudan joined the Accords as well.
Since these historic breakthroughs, Israel has been through wild political swings, from a left-right coalition government that included Naftali Bennett from the Right, Yair Lapid from the center-Left, and Mansour Abbas from a Muslim-Arab party. Fast forward to today, there is a government of the Right led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been on this podcast.
And through it all, the Abraham Accords have endured. One of the architects of the accords was Aryeh Lightstone, who served as Senior Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman from 2017 to 2021. On a recent trip to Israel, I sat down with Aryeh to hear the latest and also discuss his book, "Let My People Know: The Incredible Story of Middle East Peace―and What Lies Ahead."
Aryeh played a critical role in the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem and he was a U.S. Government point person in the Middle East for the actualization of the Abraham Accords.
Aryeh Lightsone's book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/let-my-people-know-aryeh-lightstone/1140125201