Israel, Morocco and the United States have been pursuing back channel negotiations on the disputed Western Sahara for more than a year, Axios reported on Monday. The deal would reportedly involve Morocco normalizing ties with Israel in exchange for the United States formally recognizing the 1975 annexation of the Western Sahara, which the United Nations lists as a non-self-governing territory. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started discussing the issue with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly summit in 2018. The meeting was a result of a back channel that originated between Netanyahu’s national security adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat and Moroccan businessman Yariv Elbaz, a close associate of White House adviser Jared Kushner.

Why it matters:  Kushner is the main architect of the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan that President Donald Trump unveiled last week. Morocco put out a statement last week noting that it “appreciates” the plan, which would allow Israel to annex all its West Bank settlements and the Jordan Valley.

Morocco also started targeting Iran — a bugbear for both Netanyahu and Trump — around the same time it started back channel talks with Israel. Shortly before meeting with Netanyahu in 2018, Bourita made the rounds on conservative media outlets accusing the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah of providing missiles to the Polisario Front, a Sahrawi independence movement demanding autonomy in the Western Sahara. Bourita levied similar accusations against Iran in May 2018, when Rabat severed ties with Iran at the same time Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal.