President Trump announces the diplomatic breakthrough, in which Israel halts its plans to annex parts of the West Bank, and in return, the UAE agrees to full diplomatic relations with Israel. This took place without any Israeli commitments to withdrawal from lands it won in the June 1967 war. The long-standing “Land for Peace” formula that had dominated Arab-Israeli talks for half a century, namely Israel would return lands for peace was not part of this agreement. The UAE demonstrated that while it had sympathies for the Palestinian plight, its own national interests made a strategic, economic, and military alliance more relevant than waiting for the divided Palestinian community to initiate negotiations with Israel. Israel finds the UAE and other Arab Sunni Gulf states equally distressed at the slow pullback of American presence and unrestrained aggressive Iranian hegemony in the region, and the budding presence of China in the Persian Gulf zone. The UAE seems eager to access Israel’s technologies in water management, desalination systems, cyber technologies, and sharing of strategic intelligence data. (Source)