It’s Not a Peace Deal. It’s a Powder Keg.

By Kenneth M. Pollack

Foreign Policy: ... Because the United States was the most powerful force in favor of the status quo, so our withdrawal has emboldened those actors seeking to overturn the regional order. Iran and its allies are the most obvious and successful of these beneficiaries, but so too are various radical Sunni Islamist groups. Predictably, America’s detachment has terrified our allies, and that fear has pushed them to take actions they never otherwise would have—some good, some dangerous, some both at the same time, like Israel-UAE normalization.

For all its economic and military strength, Israel remains a small, beleaguered country, at least psychologically. Of course, Iran is trying to do everything it can to turn that perception of menace into a strategic reality: bolstering Hezbollah and Hamas; building a vast military infrastructure in Syria; reaching out to radical Palestinian groups in the West Bank and Jordan; mounting cyberattacks against Israeli infrastructure, and so on. Because of its small size, extreme casualty sensitivity, and historic ghosts, Israel’s inclination—and its strategic doctrine—is to strike hard and fast at potential threats before they can become existential. That is what it has been doing for years in Syria, waging a war of attrition with Iran and its allies to try to prevent Tehran from building a military base there to open a new front against Israel.

The UAE has pursued a similar approach to its security concerns over the past two decades, albeit without quite the capabilities or psychological scars of the Israelis. Along with Saudi Arabia, the UAE intervened with conventional land and air forces in Yemen, employed its air force and covert support in Libya and Syria, and led the blockade of Qatar by the other Gulf states. Yemen is a particularly important case to understand. There, the UAE and Saudi Arabia decided to intervene in 2015 to prevent a military victory by what they saw as an Iranian-allied Shi’a militia, the Houthis. However, they did so only after repeatedly asking the United States to do more to prevent the expansion of Iranian power in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq to no avail. Their leaders explicitly said that since the United States wasn’t going to act to limit the Iranian threat, they felt they had no choice but to do so themselves. Thus, the fear of growing Iranian power in the face of a retreating America pushed the Emiratis and Saudis to embark on a risky and bellicose course of action.

It is no accident that both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have begun nuclear programs in the past dozen years. These are both ostensibly for power generation and to save their oil supplies for export, not for producing weapons. Of course, so too was/is Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran claimed, and Saddam’s, and North Korea’s, and the list goes on. In private, Gulf leaders will say that they fear that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons and without the United States to protect them, they feel they may have no choice but be able to match Iran to deter it.

It gets worse when you recognize that none of these countries -- not even Israel -- has the same military or intelligence capabilities as the United States. We are usually better able to gauge the level of threat in the Middle East than our regional allies, the Iraq WMD fiasco notwithstanding. Other countries, starting with Iran, won’t pick fights with the United States the way that they will with one another. Iran is wary of Israel, but it may be less so in future as its own capabilities and those of its allies expand. Meanwhile, it has never shown any fear of the Arab states.

Thus, just as the 1907 Anglo-Russian convention closed out one of the great conflicts of the 19th century only to help enflame the great conflict of the 20th century, so the Israel-UAE agreement must be seen as part of the ending of a 20th -century conflict, but also as potentially the beginning of a new 21st -century conflict that may dominate the Middle East. In that Middle East, without an American hegemon to keep a lid on aggression, status quo powers as diverse in other ways as Israel and the UAE have no choice but to find common cause. To band together as best they can to fight their common enemy, as the British and Russians did in 1907. All of this is a recipe for greater tensions, fear, conflict, and potentially outright war.

We may be putting to bed one great regional conflict, only to watch another arise. And that should temper our enthusiasm for the latest turn of events, no matter how positive it may seem in the short term >>>

Another Putin Critic Apparently Poisoned

Editorial

The New York Times: Aleksei Navalny — reportedly still in a coma — has finally been allowed to fly to Germany for treatment, so at least the mystery of what caused Russia’s most prominent opposition figure to collapse in terrible agony on a flight over Siberia may be resolved. But if it does turn out to be poison, to which all signs point, it will still not explain who attacked him or why.

That may never be known. Just as it remains unknown who was behind the killings of the politician Boris Nemtsov, the journalists Anna Politkovskaya, Vladislav Listyev and Yuri Shchekochikhin, the human-rights activist Natalia Estemirova or the American journalist Paul Klebnikov, to name a few.

