Ezra Levant and Joel Pollock explore the Abraham Accords’ impact in Dubai, where 40+ travelers witnessed its economic boom—skyscrapers like the Burj Khalifa replacing conflict narratives—and the UAE’s unprecedented tolerance, hosting synagogues and the Abrahamic Family House. Pollock contrasts the Emirates’ pragmatic, oil-independent growth with Mahmoud Abbas’s anti-Semitic rhetoric, suggesting younger Palestinians may drive progress. Trump’s 2020 deals (Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan) stalled under Biden, who reversed Israel’s F-35 exception and opposes "peace for peace" terms, while Saudi-Israeli talks falter due to Palestinian vetoes. Levant credits Netanyahu and Emirati flexibility but warns legal battles—like his Toronto trial over The Libranos—show Rebel News’ role in exposing suppressed truths often clashes with institutional power. [Automatically generated summary]
I am in Dubai, and we are wrapping up our Abraham Accords journey, a journalistic mission.
And we took more than 40 Rebel News super fans.
It's being great.
So I'm going to have a good catch up with Joel Pollock, senior editor-at-large of Breitbart.com, who accompanied us.
Hey, by the way, it's such a visual feast, some of what we're doing.
I'd like you to get the video version of this podcast.
Just go to RebelNewsPlus.com, click subscribe.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Khabib, come to Dubai.
It's September 12th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
shame on you you sensorious bug oh hi there I am in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.
It is sweltering, almost 40 degrees, even though it's nighttime.
It gets hotter during the day.
This is a city that wouldn't really exist without air conditioning.
Well, I suppose it has existed for centuries, but not the skyscrapers.
We're standing in front of a mosque, which is beautiful and historic, but it is not the norm in this city.
The norm are the, well, for example, the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa.
It is like Las Vegas on steroids.
It's an incredible city and has really come into its own in the last 15 years.
I don't know if it's true today, but there was a point in time when literally most of the construction cranes in the world that were operating were in the United Arab Emirates.
That's how explosive the growth is in this country.
I use the word explosive.
In other parts of the Middle East, when you say explosive, you think of terrorism and war, not the United Arab Emirates.
And here's another thing.
I'm a Jew, as is my friend Joel Pollock, senior editor-at-large of Breitbart.com.
And he's more identifiable as a Jew because he wears the Jewish yarmuka or skull cap.
And yet here we are in a Muslim Arab dictatorship.
Let's be honest.
It's a benign dictatorship, but a dictatorship nonetheless.
And yet Jews and other minorities, including Christians, can walk freely here.
And even much more, there are Jewish synagogues and Christian churches here, free of persecution that you find in other places in the Middle East and even in places like China.
We are here because this is, we're one week into our Rebel News trip where we've taken 40 of our most enthusiastic viewers and we're going through Israel and then we just landed today in the UAE to look at the Abraham Accords.
That is the peace treaty negotiated by Donald Trump.
I have to say, were it any other man or any other political party, he would have received the Nobel Prize for solving the insoluble problem, bringing peace to Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, something that I myself thought was impossible and intractable.
I'm going to bring Joel into this conversation in a moment.
I promise you I will.
But I just want to say that it was personally moving when you fly on the Jewish airline El Al from Tel Aviv over Saudi Arabia, landing in the United Arab Emirates.
You go into the immigration line and you're greeted by an Emirati wearing the Kafiya and he stamps your passport and says, welcome to Dubai.
It's an incredible feeling of, I'll say it, I don't want to sound emotionally weepy, but it's a feeling of healing and of solving a wound because I have to say, growing up, I thought that Arab countries and Muslim people were permanent, perpetual, ancient, and non-negotiable, permanent foes of the Jews.
And yet, there is a warm, genuine peace.
that is given life to all the time.
At the airport in Tel Aviv, I saw four different flights to the United Arab Emirates, as many as to any other place.
It's quite incredible.
All right, I've been talking for long enough, and you have my views on things, but I'm excited that for the past week, Joel Pollock of Breitbart has been accompanying us on a few occasions.
