As they headed on Dec. 22 to Rabat for the official signing of the Israel-Morocco normalization agreement, talk among the Israeli and American passengers on the first ever direct commercial flight from Tel Aviv to the Moroccan capital was about “the fifth state.” The agreement between Israel and Morocco is the fourth target in the peace and normalization blitz launched earlier this year by President Donald Trump. Trump’s team, led by his top adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, the director of Israel’s National Security Council, Meir Ben-Shabbat, and his team and Foreign Ministry Director General Alon Ushpiz dedicated most of the 5½-half hour flight to ongoing efforts to rope a fifth Islamic state into the normalization campaign before Trump leaves office. They may not make it, but at least they will have tried. “The less we talk about a fifth state, the better the chances of it happening,” Ushpiz told Al-Monitor.
For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Morocco is the jewel in the crown. With all due respect to the Gulf principalities and the recent agreements they have forged with Israel, hundreds of thousands of Israelis of Moroccan ancestry make up an enormous electoral pool. Netanyahu believes that many of them are part of his political base.
