U.S. President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords showed there is “genuine respect” for the Jewish state across the region, Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin said on Tuesday.
Defrin opened his remarks to the JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem by telling attendees he wanted to share “something more personal: my perspective on where we are today and why, after everything we’ve witnessed, I am very optimistic.”
“Israel is a small country, living in a very difficult neighborhood,” he said. “As Israelis, we were raised on one simple idea: we’ll defend ourselves, by ourselves—this was in our DNA, and still is.”
However, after the Abraham Accords were signed in 2020, “something remarkable happened,” Defrin continued, praising Trump’s leadership.
“Wherever I traveled across the Middle East, to countries I never thought I [would] get to visit, I saw something that surprised me. I saw genuine respect for Israel,” he said. “I met military leaders in this region who wanted to work together, and together, we began building a new regional architecture.”
Jerusalem’s emerging partnerships in the Middle East are not just based on the common threat posed by Iran and its terrorist proxies, but also on “shared interests and shared opportunities,” he noted.
By May 2023, Jerusalem believed it was “closed than ever” to reaching a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, the military spokesman continued. “And then, October 7th happened. What began as a Hamas attack against Israel quickly expanded into regional war, involving Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran itself.”
Defrin noted that the Abraham Accords have survived war and peacetime.
Meanwhile, the seven-front war sparked by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre “has revealed to the world something significant: Iran’s ambitions do not stop at Israel’s borders,” according to him. “Its missiles, drones and proxies threaten the stability of the entire region and, increasingly, far beyond it.”
The past three years of war “have reminded us that our size has never defined our strength—our people have,” Defrin stressed, praising the soldiers of the IDF.
“I often get asked: ‘what is the strategy of the IDF’? But I have to tell you, we have learned through painful experiences that protecting our people cannot mean waiting for the next attack,” he said. “A ceasefire cannot mean returning to the reality of October 6th.”
Under its new defense strategy, the IDF acts proactively to thwart threats, he emphasized. “We remove threats before they become attacks and deny our enemies the abilities to rebuild.”
“IDF soldiers stand at the front as a buffer between the enemy and the people of Israel, and we will remain there until this threat is removed,” declared Defrin.
The spokesperson concluded his remarks by thanking attendees for “standing up for Israel, even when it was, and still is, not always easy.”
“After more than 30 years in uniform, I can say with complete confidence that Israel’s greatest strength is not its tanks, aircraft, intelligence or technology; its greatest strength is its people,” he concluded.
The 2026 JNS International Policy Summit, which started on Sunday and was preceded by a weekend VIP gathering and tours around Judea, comes one year after the inaugural JNS Summit held in Jerusalem.
The three-day conference included addresses and panels on U.S.-Israel relations, the war with Iran, Israel’s military, diplomatic and legal battles, the wave of global antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack, as well as relations with the Christian world.