He's gone on little excursions himself while our group in the main has gone other places.
But pretty much he's been tracking our journey.
And I want to bring him into the conversation and really do an extended conversation with him about our trip because I think he follows the Israel and Middle East beat more closely than I do.
And I think he has a different temperament than me.
I'm more enthusiastic.
I either cheer something or condemn it.
I think Joel analyzes things perhaps a little bit more neutrally than I do, which is why I think his work is so successful.
I think he's very trustworthy and reliable.
So let me, without further ado, bring in my friend Joel Paul.
Joel, great to see you.
It's a little bit hot.
I appreciate you stepping out of the air conditioning.
I just wanted that gorgeous mosque in the background.
Well, it's just two Jewish guys talking in the steam room out here.
That's what's happening.
You know, it's funny.
I sent you a note today saying, are we meeting up with you in Abu Dhabi or Dubai?
That's a conversation that two Jews would never in a million years have had until the Abraham Accords.
And I'm standing in front of this mosque.
And in the past, I would have felt trepidation.
I would have said, is it a mosque where terrorism is being fomented and incubated?
And instead of those feelings of fear and loathing, I have the opposite.
I feel and a friendship which was offered by Dubai to the Jewish people.
And I look at that now, I guess, with fresh eyes that do not have any condemnation.
I look at the beautiful and ornate history and design of it.
And I think with true belief that it may well be possible for the Abrahamic religions, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, to actually coexist in a meaningful friendship.
I don't know if I'm sounding, you know, pie in the sky, but I think that the United Arab Emirates is sort of proof that it can happen.
Well, the proof is around us.
And as you pointed out, we're here.
Nobody's bothering us.
We're here on a street corner, two Jewish guys who sat, maybe you sat as I did in my fourth grade Hebrew class looking at a map of the Middle East, and there were all these forbidden countries.
And some of these names on a map seemed like places I would never be able to see or visit.
And yet here we are.
And I actually didn't come to Dubai for many years because until a few years ago and until the Abraham Accords, they would not allow Israelis into the country.
And you even had a problem if you had an Israeli stamp in your passport.
That was a discriminatory policy that basically discriminated against Jews, Israelis more generally, but particularly against Jews.
And they got into some trouble over it.
There were some tennis tournaments.
I believe there was a chess tournament once where there was an Israeli competitor who wasn't able to compete because of the fact they were from Israel.
And all that changed.
And it changed because the leadership of the United Arab Emirates decided to make a change.
And that's, in a sense, what Jews and particularly Israelis have said for decades, that there will be peace when Arab leaders decide that the future is more important than the past.
And that's happened here.
And it's not just happened with regard to Israel.
It's not just a change with regard to Jews or Christians.
The leadership of UAE, if you look around us, we don't see any oil drilling platforms or anything like that.
And obviously, this is still very much an oil-based economy, and fossil fuel resources are very important.
But they looked at the bigger picture the long term and they said, look, we can't survive on the energy industry alone.
We want to become an international trade hub.
We want to become a travel destination.
We want to become a luxury tourist hub.
And the leadership of the United Emirates took their own destiny into their own hands and they remade their country.
And in so doing, they freed themselves basically to remake their relationships with the rest of the region.
So that's what has happened with Israel.
And the flights to and fro between Tel Aviv and Dubai now are almost like the commute from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Israelis love Dubai.
They love the shopping.
They love the nightlife.
And there's a lot for Emiratis to discover in Israel as well.
It's slightly cooler.
So the weather's a little bit better.
But there are also so many other things to do in Israel.
Obviously, there are the holy sites, but Tel Aviv has this unique nightlife and unique outdoor culture, art, connection to Europe, connection to many different things.
And Jewish culture is interesting to Muslims.
I was in Abu Dhabi earlier today to visit the Abrahamic Family Mosque, which is a new development that includes a mosque, a synagogue, and a church.
