Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Bonus Episode: Check-in on the Abraham Accords - with Aryeh Lightstone

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

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

In Central Command, when you have a Saudi general sitting there part of strategic planning, you'll have an Israeli general sitting there as part of strategic planning. You know who's happy about that? The Saudi general. Welcome to a special episode of Call Me Back. This one is on the Abraham Accords, based on a conversation I recently had in Israel. There's a lot going on in Israel. Most of the attention has been on domestic Israeli politics, a heated debate, which we will be discussing in the weeks ahead. But in the meantime, this is a conversation about what's happening outside of the domestic political debate, and that is the further implementation and deepening of the

Abraham Accords, which were signed in 2018. Since this historic breakthrough, this normalization between Israel and a number of countries, most notably those in the Sunni Gulf, 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 an Arab party. That government's gone, but a new government's in power of the right, led by Bibi Netanyahu, who's been on this podcast. And through all these swings, the Abraham Accords have endured. One of the architects of the Accords was Aryeh Lightstone, who served as the senior advisor to the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, from 2017 to 2021. As I mentioned on a recent trip to Israel, I sat down with Aryeh to hear the latest on the implementation of the Abraham Accords,

discuss what may be next for normalization of Israel in the broader Middle East, and to discuss Aryeh's book called Let My People Know, the incredible story of Middle East peace and what lies ahead. Aryeh also 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. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome Aryeh Lightstone to the conversation. Aryeh is the author of Let My People Know, the incredible story of Middle East peace and what lies ahead. The what lies ahead part is what I'm particularly interested in talking to Aryeh about.

It's a terrific read into an incredible origin story of Israel's normalization with huge swaths of the Sunni Gulf with the Arab world. And I'm especially pleased to be having this conversation with him in Tel Aviv at the headquarters of Startup Nation Central, face-to-face, in person. Aryeh, I'm glad we're able to get together. I am very excited to be here, and I feel like I'm at ground zero of where all economic normalization comes from for the beginning of January, at the beginning of 2017, in the thick of what would be one of the most extraordinary periods in US Middle East history. I mean, you could, you know, regardless of where one stands politically, I was on a panel in Tel Aviv the other night, at Third Point Ventures for Dan Loeb, you were there

with, and Tom N It was a great panel. And Tom Nides was on the panel, the current ambassador, and he himself said – I don't know if you were there when he said it. He said, look, I don't agree with everything the last administration did at all. But in this regard, which was a big piece of what you worked on, the Abraham Accords, he views as part of his job to cement it and protect it and expand it. So there you are, early 2017. What was your role here in Israel? So it was completely and totally unlikely to be here in the first place. David Friedman, the ambassador, was appointed before half of the cabinet was appointed. That doesn't normally happen for the U.S. ambassador to Israel to happen. Israel never gets a second political appointee. And for the second political

appointee, in this case, me as his chief of staff being appointed right after the cabinet ministers, but right before any other major ambassadors to London and to China and to Russia, and the list goes on, to be able to have that demonstrated early on two things that mattered meaningfully. Number one is this was going to be a different administration. There was no rule book. I think you know that very well. And the second is David Friedman's relationship with the president, with Jared, was going to be transformational in terms of what an ambassador can normally do. I don't know how much your listeners know about ambassadors. I mean this with zero disrespect, but most ambassadors can be replaced by a fax machine because the job is to take information and to relay it back and forth.

And that's the job of an ambassador. Prior to having immediate phone calls and video conferences and Zoom the world that we live in, that was a really important job to deliver those messages. Rarely is policy made out in the embassy. David Friedman, in his original press statement after Donald Trump nominated him to be the ambassador, when he said, I look forward to working for my office in Jerusalem, it was very clear. There was no Secretary of State at that point in time. I don't think the president cleared the press announcement that policy was going to be made from the post. And therefore, to be able to sit next to the man who was making the policy was an enormous privilege. We did not know what to anticipate. He didn't know what to anticipate. And actually, I discussed that a fair amount in the book. It was because we didn't know so many things.

