By HENRY SREBRNIK President Donald Trump’s administration has been discussing with Azerbaijan the possibility of bringing that nation and some Central Asian allies into the Abraham Accords. During his first term in office, four Muslim-majority countries agreed to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. It is now closer to fruition.

The Abraham Accords, signed in 2020, were a historic step and are considered a breakthrough in Israel’s relations with Arab states. On the surface, these agreements with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates, heralded not only diplomatic engagement but also the normalization of ties in every field, including technology, economy, tourism, security, and agriculture.

While the original Accords were centered on diplomatic ties, Azerbaijan and every country in Central Asia already has relations with Israel, meaning that an expansion of the Accords to include them would largely be symbolic, focusing on strengthening ties in areas like trade and military cooperation. 

Although the Abraham Accords were initially agreements over Israeli-Arab normalization, the pacts have since transcended Arab borders into a high-profile forum that can incorporate Muslim countries committed to shared values of tolerance, peace, and prosperity. 

Wedged between Russia to the north and Iran to the south, Azerbaijan occupies a critical link in trade flows between Central Asia and the West. The Caucasus and Central Asia are also rich in natural resources, including oil and gas, prompting various major powers to compete for influence in the region.

Azerbaijan normalized relations and trade with the Jewish state in the early 1990s, shortly after gaining independence from the Soviet Union. Since then, ties have quietly flourished under the stewardship first of Heydar Aliyev and subsequently that of his son, Ilham. 

Last year, trade between the two countries reached nearly one billion dollars, mainly in the energy and defence sectors. Azerbaijan has become Israel’s critical energy partner, supplying more than 60 per cent of its gasoline needs. It has also become Israel’s second-largest defence customer, accounting for nearly a tenth of all Israeli defence exports between 2018 and 2022. 

Russia, Azerbaijan’s Soviet-era political master, is currently preoccupied with its war in Ukraine, leaving it with little ability to interfere in the South Caucasus. Meanwhile, Iran, Azerbaijan’s southern neighbor and ideological challenger, is now at its weakest political point in decades, with minimal influence in the country’s internal affairs through religious appeal or sectarian outreach, as it has tried to do in previous years. 

Kazakhstan also enjoys strong ties with Israel, and Astana benefits from advanced Israeli agriculture, medical, water, and security technology. The Abraham Accords provide an opportunity to further deepen security and economic cooperation and could help the country reduce its economic dependence on Russia and China at a time when such dependence is proving to be a liability.

Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, Steve Witkoff, traveled to Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, in March to meet with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. As part of the discussions, Azerbaijani officials contacted officials in Central Asian nations, including in nearby Kazakhstan, to gauge their interest in a broader Abraham Accords expansion. For Azerbaijan, the Accords could provide a path to expanded security cooperation against Iranian threats and, if pursued in coordination with Kazakhstan, progress towards its goal of becoming a bridge to Central Asia

Joseph Epstein of the Turan Research Center at the New York-based Yorktown Institute, a non-partisan program dedicated to exploring modern-day developments in the Turkic and Persian worlds, argues that bringing Azerbaijan into the Abraham Accords would signal to Muslim majority states in Central Asia that open cooperation with Israel is both possible and worthwhile. It would also squeeze Tehran which sees a secular Shia state aligned with Israel and Turkey as a strategic problem.

“When President Donald Trump shared a clip of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s speech at the Shusha Global Media Forum on Truth Social, it wasn’t just a friendly gesture,” Epstein explained. “It signaled that Azerbaijan’s partnership with Israel and the United States is now firmly on his radar.” 

At a time when the United States was trying to get the Abraham Accords back on track, all of this was certainly encouraging. But a sticking point remained: Azerbaijan’s conflict with its neighbor Armenia. The Trump administration considered a peace deal between the two Caucasus nations as a precondition to join the Abraham Accords. The breakthrough came on Aug. 8, when Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed a joint letter officially indicating their willingness to end their conflict. 

The pact also gives the U.S. exclusive rights to develop a transit route through a mountainous stretch of Armenian territory between Azerbaijan known as the Zangezur corridor. It will connect Azerbaijan proper with its Nakhchivan region, which borders Baku’s ally Turkey via Armenian territory. The new transit corridor will allow unimpeded connectivity between the two countries while respecting Armenia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and its people. The securing of that route also marks a significant setback for Russia and Iran in the South Caucasus. Restrictions were also lifted on defence co-operation between Azerbaijan and the United States.

 Trump framed the agreement as a “peace deal,” writing on Truth Social that “Many Leaders have tried to end the War, with no success, until now.” This is another feather in a potential Trump Nobel Peace Prize cap.

Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.

By Talya ZaxAugust 8, 2025

(Ed. note: An Officer and a Spy is not yet available for streaming in Canada. It is available for streaming on Prime Video in the U.S.)

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

In the opening scene of Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy, a retelling of the infamous Dreyfus Affair — in which Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer, was falsely accused of treason at the turn of the 20th century — Dreyfus, played by Louis Garrel, is paraded past a silent crowd of his peers to suffer a punishment known as degradation.

