Blinken to hold meetings next week with UAE, Israeli foreign ministers

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is slated to hold meetings next week with foreign ministers from the United Arab Emirates and Israel, the State Department announced on Saturday.

The State Department said in a statement that Blinken would be meeting with both Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and the UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan next Wednesday. Bilateral meetings will be held between the United States and each country and then there will be a trilateral meeting with all three representatives. 

“They will discuss progress made since the signing of the Abraham Accords last year, future opportunities for collaboration, and bilateral issues including regional security and stability,” the State Department said.

The Trump administration helped broker a deal, known as the “Abraham Accords,” last year that normalized relations between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain. All three countries signed the agreement in September 2020. 

According to Reuters, Israel and Morocco established diplomatic ties in December 2020. Earlier this year, Sudan said that it would also formalize ties with Israel and sign the Abraham Accords.

The deal was praised by then-candidate Biden in August 2020, though he claimed that the Obama administration, during which he served as vice president, had helped make inroads toward the success of that deal.

“The coming together of Israel and Arab states builds on the efforts of multiple administrations to foster a broader Arab-Israeli opening, including the efforts of the Obama-Biden administration to build on the Arab Peace Initiative,” Biden said in a statement in August 2020.

During his confirmation hearing in January, Blinken said that he intended to continue to further support the Trump administration-brokered agreement. 

“No party has a monopoly on good ideas,” Blinken said at the time. “And I hope that working together, we can pull all the good ideas from both sides of the aisle to try to advance the security and well-being of the American people abroad. I welcome doing that.”