Trump's Middle East deal is good. But still, a long way to go towards peace

Past Nobel laureates who have been honored for advancing peace in the Middle East - Yasir Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Anwar el-Sadat, Menachem Begin - have not been saints

The normalization of relations between Israel and two Arab states, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, is, on the face of it, a good and beneficial development. The Trump administration deserves credit for brokering it. It has long been an anomaly in Middle Eastern affairs that Arab nations felt compelled to publicly treat Israel as a pariah in their midst, while many of them — including the U.A.E. and Bahrain — pursued all sorts of economic and security links with Israel.

Yet the notion, put forward by one conservative Norwegian lawmaker, that President Trump or the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,