President Donald Trump has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, just weeks after helping to broker peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
He was nominated by Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian Parliament, who praised Trump for his efforts towards resolving conflicts worldwide.
‘For his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,’ Tybring-Gjedde said to Fox News.
Tybring-Gjedde, who is a four-term member of Parliament who also serves as chairman of the Norwegian delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, said the Trump administration played a key role in the establishment of relations between The UAE and Israel.
The deal was first announced by the President on August 13, with Trump saying that the United Arab Emirates and Israel have agreed to establish full diplomatic ties as part of a deal to halt the Israeli annexation of occupied land sought by the Palestinians for their future state.
The historic deal delivered a key foreign policy victory to Trump as he seeks reelection, and reflected a changing Middle East in which shared concerns about archenemy Iran have largely overtaken traditional Arab support for the Palestinians.
Officials said on Tuesday that a signing ceremony would be hosted at the White House on September 15, with senior delegations from the two countries in attendance, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
President Donald Trump (pictured holding a campaign rally in Winston-Salem yesterday) has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, just weeks after helping to broker peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates
In his nomination letter, Tybring-Gjedde wrote: ‘As it is expected other Middle Eastern countries will follow in the footsteps of the UAE, this agreement could be a game changer that will turn the Middle East into a region of cooperation and prosperity.’
He also cited the president’s ‘key role in facilitating contact between conflicting parties and … creating new dynamics in other protracted conflicts, such as the Kashmir border dispute between India and Pakistan, and the conflict between North and South Korea, as well as dealing with the nuclear capabilities of North Korea.’
Tybring-Gjedde also praised Trump for withdrawing large numbers of U.S. troops from the Middle East.
‘Indeed, Trump has broken a 39-year-old streak of American Presidents either starting a war or bringing the United States into an international armed conflict. The last president to avoid doing so was Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter,’ he wrote.
UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Mohammed Gargash (C), US President’s senior adviser Jared Kushner (L) and Israeli National Security Advisor Meir Ben-Shabbat (R) pictured during a meeting in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 31 August 2020
The Norwegian MP said that the President had met the three conditions needed to win the peace prize.
‘The first one is fellowship among nations and he has done that through negotiations,’ he said.
‘Reduction of standing armies – he has reduced the number of troops in the Middle East and the third criteria is promotion of peace congresses,’ he said, adding that Trump had made ‘tremendous efforts’ towards brokering peace.
Four U.S. presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize, which is determined by the five-person Nobel Committee, which is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament.
Barack Obama won in 2009, Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, President Woodrow Wilson in 1920 and President Jimmy Carter in 2002. The 2021 winner will not be announced until October next year.
Norwegian Member of Parliament, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, said in his nomination letter ‘As it is expected other Middle Eastern countries will follow in the footsteps of the UAE, this agreement could be a game changer that will turn the Middle East into a region of cooperation and prosperity’
Like Trump, Tybring-Gjedde is fiercely against immigration, and once compared the hijab to outfits worn by the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
In 2006, he also nominated Islam-critical filmmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali for the Nobel Peace Prize. Hirsi Ali did not win the prize.
Along with another Norwegian official, Tybring-Gjedde nominated Trump for the prize in 2018 after the president’s Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un. Japan’s prime minister Shinzō Abe reportedly did the same, but Trump failed to win.
Speaking to Fox News, the Norwegian – who is a member of the country’s conservative-leaning populist ‘Progress Party’ – said he was not nominating Trump to win favour with the president.
‘I’m not a big Trump supporter,’ he insisted. ‘The committee should look at the facts and judge him on the facts – not on the way he behaves sometimes.
‘The people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump. For example, Barack Obama did nothing.’
The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded president Obama for his ‘extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people’.
Pictured: US President Barack Obama speaks on a screen at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert at Oslo Spektrum on December 11, 2009 in Oslo, Norway
The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited Obama’s promotion of nuclear nonproliferation and a ‘new climate’ in international relations, pointing to his efforts in reaching out to the Muslim world, but drew mixed reactions in the U.S.
He was awarded the prize just 263 days after taking office, with Lech Walesa, Poland’s former president and a 1983 Nobel laureate saying: ‘Too fast. For the time being Obama’s just making proposals. But sometimes the Nobel Committee awards the prize to encourage responsible action.’
Even Obama sounded surprised in his comments following the away, saying: ‘To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize, men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.’
How Trump helped bring Israel and the UAE together
Donald Trump will host a signing ceremony for the Israel-UAE peace deal at the White House on September 15, officials said on Tuesday.
Sources citing senior U.S. officials said delegations from both countries would likely be led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Emirati Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of UAE’s crown prince.
U.S. officials, who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the ceremony would either be on the South Lawn, the Rose Garden or inside depending on weather.
Late Tuesday, Netanyahu tweeted he “was proud to leave for Washington next week at the invitation of President Trump and to participate in the historic ceremony at the White House” to sign the deal with the UAE.
The deal was first announced by the President on August 13, with Trump saying that the United Arab Emirates and Israel have agreed to establish full diplomatic ties as part of a deal to halt the Israeli annexation of occupied land sought by the Palestinians for their future state.
The historic deal delivered a key foreign policy victory to Trump as he seeks reelection, and reflected a changing Middle East in which shared concerns about archenemy Iran have largely overtaken traditional Arab support for the Palestinians.
Officials said the deal followed 18 months of talks between the nations, and the normalisation deal is the first such accommodation between an Arab country and Israel in more than 20 years and was catalysed largely by shared fears of Iran.
Flight 971 of Israel’s national carrier El Al took off for Abu Dhabi after the UAE signed a pact to officially establish relations with the Jewish state
The announcement makes the UAE only the third Arab nation to have active diplomatic ties to Israel, after Egypt and Jordan.
Following the deal, the first direct commercial flight flew from Tel Aviv to the UAE, telephone links were established, as were commitments to cooperate in numerous areas.
The UAE also announced the end of its boycott of Israel, which allows trade and commerce between the oil-rich Emirates and Israel, home to a thriving diamond trade, pharmaceutical companies and tech start-ups.
But Palestinians were dismayed by the UAE’s move, worried that it would weaken a long-standing pan-Arab position that called for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory – and acceptance of Palestinian statehood – in return for normal relations with Arab countries.
Questions immediately arose about the solidity of the agreement after Israeli officials said the agreement to halt annexation was only ‘temporary’ and was done at the request of the Trump administration.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he is ‘committed to annexing parts of the West Bank’ but agreed to ‘temporarily suspend’ those plans in order to sign the deal with the UAE.
The Trump administration admitted late Thursday the issue was not permanently off the table.
‘It’s off the table now, but it’s not off the table permanently,’ said David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel.
The UAE relied on white-collar Palestinians in creating its nation. Over time, it maintained its stance that Israel allow the creation of a Palestinian state on land it seized in the 1967 war.
But in recent years, ties between Gulf Arab nations and Israel have quietly grown, in part over their shared enmity of Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Prince Mohammed also shares Israel´s distrust of Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the militant group Hamas that holds the Gaza Strip.
It remains unclear what prompted Israel and the UAE to make the announcement now. In June, the United Arab Emirates´ ambassador to the U.S. warned in an Israeli newspaper op-ed that Israel’s planned annexing the Jordan Valley and other parts of the occupied West Bank would ‘upend’ Israel´s efforts to improve ties with Arab nations.