I think so many things were able to be accomplished. So there's a lot you were in the middle of that would be interesting to this audience. But I want to focus on the Abraham Accords, which is the big focus of your book. We're just past the two-year anniversary of the signing of the Abraham Accords. What to you was most surprising about how the Abraham Accords came together? I mean, I continue to be, you know, completely, I mean, I almost have to like pinch myself sometimes. Like even in this building we're in right now, you know, when the ambassador to Israel of Bahrain, the ambassador from Bahrain to Israel. But it could be both.

But it could be both. Right. Shows up in Israel. Or the Emirati ambassador to Israel shows up and establishes his post in Israel. I mean they come to this building. They come to Startup Nation Central. They want to talk about economic integration and collaboration and co-innovation on the economic front, not to mention strategic and intelligence issues. And I watch this happen when I see these events or I read about them.

I'm like, it's still incredible to me. And I've been involved with Middle East issues and the U.S.-Israel relationship for a long time. It's still incredible to me how it wouldn't have surprised me that if not in my lifetime. Right. And then it happened. So it goes without saying it's extraordinary, and yet you were in the thick of it all coming together. So what surprised you the most? So I'll give you one very easy example.

There was a tweet eight days ago where the Israeli embassy in UAE in Abu Dhabi has their poll booth for elections. Diplomats have to vote abroad. So they posted election voting for Israeli democracy in Abu Dhabi, something that neither you nor I thought we would see in our entire lifetime. I've now seen that tweet five times in the last two years. And I commented that because of the frequency of the Israeli elections, it's normal. And the other way to sort of contextualize that is that in the government, especially the State Department, especially foreign policy, especially the further

you are from Washington, D.C., the slower things move, the more difficult it is to change the status quo, how none of that applied to the Abraham Accords. Multiply that by the fact that we were in the middle of a pandemic that seized not only America, but the entire globe, the middle of COVID-19, pre-vaccinations, nobody knew what was going on. People were dying respirators, the whole thing. I mean, we remember what August of 2020 was like. And then you also have the middle of a very polarizing election season, where it was not clear who the next president was going to be. And all of those things normally freeze everybody. And on August 13, 2020, 10 a.m., there were 18 of us in the Oval Office.

And I was very lucky that David Freeman, Jared Kushner, Avi Berkowitz included me in that group. And we were in the Oval Office. The phone call happens. The president hangs up the phone. And there was a moment of confusion because nobody really knew the enormity of what had just happened. President Trump just hosted a phone call with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed and Prime Minister Netanyahu. And the phone call ends. And there was this buildup to get the phone call to happen.

And once the phone call happened and the tweet was sent, because that's how foreign policy was made under President Trump, the tweet was sent. And there was this – nobody else in the world knew about this. And the 18 of us in the room just paused. And I remember Steven Mnuchin, maybe two seconds, it feels like 20 minutes. But after two seconds of nobody doing anything, leaps out of his seat and leads the 18 of us in a round of applause to the president. And we were applauding something, A, because the president led it, and Jared Kushner, and Pompeo, and Friedman, Berkowitz, and a lot of people, Miguel Correa, deserve an enormous amount of credit for bringing that conversation together, the people together. But nobody understood how large this was going to be, because everybody anticipated the government would push back, the press would push back,

the pandemic would push back, all of those things. And the phone call ends, we got positive press for the first time, I think, ever. And at the conclusion of the positive press, the question was now, how do you actualize that? So you have peace on a piece of paper or on a tweet. Now, how do you get peace in between people? And that became part of my job. I worked with Rob Greenway and Miguel Correa and Avi Berkowitz in order to be able to create connectivity where there was no connectivity anywhere in the world. It was unusual to fly from the US to Israel at that point in time. And now Jared says, please get an LL plane to fly over Saudi Arabia to land in Abu Dhabi filled with Israelis in six days. Go. That's impossible. It's not going to happen. And it happened. And then we did the first flight there and we had kosher food

waiting for us in Abu Dhabi. How's that happen? And then we have two weeks later, the first flight from Israel to Bahrain. And then just yesterday was the two-year anniversary of the Abraham Accord business conference in Abu Dhabi. All this in the middle of a pandemic with no visas. No, the phones don't work from one country to the next country, flying over Saudi Arabia. And what amazes me is really to get to your question is when peace was happening, everybody moved the red tape out of the way. Everybody moved it out of the way. There was a running. Meaning in the U.S. executive branch bureaucracy or even in the bureaucracies of these other countries?

U.S. All the countries, including Saudi. Right. Meaning Saudi to allow overflight. They didn't need to do that. They could have traded it for something. They could have done a lot of things. It was Jerem ate a phone call. Right. That was it. Done.

Okay. So I want to talk about Saudi because, first of all, people – when Saudi is in the news, which is a lot, including very recently with the OPEC news. When I talk about the Abraham Accords and I praise Saudi Arabia's role in the normalization, between gradual normalization between Israel and the Sunni Gulf states, and I give Saudi Arabia enormous credit for their role, they said, well, Saudi Arabia is not part of it. And I'm like, no, no, no. This wouldn't have happened without Saudi. You can be fond, you can be supportive of Saudi Arabia, you can be highly critical. There's plenty of reasons, obviously, to be highly critical of Saudi Arabia. But the reality is it wouldn't have happened without Saudi Arabia. Can you explain why that is? Yeah, period, end of sentence,

exclamation point. But a lot of people don't understand that this began way before August 13th, 2020. It began even before when I'm going to tell you it began. Where I started to see this firsthand was we had the Peace to Prosperity Workshop in Bahrain. Now, people who don't know where Bahrain is, which was the second country to join the Abraham Accords, it's a small island connected to Saudi Arabia. By a bridge. Yeah, I've been on that bridge. You've been on the bridge.

Yeah. Many Saudis vacation there for the weekend. And in fact, most of the hotels there are built for Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night because that's when they're full. They're not really full the rest of the week. Bahrain is a forward-leaning entity that is connected to Saudi both physically, spiritually, monetarily, economically. It's sort of looking, again, be careful how I say this, it's Puerto Rico versus a state to a great degree. And obviously, there are major differences. They have their own king, they have their own, but there's a strong connectivity. You can't move there meaningfully

without that, because Bahrain is in the middle of you've got Qatar, and you've got Iran right across the straits. Right. And it's a Sunni government with a big Shiite population. So there's a lot of tensions there. Having Saudi Arabia have its back is very important to Bahrain. Bahrain is not like, you know, flying solo in geopolitics. No, correct. And that would be crazy if they did. In fact, they're not flying solo. Our fifth fleet is parked in the Bahraini Bay.

Right. Right. Bahrain is Bahrain. And they've been a fantastic ally of the United States of America for literally centuries. Precedes the kingdom. And I'm saying that the king and the family there have been generous to America, to freedom of religion for a long time, to the Jewish people for a long time as well. But it's a complicated region. And Jared, with the king, hosted the Peace to

Prosperity Workshop in June of 2019, way before there was a peace plan, the deal of the century that came out, way before anybody had heard of the term Abraham Accords. And at that Peace to Prosperity workshop hosted by the Kingdom of Bahrain, they invited Israelis to come and work on what the future of the region should look like. And this was specifically stipulated, they don't want government, they don't want to make it political, they don't want military, they don't want defense, they don't want intel. We know that that exists under other channels. But they want to talk it political. They don't want military. They don't want defense. They don't want intel. We know that that exists under other channels. But they want to talk about what can the region look like if we just ignored politics, if we ignored religion. So it was Israeli business people traveling to Bahrain.

Correct. And I also remember Israeli journalists. Correct. And that was a big deal. And I remember a number of Israeli journalists and conversations I had with them were like, I talked earlier about pinching myself. They were pinching themselves, but they couldn't say that. Correct.

But they were, because they had to, you know, objectively be reporting on what was, but they were like, oh my gosh. They're like, I'm an Israeli journalist. The idea that I'm being credentialed

as a journalist without having to have a dual, use a second passport or, you know, report for another. There was no subterfuge. They were there as guests of the Kingdom of Bahrain. And there's no world where the Peace to Prosperity workshop happens in Bahrain without the blessing of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is no way they call the entire region together there, inviting Israeli business people, inviting Palestinian people saying,

let's figure out the future of the region, not litigate the past without the blessing of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And that was the start. And then fast forward, but I met with a significant Saudi leader in 2015 in the US. And I remember him saying, we were talking about Israeli innovation, and he said, look, as far as we in Saudi Arabia are concerned, Israel is the future. Actually, he said Israel is the future and the Palestinians are the past. But his point, to finish the thought, he said Israel is the future and we want to bet on the future. He effectively said we have a Silicon Valley in our backyard. We don't have to fly 15 hours to get to Silicon Valley anymore.