The Abrahamic Family House, excuse me, is what it's called.
And it was absolutely incredible.
The architecture and the design of these buildings was amazing.
But more than that, as you pointed out, the welcome that I received when I went there from the Emiratis and from others who are working there who believe that we can get back to the common Abrahamic root of all of our faiths and get to the tradition, which is right there in Genesis in the Old Testament, of Abraham welcoming guests.
And that's become part of Arab tradition in the Middle East.
It has been for centuries.
It's also part of Jewish culture.
And extending that welcome is something that we've experienced already just in the few hours we've been here.
And I've been very impressed.
So I'm very glad that all of this happened.
And as you said, it does resolve a lot of feelings, I think, that you have as a Jewish person because we care so much about the future of the Jewish people, which is understandable given that we were nearly wiped out within living memory.
And therefore, we care a lot about Israel's survival.
And all of that seems up in the air.
As strong as Israel is and as powerful it has become and as successful as it has become, it still seems vulnerable when there's a state of war with the rest of the region.
And peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan have helped, but especially this very warm peace with the United Arab Emirates, which is not just a peace among leaders, but really a peace between people.
It's really just changed the outlook.
And we're going to see things happen in the future that we can't believe any more than we could believe that two Jews would be standing here in front of a mosque in the middle of nighttime traffic in Dubai talking about the world.
We are going to see things happen coming out of that relationship that I think will benefit everybody.
You raised a good point.
Israel has had peace treaties in the past with Egypt, a very major breakthrough in the late 70s with Jordan, but it hasn't been a warm peace.
It hasn't been, we've been waiting for you.
Welcome, Khabibi.
Come set up a synagogue.
You know, I saw Bahrain.
It's a small Gulf country.
I don't remember it offhand, but there was some Bahraini leader who was holding a Jewish Torah or something.
Like something that if you were to try that in, let's say, the West Bank or Gaza Strip, the local PLO thugs would beat you up or kill you.
And it's a sign that this isn't just some paper deal.
Like that is a remarkably warm gesture.
You just reminded me of something.
When we went to Bethlehem, when we were in Israel, we crossed through the checkpoint and we were into a Palestinian authority-controlled area.
And the driver of our bus asked me if I had a hat.
I don't know if you saw this happen, but he asked me if I had a hat.
And I do have a baseball hat for the sun usually.
And he told me to put it on so that my kippah, my yarmukah, would be covered.
He didn't want people in Bethlehem to see that I was Jewish.
And for me to come from Israel, and we had just come from the town of Hebron, where we had seen the cave of the patriarchs, the tomb of the patriarchs, this very Jewish experience.
And yes, that tomb is holy to Muslims and Christians as well.
But, you know, to have that spiritual enmeshment in Jewish faith and then literally a few meters away, cross over into a town where even though Bethlehem is known as the town of peace, I'm getting told by the bus driver, I have to cover up my religious identity and I'm in the Holy Land.
And it was so jarring.
So that's obviously the worst case scenario where people have to hide their faith to interact with one another.
But in Dubai, again, because the leadership has taken a very different approach and they've emphasized tolerance and they've actually built institutions that emphasize tolerance, it wasn't always that way.
15 years ago, there was a huge controversy over a donation that Harvard received from one of the members, I believe, of the Emirati royal family who had very staunchly anti-Israel views.
And I think Harvard returned that donation.
There were some controversies over some of the anti-Israel and sometimes anti-Semitic positions of some of the leaders in this country, but they changed.
That change happened.
Palestinians and the Peace Club00:11:49
And once you have a leadership that's willing to change, as the Palestinians are not, but as the Emiratis clearly were, then you can suddenly open up all these relationships and you can build a better foundation for peace and cooperation.
You know, I think part of it is: do you want a deal to succeed?
And Trump is essentially a deal maker.
I mean, if you can handle real estate commerce in Manhattan, perhaps one of the most intensely competitive, cutthroat places in the world, maybe you can handle Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Palestinians.
Like really, the man, like they are in the deal, he actually does know that.