That is historically accurate. In 1895, after his conviction, Dreyfus underwent the public humiliation of having the adornments of his rank ripped off his person, and his sword broken, all while he vainly protested his innocence.

But for anyone familiar with Polanski’s own history — or the history of this film, which was released in Europe in 2019, but is only now getting its U.S. theatrical premiere — the double meaning is clear.

Because Polanski, who in 1977 pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor,” is one of the legions of Hollywood men to face public disgrace over sexual misbehavior. (He fled to Europe after learning that a judge planned to issue him a harsher sentence than was agreed in his plea deal.) When An Officer and a Spy first came out, Polanski said that his attraction to the Dreyfus story was in part attached to his own case: “I can see the same determination to deny the facts and condemn me for things I have not done,” he said.

What a difference six years makes. In 2019, only two years after the #MeToo movement rocketed to public prominence, Polanski’s film couldn’t secure distribution in the United States. In 2023, the next movie he made, a poorly reviewed comedy called The Palace, suffered the same fate.

But in 2025, the backlash against #MeToo has reached an apogee, and allegations of rampant antisemitism have come to define much of American political life. Now, An Officer and a Spy‘s long-delayed American premiere — a two-week run at Manhattan’s Film Forum, beginning on Friday — suggests that Polanski’s barely-veiled “J’accuse” against his detractors may be newly relevant.

A scapegoat in search of a savior

Dreyfus is not the hero of An Officer and a Spy. Instead, he’s a foil for the rest of the action: a convenient martyr, whom Garrel bestows with a kind of drippy intensity. No one, including the film’s real subject — Georges Picquart, the antisemitic army official who trained Dreyfus and reluctantly comes to campaign against his conviction — has much attention to spare for him.

Even Polanski seems bored by Dreyfus’ suffering; when his camera visits the desert island to which Dreyfus is banished, it’s more fascinated by the desolate landscape than the lonely Jew wasting away within it. And as Picquart, played by Jean Dujardin, pieces together the conspiracy that framed his formal pupil, he doesn’t appear to feel any real compulsion to reconsider his general distaste for the man himself.

Instead, he’s driven by his commitment to the ideals that have informed his career in the French army, chief among them orderliness and an adherence to proper procedure. To the extent that Picquart is radicalized by his adventures as a political outcast — a natural consequence of his insistence on airing the truth — it’s by becoming skeptical of the official structures in which he once put faith, not skeptical of his own inclination toward bigotry.

In other words, this is the story of a crusader so committed to justice that he sees his personal feelings as unimportant. If Polanski thinks of himself as Dreyfus — polarizing and perhaps unlikable, but the victim of a moral panic nonetheless — he is, in an Officer and a Spy, putting out a call for some powerful party to serve as his Picquart. Which brave soul, the film wonders, will take a similar stand against the social furor that made Polanski a cultural outcast — albeit one who won multiple César Awards, the French equivalent to the Oscars, for this film — not because they like him, but because they can see that what he’s suffered is wrong?

That framing is a bold choice. The men who have attempted post-#MeToo comebacks have generally done so from a stance of bashful victimhood. When Kevin Spacey, whom more than 30 men have accused of sexual assault or inappropriate behavior, received an award at a gala hosted during this year’s Cannes Film Festival, he portrayed himself as a wrongly outcast golden boy now receiving his just rewards. “I feel surrounded by so much affection and love,” he said.

Polanski is doing something different. He’s not suggesting that he’s too nice and gentle to be responsible for all the things of which he’s been accused. Instead, he’s arguing that no matter how much his viewers might hate his guts, they should turn a gimlet eye upon the processes that led to his banishment from Hollywood, the U.S., and even many institutions of European cinema. (A French woman accused Polanski of rape shortly before An Officer and a Spy‘s French release; amid an outcry over French accolades for the film, Polanski didn’t attend that year’s César Awards, and when he was announced as Best Director, several attendees walked out in protest.)

The allegory of antisemitism

After Dreyfus is carted away to exile, in An Officer and a Spy, Picquart, who watched his degradation, is summoned by a superior who asks how the crowd reacted. The feeling, Picquart says, was that of a body that had rid itself of a pestilence.

Polanski is examining how the establishment reacts to what it perceives as the will of the public — how its self-protective mechanisms lead it to be in a constant race to anticipate the people’s prejudices, and fulfill them.

In his vision, the parties complicit in framing Dreyfus appear to be driven not by personal antisemitism so much as the sense that, because Jews have come to be widely held in suspicion by France’s citizenry, acting against Jews is a sure way to maintain their own hold on power. The generals who eventually perjure themselves in an attempt to prevent Picquart’s success know that if they admit that Dreyfus was innocent, the public won’t see them as noble and brave. They’ll see them, instead, as having joined with nefarious forces for personal gain.

Polanski, in making An Officer and a Spy, accurately anticipated a cultural turn that would see all kinds of people beginning to perceive themselves as “the Jews” in situations of societal discord: victims of a witch hunt, based on an ambient cultural sense that someone should be held accountable for all the things that are wrong in all our lives, while authorities tacitly encourage the scapegoating.

It happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, as some who were resistant to public health measures began comparing themselves to Jews in Nazi Germany. It’s happening now, as some Republicans have tried to turn Jews into avatars for conservatives, with the argument being that both groups have been persecuted by promoters of “wokeness.”

There is a natural parallel, as well, in the story of #MeToo. In the movement’s heyday, the locus of power in the sexual realm seemed to have shifted. The time in which successful men could basically do as they pleased was over. A new power structure had been adopted; adherents of the old one began to see themselves as victims of a shadowy new elite.

What happens when people begin to see a real historical conspiracy as an analogy for every development they dislike? Do they find a harmless outlet for their grievances, or do they simply risk becoming more suspicious, and more conspiratorial? In a U.S. where the president owns a social media outlet called Truth, any number of people going to see An Officer and a Spy might see something of their own plight in that of Dreyfus. And any number of them might idolize Picquart as a vigilante uncovering deep governmental rot.

They may or may not be right. After all, there’s much injustice in the world, today as at the turn of the century. But I fear that while An Officer and a Spy might be trying to investigate the kind of conspiratorial mindset that gave rise to the Dreyfus Affair, what it’s really doing is reinforcing it.

Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at zax@forward.com or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.

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This story was originally published on the Forward.

The Boys in the Light by Nina Willner

Reviewed by JULIE KIRSH, Former Sun Media News Research Director

In 1945, my father dug a hole on the grounds of Buchenwald concentration camp. He pulled a dead inmate’s body over him as a cover. The SS guards in the camp were rounding up Jews. He knew that he would not survive a forced march. He heard American soldiers’ voices but was too weak to call out. Having contacted typhus from the dead body, he was dying. On April 11, 1945, a black American soldier carried my 70 pound father like a babe in arms to the medic station where he received an instant blood transfusion which probably saved his life.

The author of The Boys in the Light, Nina Willner, tells the true story of her father, Eddie, German born, and his best friend, Mike. Both boys were teenagers who survived Auschwitz, Blechhammer and Langenstein labour camps. Eddie’s father, a decorated soldier in the German army in World War I, kept the boys under his wing. The discipline that he learned in the German army was imparted to the boys until his death in the camps.

In a riveting chapter, the boys make a run for it. Eddie is shot in the arm, a German Shepherd bites Mike in the leg but, nevertheless, the boys escape and allow the River Eine in Germany to carry them away from their captors.

The Boys in the Light includes stories of other boys. Young American soldiers, mostly in their twenties, had been fighting the war as part of Company D. Their unit, led by the extraordinary, twenty-three year old Lieutenant Elmer, was cemented by faith and a need to survive, not unlike the young Jewish Holocaust survivors.

As the two emaciated boys encountered the American soldiers, the author tells us “that was the moment Eddie and Mike walked from the darkness into the light.”

Although the US forces were under strict orders to bypass all refugees they encountered, Lieutenant Elmer, a staunch Christian and an inspiring leader, took the teenagers under his unit’s wing.

Pepsi, the kitchen cook, was entrusted with bringing these boys back to life. Food, compassion and Company D’s willingness to incorporate the boys into their brotherhood, saved Eddie and Mike. The boys’ presence provided an understanding to the American soldiers of what they were fighting for and against.

In this compelling book, the reader learns about the Hitler’s rise to power, the hatred directed against European Jewry, and the young American soldiers who sacrificed their lives far from home.

The last days of the war in the spring of 1945 find Eddie and Mike in the company of this very special unit. Although the US army’s mandate at the time was not to provide aid to refugees encountered on the road, Lieutenant Elmer broke every rule in the book by providing sanctuary to the two emaciated boys.

After the war, the soldiers of Company D did not abandon their wartime fidelity to each other. Even after fifty years, the veterans continued to celebrate their renewal of life with annual reunions. In trying to track down the soldiers, the author’s parents only had their nicknames, which made the search elusive.

Finally, Eddie’s wife located Lieutenant Elmer and told him that Eddie had been recounting the story of his liberation by Company D to his family for his entire life.

In September 2002, Eddie hosted a reunion at his home in Falls Church, Virginia. Mike had died of cancer in 1985. Both “boys” had found new lives as proud Americans.

“Dashing soldiers became stooped grandfathers,” but the men of Company D had not forgotten the two teenagers who stood in front of US tanks with hope in their eyes.

When Lieutenant Elmer arrived at the reunion, the veteran soldiers stood at attention. A grandson of one of the veterans asked Eddie about the tattoo on his arm. Eddie’s grown children moved through the room and thanked the old soldiers for “saving our father.”

The reunion of the Holocaust survivor and the soldiers who rescued him was a triumph of faith and friendship.

Eddie’s grandson, named Michael after his best friend, visited his Uncle Pepsi many times and was treated to his very fine cooking. In 2016, Pepsi passed away, preceded by his close friends in Company D.

The book’s message comes through loud and clear. Some memories should never be forgotten. Over time the memories become a cautionary tale. We must never forget.

The Boys in the Light by Nina Willner

Published by Penguin Random House, 2025