It's here. It's in Israel. And that's where the future is. And we want to be with the future. And I asked him what the mood was on the, quote unquote, Saudi street, the Arab street, because it used to be Arab leaders used to say, look, I understand we have to normalize with Israel. But the street, the street is against it. My government's going to be toppled. And here the Saudi leader was saying, the street is with us. The street supports normalization. They think our priorities have been skewed in where we have stood historically in the conflict. And we, you know, the street, so to speak, they almost flipped

it. Like, if we don't start modernizing... The street's going to topple us. Right. If we don't start modernizing, which part of modernizing they viewed as normalization of Israel. So why – do you think had you had more time, Saudi Arabia would have officially – or if you had started earlier? Like is there a world in which – I agree with you. There's no question this wouldn't have happened without Saudi Arabia. But is there a world in which it could have happened with Saudi Arabia? So your good friend and my former boss, Jared Kushner, understands the region better than anybody I know. And the language he uses is, it's a question of when and not if. And while I don't have those conversations with the leaderships of Saudi or the people who represent the leaders of Saudi, I will give you a couple

of points to illustrate that. The first time I landed in Saudi, I was very nervous. I don't take off my kippah anywhere I go, my head covering anywhere I go. But it's easy to do that because I had, you know, U.S. security and a big American flag on my lapel when I landed in Saudi the first time, when I landed in Saudi the second time. Now, the third and fourth time that I went to Saudi, I went as a civilian. When I walked around, I was concerned about wearing my kippah, but I decided that I was going to wear it because I was invited. They knew who I was, and I wasn't going to change. I don't think you should change who you are from one situation to the other situation. The amount of excitement there was when I met ministers and deputy ministers and business leaders, men and women,

who were both intrigued to see a guy walking around in Riyadh with a kippah on his head, and then to find out where he lives now, where I told told him Israel in order to push a couple buttons in that case the response overwhelmingly was we can't wait to visit you soon and wow that was not the case three years ago when I was there for the first time when I was there it was sort of looking and the people who came to say hi I think we're checking is someone going to see me take a picture with that guy like that would be the worst thing ever, right? And now there are people actively running over to the non-alcoholic cocktail party to come and be with the guy with the kippah who says that he lives in Israel. Now, if I was truly Israeli, maybe I would have had a different response.

I'm an American who lives in Israel. But it is without a doubt in my mind a question of when. And I'll tell you where I learned that this was going to happen from. We, the United States of America, opened up our embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, 2018. That was led by David Freeman, President Trump, Mike Pompeo, Jared Kushner, et cetera. David certainly, and I recall in the book, led the way and crushed it completely and totally on that one in a positive way. Two days later, Guatemala moved their embassy to Jerusalem. Why did Guatemala move their embassy to Jerusalem. Why did Guatemala move their embassy to Jerusalem? Certainly, they were trying to curry favor with President Trump and

southern border stuff and everything else like that. But when I met with the foreign minister of Guatemala and the president of Guatemala and their ambassador to Israel, they said all those things. But those were second and tertiary reasons for doing that. They came over and over and over again and said, Israel has no natural resources. Now they've got a couple, but no natural resources. And look what they've done for a world economy here, this tiny little country, right? And they've been able to create such a engine that it needs 10,000 new engineers a year just in order to keep that engine going, forget growing, just to sustain where it's at. Why can't we get a piece of that? If their neighbors don't want it, if I get 100 engineers, Guatemala says, from Israel a