It's not just a slogan or a catchphrase.
The guy knows how to solve problems.
I think the first thing is to have a problem-solving mindset.
You've got a point, but let me just throw you to a contrasting video.
Here is John Kerry, who was the Secretary of State, who basically said there will be no peace deal.
There will not be a peace deal if the Palestinians aren't dealt with first.
And anyone who thinks that Israel can make peace with an Arab or Muslim country is listen to how emphatic he was.
John Kerry, who's never had any real-life experience, he's been a political hack his entire life.
I can't think of anything successful he's done.
He gave the whole show away to Iran in an atrocious deal.
He said, no, no, it's impossible, but he's never done a deal before, at least not one that benefits America or the West.
Here's John Kerry saying there will never be peace with the Arabs until there's peace with the Palestinians.
Take a look.
There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world.
I want to make that very clear to all of you.
I've heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, well, the Arab world's in a different place now.
We just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world and we'll deal with the Palestinians.
No, no, no, and no.
I can tell you that reaffirmed even in the last week as I have talked to leaders of the Arab community.
There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace.
Everybody needs to understand that.
Well, he obviously didn't want there to be peace.
Trump wanted a deal because I think he believes in peace actually, but he also wanted to be the guy to solve the once-in-a-century problem.
When you look at Trump's career and how he made his billions, it's right there in his book, The Art of the Deal.
He had a pattern in New York real estate, which was that he would look at projects other people had started and then abandoned for whatever reason.
There was one project, the Hudson Yards, I think, where there was an Argentinian investor, very wealthy guy, who had a vision for what this piece of property could be, but he didn't get the zoning regulations lined up ahead of time, and so he had to abandon it.
Trump swooped in and bought him out at a very low price and then built this development and created massive amounts of wealth and value.
And that is the pattern throughout Trump's real estate career, that he finds distressed properties, takes over the project at a very low price, and then creates something valuable.
So the John Kerry perspective was essentially the retail perspective, if you want to put it that way, of Middle East peace, that the only peace that's acceptable is the best possible peace, which is one that includes Israel and the Palestinians and builds out from there.
And there was this idea that unless you get that, you don't have anything.
And Kerry really wanted to discourage anybody from thinking about it any differently.
Trump came into office and tried it that way for a little while.
He met with Mahmoud Abbas, the anti-Semitic leader of the Palestinian Authority, and then he realized he wasn't getting anywhere.
So he said, okay, let's try something else.
And essentially, he took over the peace process as a distressed property.
And he said, let's see if we can do this at a discount.
Let's go to other people.
If you allow one company to monopolize a market, you're going to pay a higher price.
So the Palestinians were monopolizing peace.
Trump said, I'm going to a competitor.
I'm going to go talk to these other regimes.
Let me talk to the Saudis.
Let me talk to the Emiratis.
Let me talk to the Bahrainis.
Let me talk to whoever else is willing to make peace.
It turned out there was a huge interest in doing so because of their self-interest.
They want commercial ties to the West.
They want commercial ties to Israel.
And so was it the peace that everyone hopes for still, a peace between Israelis and Palestinians?
No.
But it provides a foundation for that future peace because it shows that there's nothing intrinsic to these cultures that means that they have to be at war.
And again, if you visit the Abrahamic family house in Abu Dhabi, you see an incredible respect for all three of the main monotheistic faiths.
There's nothing in Islam, in fact, Islam historically has been very tolerant toward Jews and Christians, both of whom are described as people of the book.
There have also been wars and so forth and lots of conflict, but there are ideas in there that one can focus on and bring to the fore that encourage tolerance.
And so Trump basically said, I'm going to take this distressed property and I'm going to turn it into something valuable.
And it's been immensely valuable.
How do you get the Palestinians on board?
Well, I think it became clear in recent days when Mahmoud Abbas made another crazy anti-Semitic statement, basically blaming the Jews for the Holocaust.
It's clear that he's in his 80s and he's not helping.