Poisons of various kinds have been deployed in political hits — a fatal dose of polonium 210 against Alexander Litvinenko and a drug called Novichok against Sergei Skripal, both former Russian intelligence officers attacked in England; dioxin against the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko; unknown toxins against Vladimir Kara Murza, a Russian journalist who lobbied in the West for sanctions against Kremlin operatives; and Pyotr Verzilov, unofficial spokesman for the band Pussy Riot.

In none of these cases have the person or persons who ordered the attack been identified, even when hit men have been arrested and put on trial. But when so many prominent Russian gadflies fall prey to unexplained and often fatal attacks, there isn’t much benefit of the doubt left to give.

Almost immediately after Mr. Navalny was taken ill, the almost universal presumption on Russian social media and in Western news reports was that Russia’s best known opposition figure — really its only active opposition figure — was the target of a premeditated attack. A hit on so prominent a figure, with the inevitable eruption of global and domestic fury, would presumably require sanction from the highest echelons of power.

Until now, despite Mr. Navalny’s years of tireless and very public activism and innumerable arrests and attacks, the Kremlin has stopped short of putting him away for good, usually limiting his stints in detention to a month or less. The most brutal action against him was a toxic dye thrown into his face by Kremlin loyalists three years ago, for which he was treated in Europe. By contrast, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, was imprisoned for a decade and driven into exile; two members of Pussy Riot spent 21 months in prison.

The widespread presumption had been that President Vladimir Putin is prepared to tolerate an opponent for appearances sake, a kind of permanent and predictable opposition to a permanent ruler. So far, Mr. Putin’s spokesman has expressed only detached concern about Mr. Navalny, wishing him a “speedy recovery” and insisting that it was up to the doctors in Omsk to determine whether he could be flown for treatment abroad. That is pathetically transparent: Russian social media has been full of plainclothes officers swarming through Hospital No. 1 in Omsk, and the Germans who flew in on an evacuation flight were kept away from the public. Mr. Putin’s supporters have been suggesting that Mr. Navalny was dead drunk, or floating the oft-used canard that he was attacked by someone interested in creating a crisis for Mr. Putin.

But Mr. Navalny’s exposés of corruption among the “crooks and robbers” at the top, including a blistering YouTube documentary on the lavish properties, yachts and Tuscan vineyards owned by former prime minister and former president Dmitri Medvedev, earned him powerful enemies. Of late, he had been actively cheering on the ongoing protests in the city of Khabarovsk, and the anti-government demonstrations in Belarus — rebellions that surely triggered Mr. Putin’s fear of a Ukraine-like popular uprising in Russia.

Was Mr. Navalny’s support of those efforts enough to provoke a murderous attack and risk the global opprobrium? Mr. Putin has certainly shown no qualms about striking at foes at home and abroad. But it is equally possible that some other shadowy figure in the Russian kleptocracy decided to silence him. Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman of the Chechen Republic within Russia, for one, is believed to be responsible for several assassinations, most likely without approval from the Kremlin.

What is certain is that Mr. Putin, through his disdain for human rights and the rule of law, has set the tone for his nation, and has made it dangerous for anyone who dares rise up against corruption, lawlessness or injustice. Given the murky politics of the Kremlin, it may indeed be that Mr. Putin and his lieutenants did not order the hit on Mr. Navalny, who stands to become a bigger problem as a martyr than he was as a gadfly. But, as the Russian expression goes, “You cooked the kasha, you eat it.”

It is too early to know whether Mr. Navalny will survive or recover, and if so what permanent damage he may have suffered. Flying him to a clinic in Berlin gives him his best chance, and the sooner he reaches it the better. It is also the best chance for determining whether Mr. Navalny was poisoned, and with what. That, in turn, would make it possible to determine by whom, and to do something about it. Under the Global Magnitsky Act, named for a Russian accountant who died in detention after exposing large-scale theft by Russian officials, the United States president can impose visa bans and targeted sanctions on anyone responsible for human rights violations or massive corruption.

Russia has seen many instances of justice deferred. Let us hope that the investigation into Mr. Navalny’s case is quick and thorough, and that the president of the United States has the fortitude to punish those responsible.