year, that'll change my entire country. You're sitting there next door. I live in Renana half of the year. I can hit a golf ball to Cacilia. Not well, but I can hit a golf ball to Cacilia. Why can't they be part of the 10,000 engineer a year issue? Why can't Ramallah look like- These are, for our listeners, these are Palestinian towns. Right. Correct. Exactly. Why can't they look like Tel Aviv? They can and they should. The economy needs them to. And right now, instead of flying to New York or to LA or to DC or to Miami, they're flying to Abu Dhabi and Dubai. And when I say they, the Israeli startups are going Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Manama, and they're going to go to Morocco soon. And it's a shame for the Palestinians to miss out on that. And the Saudis,

see, I think there are 12 or 14 daily flights from Israel to the UAE back and forth. Almost every one of the business class seats is filled. I can't tell you about all the economy, maybe during vacation time, every business class seat is filled and the Saudis know that. Yeah. So you think it's just a matter of time? Oh, without a doubt. And even the recent developments, so for instance, when President Biden was in the region a few months ago, there were these announcements made that Israeli aircraft can now fly over Saudi. They were able to fly over Saudi beforehand to Abraham Accord countries. This was going to open it up so you can fly direct to India and Australia. Right, right, which saves time.

It's a big deal. Yeah, for sure. And the other big announcement, there were several announcements. The other big announcement, which I'm struck by how little press attention it got, was that Israel and Saudi Arabia would be partners in the broader U.S. Central Command military structure. Can you explain what that is and why it's important? Yeah.

For years, I mean years forever, America allowed Israel to be an exception to all of our rules. So one of the examples was we didn't put our embassy in Jerusalem. Why? Because it was going to upset other people. We did not put Israel in Central Command, which is where all of the rest of our troops are in the region and the way we coordinate amongst our allies. So just for our listeners, so there's these commands. There's southern command, which are countries in like the Western Hemisphere, Latin America. There's European command.

There's central command, which are mostly the Middle Eastern countries and beyond. This is how the U.S. military works. Divides the world. Yeah, divides the world and organizes with other militaries in these parts of the world. And when you're a part of this command, like, for instance, U.S. Central Command, its headquarters is in Tampa at MacDill Air Force Base, and there's a forward operating base in Doha. That's where I worked and lived for a year – or not a year, a couple months before I moved to, went to Baghdad in 2003. There's, I'm just trying to describe the image. You see representatives in their uniform from these countries all working side by side at the U.S., in this case, Central Command Headquarters. So in the past, the Saudis and the Bahrainis and the Emiratis said, look, we can't have an IDF official in uniform working side by side at the command with our soldiers or our military leaders, our military officers.

And the idea that that's no longer a problem. And so Israel was a European command, right? So it was put in Europe, which made no sense. Not only did it make no sense, but just go back to the sentence that you said. The Emiratis and Saudis and whomever else told America who we could have in our command station. It's not their command station. Remember, who is right or wrong, but who is the policeman or who's the police force for the world? Without U.S. troops here, what does the Middle East look like? And what's the exception

to that? Israel, right? And those countries did not want to sit next to Israel. Baloney. That was us not acting like America. We allowed other people to dictate our policies. Same thing, our embassy in Jerusalem. Same thing, recognition of the Golan Heights. Same thing, having Israel artificially in European command and not in central command. Now, one of the beautiful things that being moved to central command is it's our command. It's U.S. central command. And we're going to put the people there that make sense for us. If, God forbid, we need to do something in the region, we sure as heck want in central command Israeli F-35s over anybody else sitting in that region. We want them there. The Italians and whoever else in European command, it makes for great, you know, Air Force parades, but not much other than that. So this is the logical place to be. And

that means correct. In Central Command, when you have a Saudi general sitting there, part of strategic planning, you'll have an Israeli general sitting there as part of strategic planning. You know who's happy about that? The Saudi general. Right. They are. And so this was a big change. It was formally announced. And now it also formalizes a lot of – and there's already a lot of intelligence sharing and strategic cooperation between Israel and the Saudis. But this really formalizes it. Yeah. Without getting into sort of part of the nitty-gritty, we're sitting in the start of Nation Central. One of the things that you and this entity have brought to Israel is the concept of deregulation.

