Most Israelis had never seen the two elegant gents standing alongside their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on the balcony overlooking the White House lawn on Sept. 15.
The foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, signed their countries’ historic normalization agreements with Israel’s prime minister in the surprising mid-August breakthrough with the Gulf states. Even the senior members of Israel’s ministerial security cabinet were not in on the secret of the accelerated peace process and its outcome, and the players involved on the Arab side.