Fox Business host blames ‘deep state’ conspiracy theory for Bannon’s arrest

The Guardian: Fox Business host Lou Dobbs has blamed the “deep state” conspiracy theory for the arrest of Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign manager who on Thursday pleaded not guilty to a charge of skimming donations from a fundraising campaign for a border wall with Mexico.

Bannon himself is a key propagator of the theory that unknown government operatives are working against the Trump administration – but has also said the idea is “for nut cases” and should not be taken seriously.

Addressing the story on his show on Thursday night, Dobbs, one of Donald Trump’s favorite Fox hosts, said Bannon “was arrested this morning, not by the FBI or US Marshals but by inspectors of the US Postal Service while Bannon was cruising aboard a mega yacht, owned by a Chinese billionaire”.

“Yes, you heard that correctly – an elite police unit of the Postal Service. They’re called the US Postal Inspection Service and they had authority to arrest Bannon and they did so … Somehow, the deep state launched agents of the US Postal Service to arrest Mr Bannon.”

The “deep state” is supposedly a conglomeration of bureaucrats and law enforcement agents which exists to thwart Trump’s agenda. Bannon enthusiastically propagated the theory when he was Trump’s campaign manager in the 2016 election and then a senior adviser in the White House.

However, since leaving Trump’s employ he has repeatedly cast doubt on the theory.

In Deep State: Trump, the FBI and the Rule of Law by James B Stewart, published last October, Bannon said the “deep state conspiracy theory is for nut cases”, because “America isn’t Turkey or Egypt”.

There is a formidable government bureaucracy in the US, he told Stewart, but “there’s nothing ‘deep’ about it. It’s right in your face.”

Bannon also described to the journalist Michael Wolff, for his book Siege: Trump Under Fire, advice he gave to a ghostwriter working on Trump’s Enemies: How the Deep State is Undermining the Presidency, a book by Trump aides Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie.

As quoted by Wolff, Bannon said: “You do realise that none of this is true.”

What If Donald Trump Is What America Needed?

The Bulwark: In 2016, Americans were asked to pick their poison.

On the one hand a highly competent, highly qualified mainstream pro-Wall Street pro-corporate candidate who would in most regards hold the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama trajectory—while entirely missing the desperation working Americans were feeling.

On the other hand a corrupt businessman calling bullshit on the entire system, willing to burn everything down to Make America Great Again—meaning give working people back the dignity (and manufacturing jobs) that had been stolen from them by the evil cabal of globalist elites. The fact that he was lying was entirely beside the point for his supporters.

And many Americans were willing to live with his exploiting of resentments and divisions to get anything that wasn’t business as usual.

What was business as usual?

    - Real wages for American workers were exactly the same as they had been in 1980. Upward mobility was a distant memory for most.
    - 49 million Americans experienced food insecurity daily.
    - There were 1.68 million African-American men under state and federal criminal justice supervision, and they were receiving sentences 19 percent longer than white male convicted of the same charges.
    - The purchasing power of the minimum wage had been falling since 1968.
    - 40 percent of Americans could not handle a $400 emergency.
    - 71 percent of young Americans would be unfit to serve in the military if they enlisted because they’d either fail the physical or be unable to read at a sixth-grade level.
    - Our students ranked 26th out of the 34 wealthiest countries in math, despite the fact that we spent the 5th most on education.
    - The prevalence of lobbyists in Washington meant that the percentage of Americans who supported a law had 0 percent bearing on whether that law would pass. Citizens’ impact on public policy was statistically non-significant.
    - Lawmakers in Washington spent 70 percent of their time raising money for reelection. In some Senate races candidates had to raise $45,000 a day, 365 days a year, for 6 years in order to have a shot at winning.
    - America had the most expensive—and infuriating—health care system in the world.

Not good >>>

US Postal Service row: What is it about?

BBC: Slower mail delivery times in the US have raised concerns about how one of the oldest and most trusted institutions in the US - the Postal Service - can handle an unprecedented influx of mail-in ballots in November's election.

This year fewer voters are expected to vote in-person amid the coronavirus pandemic, in which the US has seen the highest number of deaths and infections in the world.

That drop-off is expected to lead to an unprecedented influx of voters submitting their ballot by mail.