What do I mean by deregulation? You've demystified Israel for mostly the American and the Western market. What do the Abrahamic do? It deregulated the region, right, for the countries that signed on. So there's no reason that UAE and Israel should not be natural partners. We got rid of that fake or false pretense for not being able to cooperate. Putting Israel in central command is an enormous deregulation for the region. There's no reason that Saudi and Bahrain and UAE and Oman and Qatar, who are not part of the Abraham Accords, shouldn't benefit from the number one power in the region, which is Israel. If they want to intel on Iran or on the pirates

or on the terrorism that happens when you try to ship oil from one place to another, wouldn't you want to work with the number one entity in the region for that? We've deregulated that process. So what happens now? I mean, you know, there's a sense after the Biden administration came in that the questions, are they going to screw up the Abraham Accords? Are they going to dil up the Abraham Accords? Are they going to dilute the Abraham Accords? It seems to me that, I mean, some of their policies may not be helpful towards the expansion of the Abraham Accords,

specifically their continued negotiations with Iran. But they seem, when I speak to officials in the Biden administration, they seem pretty committed to the Abraham Accords. Like what Tom Nides was saying the other night. They recognize it as a real positive and something they do not want to chip away at. I credit Tim Besser Nides for what he's done to be able to continue to support the Abraham Accords. Although when he said, from day number one, we've been supportive of the Abraham Accords, my book was written specifically because of the press conference that Ned Price gave in May of 2021. This is the State Department spokesman for Tony Blinken in the Biden administration.

Correct. And he was asked by Matt Lee, the reporter from AP, who's a great reporter, balls and strikes, which means he on occasion asked us nice questions also, and asked Ned Price to name the Abraham Accords. And he wouldn't do it. Just look it up on YouTube. This wasn't during the confirmations. This wasn't during nominations. This was six months into the administration, and they refused to use the word Abraham Accords. The first time a senior elected official from Washington, D.C. used the word Abraham Accords was two days after the Afghanistan debacle. That was the first time. Now, coincidence or not, I'm sure that coincidences never happen in Washington, D.C., but this might have been the first time that it happened.

This administration needs to do three things, and they're in the interest of the United States. These are not – they should not be partisan. Iran is a terrible, malign influence on the entire region continuing to try to sit at the negotiating table with them especially i mean prior to the women and the the the uh protests that are going on in iran right now it was ridiculous and frankly on its face stupid to be offering them this deal but right now i think it borderlines on criminal there are we want our kids to see bravery turn on a tweet or a YouTube video of these brave 15, 16, 17-year-old women in Iran trying to make a better future for themselves. Every one of them has more courage than any of the Palestinians that I tried to get to go to Bahrain. They have more courage

than any of our kids on an American campus or on an Israeli campus. And the fact that we as the United States of America aren't doing more to help them, and at the same time we've got diplomats talking to their, quote, diplomats about engaging them in, it's criminal. This is real bravery. We talk about snowflakes on the college campus. Go be an Iranian 16-year-old girl for the day,

and you'll see what bravery looks like, and you'll see what microaggressions are. But don't you think the negotiations are effectively frozen now anyways? But by who? Well, I mean, by both parties. No, not by both. If they do this, this would be like us still talking to the Russians about – Oh, your point is that Iran is frozen.

Correct. Right. I'm saying we – call them and say, thank you. We tried with you. We now see your true colors. That's fine. Just admit we're wrong. President Obama just had a tremendous mea culpa. It was amazing. Yeah, saying he should have stood by the Iranian protesters in 2009. Although that got a lot of attention, and I think it's important what President Obama said, but he didn't say a lot of other things about U.S. policy in Iran that would have been consistent with his...

Concur. But right now, today, it's never too late to lead. And if the U.S. government, led by our president or our secretary of state, who I root for, I root for whoever our president and secretary of state are. I'm an American way before I'm a Republican. We're to stand up and say, Iran, you've shown us your true colors. Not only are we walking with the deal, but we're going to lead the world in sanctions against you until you give up your nuclear program and you give freedom to the women there. We'll squeeze them and we'll win. The second Iran realizes they're negotiating with America, not Republicans or Democrats, Iran will lose. That's it. It's as simple as that. So that's policy number one. Policy number two, embrace the Saudis. You might not like the Saudis.

