Expanding the Abraham Accords will go “hand in hand” with furthering energy cooperation in the Middle East, Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Eli Cohen said on the second day of the inaugural JNS International Policy Summit on Monday.
“Expanding the Abraham Accords, which I believe and hope will happen soon, will go hand in hand with expanding energy cooperation across the Middle East, helping bring a new era to our region,” he said.
“The United Arab Emirates decided to invest in our gas discoveries. I met the minister of economy of Azerbaijan and the leadership of SOCAR when they came to Israel a few weeks ago and also decided to invest in our energy,” continued Cohen, a Cabinet member on behalf of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party.
“Azerbaijan was the first Muslim Shia country to open an embassy in Israel,” Cohen noted. “So we definitely see the energy as a very important and a key factor.”
However, there will be “no stability and prosperity in the Middle East until we reach the head of the snake, Iran,” he warned, noting that the Jewish nation “is the only state which is a member in the U.N. where another country is calling for our destruction.”
Cohen said Jerusalem sees eye to eye with the Trump administration, adding that Washington “shares the simple understanding: Iran must not be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.”
The U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries in 2020, were in part propelled by the common threat posed by the Islamic Republic.
Netanyahu told the JNS International Policy Summit on Sunday that Israel will only agree to a nuclear deal with Iran that eliminates Tehran’s capacity to enrich uranium.
The only way to prevent Tehran from building a nuclear weapon is to dismantle “all the infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear program,” he said, adding, “That is the deal.”
Israel, the prime minister continued, “cannot live with anything short of that—anything short of that could bring you the opposite result, because Iran will say, all right, I won’t enrich, wait, run out the clock, wait for another president, do it again.”
This, Netanyahu said, would be “unacceptable.”