It's up to states to determine how they arrange postal voting and there are mounting fears that some are not ready.

What are Democrats' concerns?

A political appointee recently hired by President Donald Trump to run the US Postal Service (USPS) has been accused by top Democrats of implementing changes to how mail is processed in a deliberate effort to "sabotage the election".

Republicans and Mr Trump counter that the new measures are needed to address the agency's multi-million dollar budget shortfall. Mr Trump has said the price tag for emergency funds requested by Congress to shore up mail-in voting is too expensive and will lead to voter fraud.

Last week, he told Fox News he was blocking $25bn in the latest draft coronavirus relief bill in order to prevent the expansion of voting by mail.

Meanwhile, delivery times on everything from postcards to medicines have already slowed and Congress has recalled lawmakers to Washington to address the growing crisis.

Is there evidence of an intentional slowdown?

In May, Republican megadonor Louis DeJoy was tapped by the White House to be the first postmaster general in more than 20 years to not come from within the agency's own ranks.

Seeking to address the $160bn (£122bn) budget shortfall at the USPS, in July Mr Dejoy implemented several new measures which have come under scrutiny.

US media report that more than 600 mail sorting machines are being decommissioned head of the presidential election this November.

This would represent around 10% of the service's machines, but the Postal Service has said it "routinely moves equipment around its network as necessary to match changing mail and package volumes".

The amount of mail has been down so far this year, but there are concerns the reduction in machines - which process millions of pieces of mail per hour - could limit the handling capacity of postal ballots in the build-up to the election.

Postal unions have confirmed some machines have already been removed, but President Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows says no more will be extracted from service ahead of the election.

The option of overtime for employees is also being restricted, and additional trips to ensure mail is delivered on time have been axed.

The Postal Service says this is to save costs and improve efficiency, but employees say the move has led to delays >>>

The end of democracy as we know it? 

The Guardian: As we try to face the future, we are usually fighting the last war, not the one that’s coming next. One of the most striking points the political philosopher David Runciman made in his seminal book How Democracy Ends was that democracies don’t fail backwards: they fail forward. That’s why those who see in the current difficulties of liberal democracies the stirrings of past monsters – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, to name just three – are always looking in the wrong place. And if that’s true, the key question for us at this moment in history is: how might our current system fail? What will bring it down?

The answer, it turns out, has been hiding in plain sight for years. It has three components. The first is the massive concentration of corporate power and private wealth that’s been under way since the 1970s, together with a corresponding increase in inequality, social exclusion and polarisation in most western societies; the second is the astonishing penetration of “dark money” into democratic politics; and the third is the revolutionary transformation of the information ecosystem in which democratic politics is conducted – a transformation that has rendered the laws that supposedly regulated elections entirely irrelevant to modern conditions.

These threats to democracy have long been visible to anyone disposed to look for them. For example, Lawrence Lessig’s Republic, Lost and Jane Mayer’s Dark Money explained how a clique of billionaires has shaped and perverted American politics. And in the UK, Martin Moore’s landmark study Democracy Hacked showed how, in the space of just one election cycle, authoritarian governments, wealthy elites and fringe hackers figured out how to game elections, bypass democratic processes and turn social networks into battlefields.

All of this is by way of sketching the background to Peter Geoghegan’s fine book. It’s a compulsively readable, carefully researched account of how a malignant combination of rightwing ideology, secretive money (much of it from the US) and weaponisation of social media have shaped contemporary British (and to a limited extent, European) politics. And it has been able to do this in what has turned out to be a regulatory vacuum – with laws, penalties and overseeing authorities that are no longer fit for purpose.

His account is structured both chronologically and thematically. He starts with the Brexit referendum and the various kinds of unsavoury practices that took place during that doomed plebiscite – from the various illegalities of Vote Leave, through Arron Banks’s lavish expenditure to the astonishing tale of the dark money funnelled through the Ulster DUP and a loophole in Northern Ireland’s electoral law. One of the most depressing parts of this narrative is the bland indifference of most mainstream UK media to these scandalous events. If it had not been for the openDemocracy website (for which Geoghegan works), much of this would never have seen the light of day.