You might not love the Saudis, You might not love the Saudis. But do you want 1.8 billion Muslims who will look towards Saudi five times a day to have a Saudi Arabia that looks more like Abu Dhabi and Dubai or looks more like Kabul, Afghanistan? Okay. It's in our hands. We will either support Saudi in the direction that they're headed or they'll go the other way. Which way do we want it to go? To me, it's binary from that perspective. And my goodness, every morning I wake up and pray for their continued success because their continued success is not just for the tens of millions of people in Saudi, but it's for 1.8 billion Muslims.

Let them have – I'm not an apologist for the UAE, but I've become in love with the UAE because it's a really – they're not perfect. But what a cool place where if you're born there today, you have a chance to be anybody you want to be, which is fantastic. And they've got a lot of reasons why they had head starts and everything else like that. But UAE has less natural resources than Libya and Venezuela and Kuwait. Which one would you rather live in? All right. Okay. And what's the third?

The third one is we have to be stronger with Israel. This is a no-brainer. This either distancing and whether that's with the Iran situation or whether there's a Bibi situation where we have to divorce personality from the policies, it is completely and totally in U.S. interest to stand with Israel. And anybody from any party who says that that is not in our interest, they are simply not representing America correctly. And we have to make sure that Israel knows that it doesn't have a relationship with a Republican president or a Democratic president, but has a relationship with America. And credit to members of Congress who have tried to make that happen. But as they've tried to make that happen, they have not condemned

and shut out and made irrelevant the marginal members of both parties, much more on the progressive left, who want to separate America from Israel. Those people who do that damage severely, not Israel, Israel will be fine. They damage America in a meaningful way. And because of that, it also damages the opportunity for peace in the region. If those progressives actually gave a damn about Palestinians, which I don't think that they do, but if they actually did, they would be supporting the Abraham Accords like nobody's business because the single greatest chance for Israeli Arabs to reach their top potential in this country and the Palestinians to come along as well is the success of the Abraham Accords. All right, Aryeh, we'll leave it there. The book is Let My

People Know, The Incredible Story of Middle East Peace and What Lies Ahead. Thanks for coming in. Great to catch up. I hope to see you here. When are you going next to the Gulf? In two weeks. And Morocco, include any of your listeners. Yeah, we're talking about the Gulf and the Gulf and the Gulf. You're right. Morocco deserves to be part of it. Enormous credit. Any of your listeners, here's the one thing that I try to leave almost all of these with is not only buy my book, which is fantastic, but less- Buy the man's book. Less important than that. And that's really cool for me to be sitting here with you because you wrote the book literally on what has opened up Israel to the entire region. You are

a major reason why the Abraham Accords happened. I don't say that, A, to anybody, and B, lightly. It's so important when people understand what Israel is, it becomes the prize and not the obligation. And that's a major difference. But all of your listeners who care about the Abraham Accords, which I think is the most exciting thing to happen in foreign policy in my lifetime, go to the countries that signed the accords. They need a peace dividend. Every seat needs to be filled from Israel to Morocco and from the U.S. to Morocco. And when you stay in a hotel, tell them that you're here because of the Abraham Accords. When you go out to dinner, you're there because of the Abraham Accords. The message will get back to leadership and do it in Morocco and do it in UAE and do it in Bahrain. Don't go to Sudan yet.

You can go to Kosovo if you want. I'm sure it's lovely this time of year. But go to those places and then you become an ambassador of the Abraham Accords. The Abraham Accords become stronger and I promise you, in Saudi and Qatar and Oman and Pakistan, they're watching this happen. They're counting the Jews, they're counting the Israelis and they're saying, is there a peace dividend? If the answer is yes, they will all join. If the answer is no, it'll look like Egypt and Jordan. So there you go. Aryeh has just nominated all of you to be ambassadors, volunteer ambassadors for the Abraham Accords.

That's pretty good practical advice. No confirmation necessary. No confirmation. No background check. Also true. All right. All right. Hey, thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Dan. That's our show for today. To keep up with Aryeh Lightstone, you can follow him on Twitter at Lightstone A. And you should also order his book called Let My People Know, The Incredible Story of Middle East Peace and What Lies Ahead. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.