And the Palestinian leadership is basically of that generation, the old Soviet-trained generation, the old anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda generation.
There are younger Palestinians who have had to navigate the terrible world that their parents left them.
And we talked to some of them when we were in Israel.
We talked to Arab Israelis.
Those are Arabs or Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship.
And they've had to move between these two worlds.
But they are young people trying to build a better future for themselves.
We talked to them at the factory in Ariel, people who actually moved from Dubai back to the West Bank to live in what we are told by the left is a horrible occupation.
But for them, it was actually a place of economic potential as long as they could work with Israeli companies.
There are young Palestinians who want a better life.
And so I think once this present generation of Palestinian leaders leaves the stage, there will be an opening and hopefully an opening like the one we're experiencing in Dubai.
Yeah, I want to ask you one last question because I think that Bahrain and UAE and Morocco and Sudan, obviously they won Donald Trump's favor.
And I'm sure they got certain concessions directly from Trump in America.
One of those rewards being just FaceTime with the most powerful man in the world.
And I'm sure that there were bilateral things that each of those countries wanted from America.
I'm sure of it.
But I think other than just some horse trading or log rolling, as they might call it, I think it was genuinely a peace for peace deal.
As in, we're going to offer you peace.
What are you offering us in return?
Also peace.
Whereas the other peace deals that Israel has had, for example, with Egypt, it was land for peace.
Okay, well, did you want peace at all?
Are you just going to say you want peace until we give you the Sinai back?
And I think with the Palestinians, it has never been peace for peace.
It was, what can we get by offering peace?
Let's get the most we can through negotiations.
Get that, and then that's the new starting point for the next Intifada.
So I think that there's a qualitative difference between, I mean, of course, the UAE wants things from Trump and America and all these other countries do.
But I think what you've described and what we've both observed is that actually peace is the payoff.
Peace is the payoff.
And look, there were things that were offered to the UAE and Bahrain and these other countries.
Interestingly, President Biden pulled back on some of those commitments.
Give me an example of what those were.
There was a weapons system.
I think it was the F-35 new fighter jet that the United States is using across the different branches of the armed forces.
I think we were going to go into a deal.
And that had to be worked out with Israel as well because Israel has a strategic understanding with the United States that the Arab countries won't be allowed to have weapons equivalent to what Israel has because Israel has no strategic depth whatsoever.
It's a very tiny country, and so they want that qualitative military edge and equipment that they buy from the United States.
But Israel basically said, we're going to make an exception.
We'll let the UAE get these weapon systems as well for the sake of peace with the UAE.
We're not going to go to war with the UAE.
And it worked out.
But the Biden administration started reneging on some of these things.
And it's interesting that since Joe Biden has taken office, there hasn't been one new country added to the Abraham Accords.
When Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates signed on, very quickly you had Morocco, you had Sudan, you had Kosovo, you had other countries jumping in when Trump was president.
Biden has not been as interested in creating these separate peace agreements.
He has reneged on some of the goodwill and some of the promises that Trump made to other countries.
And only for domestic policy reasons.
Democrats, unfortunately, in the United States today, don't really have a foreign policy.
They have a domestic policy, which is that anyone who sides with Trump, any foreign leader, any foreign country, is now an enemy of the United States.
So the UAE had a really tough time with the Biden administration in the early months because the Biden administration treated them almost as a hostile country because they had done business with Trump.
So Biden has closed down a lot of the avenues and a lot of the horse trading that might have helped some other countries develop peace agreements.
There's now talk of a Saudi peace deal that the Biden administration is trying to negotiate, and they are bringing in the Palestinians, apparently at the insistence of the Saudis.
But I don't know that that's going to go anywhere because the Palestinians tend to veto these agreements.
I think everybody would welcome it if there were an Israeli-Saudi peace deal.
But the progress has been so slow, whereas it was almost every week under the Trump administration, you were seeing a new country added to this peace arrangement.
I think when America is strong and when America follows through on commitments to our allies, then more people want to be part of the peace club.