The middle section of the book explores how dark money has amplified the growing influence of the American right on British politics. This is a story of ideology and finance – of how the long-term Hayekian, neoliberal project has played out on these shores. It’s a great case study in how ruling elites can be infected with policy ideas and programmes via those “second-hand traders in ideas” of whom Hayek spoke so eloquently: academics, thinktanks and media commentators. In that context, Geoghegan’s account of the genesis and growth of the European Research Group – the party within a party that did for Theresa May – is absolutely riveting. And again it leaves one wondering why there was so little media exploration of the origins and financing of that particular little cabal.

The final part of the book deals with the transformation of our information ecosystem: the ways in which the automated targeted-advertising machines of social media platforms have been weaponised by rightwing actors to deliver precisely calibrated messages to voters, in ways that are completely opaque to the general public, as well as to regulators.

Remainers will probably read Geoghegan’s account of this manoeuvring by Brexiters as further evidence that the Brexit vote was invalid. This seems to me implausible or at any rate undecidable. Geoghegan agrees. “Pro-Leave campaigns broke the law,” he writes, “but we cannot say with any certainty that the result would have been different if they had not. Instead, the referendum and its aftermath have revealed something far more fundamental and systemic. Namely, a broken political system that is ripe for exploitation again. And again. And again.”

And therein lies the significance of this remarkable book. The integrity and trustworthiness of elections is a fundamental requirement for a functioning democracy. The combination of unaccountable, unreported dark money and its use to create targeted (and contradictory) political messages for individuals and groups means that we have no way of knowing how free and fair our elections have become. Many of the abuses exposed by Geoghegan and other researchers are fixable with new laws and better-resourced regulators. The existential threat to liberal democracy comes from the fact that those who have successfully exploited some inadequacies of the current regulatory system – who include Boris Johnson and his current wingman, Cummings – have absolutely no incentive to fix the system from which they have benefited. And they won’t. Which could be how our particular version of democracy ends.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan is published by Head of Zeus (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15

While Israel celebrates a new peace accord, Palestinians once again lose 

By Jonathan Freedland

The Guardian: Who could be against an announcement of peace between two nations formally at war? Who could possibly object to Israel calling a halt to a move that would have entrenched yet deeper the loss of territory Palestinians need for a state of their own? We got the answer on Thursday, when Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and the de-facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan – MBZ to his friends – announced what Trump called a “historical peace agreement” between Israel and the Gulf state. In return for “full normalisation” of relations, Israel said it would suspend its planned annexation of large chunks of the West Bank.

Sounds great, right? There was immediate praise from the United Nations, from Britain and France, from Egypt, from Trump’s November opponent, Joe Biden, and from veterans of the once-real “peace process”. The talk now is of a signing ceremony at the White House within weeks, with more Gulf states – Bahrain and Oman are the obvious candidates – set to follow the UAE’s lead in the coming days.

There’s no denying that we all need a ray of light in the gloom of 2020, but this one should be approached with caution. A quick look at the winners and losers might tell you why.

An obvious beneficiary is Trump, who now has a trophy to hold aloft in the run-up to election day. To be sure, not many Americans are about to switch their vote because of a diplomatic shift in the faraway Gulf. But it does allow Trump to claim a foreign policy achievement, albeit one dwarfed by his multiple foreign policy failures, whether getting suckered by North Korea or undermining the Iran nuclear deal. He’s always coveted the Nobel peace prize that Barack Obama bagged before he’d served a full year in office, so naturally Trump sent out his national security adviser to declare that the president “should be a frontrunner for the Nobel Peace Prize”.

The bigger winner is Netanyahu, who also has an election on his mind. He’s thinking of triggering yet another one – it would be Israel’s fourth in just over 18 months – and the UAE’s move gives him a valuable advantage. On trial for corruption, blamed for botching Israel’s initially effective handling of coronavirus and for a battered economy, his home besieged by furious protesters, Netanyahu can now divert attention away from all that and focus on the terrain he has made his own: “national security”. He can pose as the statesman poised to sign the first Israeli accord with an Arab state since the handshake with Jordan back in 1994, the global player who towers over his rivals. He was careful to brief that his former opponent and coalition partner, Benny Gantz, did not even know about the UAE deal until it was on the news.

