President Trump announces the Israel-UAE agreement with (from left) senior adviser Jared Kushner, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien, Aug. 13, 2020. (Photo/JTA-Brendan Smialowski-AFP via Getty Images)
President Trump announces the Israel-UAE agreement with (from left) senior adviser Jared Kushner, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien, Aug. 13, 2020. (Photo/JTA-Brendan Smialowski-AFP via Getty Images)

Trump nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for brokering Israel-UAE agreement

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President Donald Trump was nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the normalization agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a lawmaker in the Norway parliament who heads his country’s delegation to NATO, nominated Trump, Fox News first reported. Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the conservative-leaning populist Progress Party, told Fox that Trump has “done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees.”

Fox quoted from 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.”

Tybring-Gjedde and fellow Progress Party lawmaker Per-Willy Amundsen nominated Trump for the same prize in 2018, citing his Singapore summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

“I’m not a big Trump supporter,” Tybring-Gjedde told Fox. “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.”

Obama, Trump’s predecessor, was awarded the prize in 2009 “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” The Nobel Committee said it “attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”

Marcy Oster
Marcy Oster

Israel-based JTA correspondent

JTA

Content distributed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency news service.