On Oct. 23, U.S. President Donald Trump announced from his office in the White House a normalization agreement between Israel and Sudan. It came five weeks after similar agreements were announced between Israel and two other Arab countries, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Tweeting about the agreement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated the reversal from the 1967 Arab League summit in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, where Arab leaders declared their infamous Three Noes: no to peace with Israel, no to recognition of Israel, and no to negotiations with Israel. “And today Khartoum says – yes to peace with Israel, yes to recognition of Israel and yes to normalization with Israel,” Netanyahu wrote, adding, “Delegations from Israel and Sudan will meet soon to discuss cooperation in many areas, including agriculture, trade and other areas important to our citizens.”
Critics point to the timing of the announcement around Trump’s reelection campaign and Sudan’s removal from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism as an apparent condition to make it happen. But largely absent from the public discussion of the normalization thus far is the future of around 6,200 Sudanese asylum-seekers in Israel who are worried that Israeli authorities will now aggressively try to deport them, as they did with South Sudanese refugees following South Sudan’s independence in 2011. Many Sudanese in Israel are convinced that they have become a scapegoat in domestic Israeli politics, as Netanyahu—who also faces a likely election while embroiled in multiple political scandals—has repeatedly promised his right-wing political base over the years to expel them.