When we hang back and when we say that we don't want peace for peace, but we are willing to sacrifice all kinds of other things, we create an incentive, as you point out, to delay a final peace agreement because people want to see what else they can get from us.
So I think Biden, for all his talk about being a diplomacy president, he gave a speech in his first week or so in office where he said, diplomacy is back, diplomacy is back.
We've seen no diplomacy.
And in fact, this can take us further afield.
We've seen the Biden administration stoking conflict in some places rather than diplomacy.
So, look, the reason a peace-for-peace deal is more effective in the long run is it is based on mutual respect.
And that's what's happened with Israel and the UAE.
Also, I got to give credit to the Emirati government again.
They did something very clever, which was when Netanyahu, who also did something clever, when Netanyahu was talking about annexing Judea and Samaria, annexing the West Bank, the Emiratis said, Don't do that.
We still want there to be the potential for a Palestinian state one day.
And if you back away from that pledge to annex this territory, we might have a peace deal.
So both sides, in a sense, created this trade-off where Netanyahu agreed to maintain the status quo.
It didn't cost him anything.
All he did was kind of create this asset of an annexed West Bank and then give that to the Emiratis.
And they said, okay, well, now we can talk about peace.
And so there was creative thinking on both sides about how to make it easier for the other to move into a negotiation.
Well, Joel, it's great to have you on this trip.
And I know that the dozens of Rebel News super fans who are here have enjoyed hearing your talks on the bus.
And, I mean, you obviously have a very deep knowledge of these things.
And it's been fun to hang out with you.
And I appreciate you taking so much time away from work.
We used to do these trips more frequently.
This is actually the second Israel trip we've done before.
We have had cruises.
Joel Joins Us00:02:31
We have events.
We're getting back into these events.
I find them very interesting.
They do take up time away from the office.
But I think that you learn so much.
I think by being in the United Emirates, by being, for example, we had a tour of the security fence with Colonel Danny Tierza, the retired colonel who built the things.
You learn more in one hour on the scene, a thousand little colorful details than you could by watching a TV report or reading a book.
Just being there.
And I think that the dozens of people on our trip certainly feel that way.
They are now going back to Canada, U.S., U.K., Australia.
We have people from all those countries.
And I think in their own way, they are lay experts on the subject matter.
And some of that expertise comes from you.
So thanks very much for joining us.
And hopefully we'll have you in the future.
I don't want to pin you down right now, but I'd love it if you came on future trips with us.
Great to see you.
You too.
It's been amazing being here.
And just to add to what you just said, this isn't the kind of trip where you just go from one hotel to another.
This has been a real trip of getting out there, which is what journalism is all about.
So it has allowed the participants who are viewers and readers of Rebel News.
It's allowed them to experience some of what it's like to be a journalist and to be out in the field.
And so I think it's been valuable.
And I've learned from them as well.
They're very interesting and fun people.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Well, there you have it.
Joel Pollock, friend of ours, senior editor-at-large of Breitbart.com, regular guest of the Ezra Levant Show, where we talk to him from his LA base.
But here we are in Dubai, and it's only 37 degrees now, so it's cooled off tremendously.
Great to see you, and I'll be back in Toronto on Friday.
Looking forward to getting back to Canada, getting back to work.
I will not be in the city for long, though, because I've got to cover Arthur Pavlovsky's sentencing hearing on Monday.
I'm in court on Tuesday in Calgary, the Calgary Police Service demanding production of our files.
Derek Reimer in trial in Calgary the next day for violating the bubble zone around the Drag Queen Story Hour.
And then the next day, I'm on trial again in Toronto for my book, The Libranos.
I tell you, I'm spending more time in court than I am in journalism.
And of course, Tamara Leach on trial all next week.
That's Rebel News for you.
We tell the other side of the story.
That's our motto.
But you know what we do.
Every once in a while, it's not enough just to be voyeurs.
We have to jump in there and try and change the world, fix it a little bit.