The gains for Netanyahu are not merely electoral. By agreeing to give up annexation – which plenty of observers reckoned was always an empty threat in any case – he has been generously rewarded, even though the West Bank remains occupied and Palestinians are still denied basic rights. Netanyahu is the man who picks your pocket, then expects a prize for agreeing not to hit you over the head. The UAE has handed him just such a prize. As one Middle East hand jokes: “Next time he should threaten to annex Jordan – that way he’ll get a peace treaty with Saudi Arabia.”

Don’t joke: the UAE could well be flying a trial balloon for the Saudis, as Riyadh monitors global reaction to this step. For now, the Emiratis are hailing a diplomatic win, hoping to reap the prestige that comes with being “the first mover”, as one UAE official put it to me. They’ve also hedged their US bets for November: either they’ve boosted Trump, and he’ll owe them, or they’ve made a play that’s likely to win favour with Team Biden and the peace-process stalwarts who surround him. “MBZ has just taken out his insurance policy,” says one longtime observer.

For MBZ, an alliance with Israel makes good sense. There’s the obvious strategic logic that has long made Sunni Gulf states willing to cosy up to Israel: namely, their shared fear and loathing of Shia Iran. It’s that which has fuelled discreet cooperation with Israel, especially in intelligence matters, for several years. In the period when Iran was loudly pursuing its nuclear ambitions, the Gulf states grew to see their enemy’s enemy – Israel – as a potential friend.

But there’s a narrower calculation too. The end of annexation is a relief to authoritarian rulers such as MBZ: it might have sparked a Palestinian movement for equal rights, one whose message could have spread across the region, perhaps – who knows – even catching fire with MBZ’s own subjects. Best for him if it’s snuffed out.

Which brings us to the people conspicuously missing from that list of winners: the Palestinians. Throughout their history they have seen their fate determined by others, thanks to decisions taken without their knowledge, let alone consent. And now it’s happened again.

For many decades, the Arab world insisted that there could be no normalisation, no peace, with Israel without some measure of justice for the Palestinians. When Egypt and Israel reached agreement in 1978 not much was promised to the Palestinians, but there was something; the accord with Jordan in 1994 went further, including substantial commitments predicated on Palestinians’ direct involvement. But the UAE has abandoned the Palestinians entirely.

With this deal, it has signalled that Israel can remain an occupier, closing off the possibility of Palestinian self-determination, and still win regional acceptance. The result is that the occupation itself has been normalised, given an Arab seal of approval. Small wonder that the veteran Palestinian campaigner Hanan Ashrawi accused MBZ of “selling out” her people, while the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called the crown prince’s agreement with Israel a “betrayal of the Palestinian cause”. Abbas called for an emergency meeting of Palestinian leaders and withdrew his ambassador from the UAE, but both moves served chiefly to show how little he can do.

I understand why Israelis will delight in this opening, with its promise of embassies in each capital, direct flights between them and all that seems to symbolise: acceptance in the Middle East was a goal of Israel’s founding generation. But real acceptance requires more than a dictator’s signature on a treaty. It means making peace with the peoples of the region rather than with the tyrants who rule them – and making peace with one people in particular, the people fated to share the same land. That prize will be much harder to achieve, but it is the one that matters.

Palestinians say UAE deal hinders quest for Mideast peace

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s agreement to establish diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates marks a watershed moment in its relations with Arab countries, but the Palestinians say it puts a just resolution of the Middle East conflict even farther out of reach.

The UAE presented its decision to upgrade longstanding ties to Israel as a way of encouraging peace efforts by taking Israel’s planned annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank off the table, something Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu swiftly rebuffed by insisting the pause was “temporary.”

From the Palestinian perspective, the UAE not only failed to stop annexation, which would dash any remaining hopes of establishing a viable, independent state. It also undermined an Arab consensus that recognition of Israel only come in return for concessions in peace talks — a rare source of leverage for the Palestinians.

“I never expected this poison dagger to come from an Arab country,” Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official and veteran negotiator said Friday. “You are rewarding aggression. ... You have destroyed, with this move, any possibility of peace between Palestinians and Israelis.”

President Donald Trump has presented the U.S.-brokered agreement as a major diplomatic achievement and said he expects more Arab and Muslim countries to follow suit. Israel has quietly cultivated ties with the UAE and other Gulf countries for several years as they have confronted a shared enemy in Iran.

In Israel, the agreement has renewed long-standing hopes for normal relations with its Arab neighbors. Netanyahu has long insisted, contrary to generations of failed peace negotiators, that Israel can enjoy such ties without resolving its conflict with the Palestinians. For now, he seems to have been proven right.

“It’s hard to claim right now that the 53-year-old occupation is ‘unsustainable’ when Netanyahu has just proved that not only is it sustainable, but Israel can improve its ties with the Arab world, openly, with the occupation still going,” wrote Anshel Pfeffer, a columnist for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.

But the Middle East conflict was never between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, which have fought no wars and share no borders. And the nature of the agreement will likely force the Palestinians to harden their stance and redouble their efforts to isolate Israel.

The Palestinian Authority issued a scathing statement in response to the move, calling it a “betrayal of Jerusalem, Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Palestinian cause,” language clearly aimed at inflaming Arab and Muslim sentiment worldwide.

What we know -- and don't know -- about Russia's 'Sputnik V' vaccine

CNN: Russia raised eyebrows on Tuesday when it announced the world's first approved coronavirus vaccine for public use.

President Vladimir Putin says his own daughter has already received it, but testing is yet to be completed and experts are skeptical about how quickly the vaccine has been registered.

While details about the research behind the vaccine are limited, here's what we know so far.

What do we know about the Russian vaccine?

The vaccine was developed by the Moscow-based Gamaleya Institute, using funding from the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF). The vaccine is named Sputnik V -- a reference to the 1957 Soviet Union satellite.

Scientists conducted months of human trials but are yet to publish data and did not begin the crucial Phase 3 stage, which usually precedes approval, before the announcement on Tuesday.

On Wednesday it was announced that a Phase 3 trial involving more than 2,000 people in Russia and several Middle Eastern and Latin American countries had begun. Typically this stage of trial involves testing on tens of thousands of people.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said Tuesday that the number of people the vaccine had been tested on so far was the equivalent of a Phase 1 trial, which typically involves a small group and studies the safety of the vaccine.

Is the Russian vaccine safe?

The short answer is that we don't know. Russia has released no scientific data on its vaccine testing and CNN is unable to verify claims about its safety or effectiveness. But Russia says the vaccine has passed through Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials which were completed on August 1.

A Phase 1 study typically focuses on whether a vaccine is safe and whether it elicits an immune response in a small number of people.

"We do not have any information whatsoever on whether this is safe," Keith Neal, Emeritus Professor of the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases, University of Nottingham, told CNN.

Russia claims that volunteers in the Phase 1 and 2 trials felt well after taking the vaccine, and exhibited no unforeseen or unwanted side effects.

Neal said that researchers were unlikely to have detected any rare side effects linked to the Gamaleya vaccine.

"You won't know about side effects without [widespread] testing, if they're rare. That's the point of a Phase 3 study," he said.

"I wouldn't take it, certainly not outside of a clinical trial right now," Gottlieb told CNN Tuesday.

Is the vaccine effective?

Without data and completed Phase 3 trials, Russia has not proven to the world Sputnik V works.

"I would think that it at least produces antibodies. What we don't know is if it protects people against infection," Neal told CNN.

Russia has said that its vaccine is an adenoviral vector one. Adenoviruses cause the common cold, but in Covid-19 vaccines they're weakened and modified to deliver genetic material that codes for a protein from the novel coronavirus.

The body then produces that protein and may produce an immune response against it but the method can cause problems.

Sputnik V's makers say the vaccine induced a "strong antibody and cellular immune response," in trial volunteers, according to the official website for the vaccine.

"Not a single participant of the current clinical trials got infected with Covid-19 after being administered with the vaccine," the statement adds.

"It's not clear how efficacious the Russian vaccine is going to be and whether or not people have some prior immunity to the adenovirus that they're using to deliver the coronavirus gene sequence," Gottlieb told CNN Tuesday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, expressed similar concerns.

"I hope that the Russians have actually, definitively proven that the vaccine is safe and effective. I seriously doubt that they've done that," Fauci told Deborah Roberts of ABC News for a National Geographic event to broadcast Thursday. A portion of the interview was posted by National Geographic on Tuesday >>>