ARAB AND WORLD
Fri 24 Jan 2025 8:34 am - Jerusalem Time
The Abraham Accords Fallacy: Why Normalization Without the Palestinians Won’t Bring Stability to the Middle East
The American magazine "Foreign Affairs" published a detailed analysis by researcher Khaled Elgendy, a professor of political science at Georgetown University in the American capital, on Thursday, in which he says that US President Donald Trump's efforts to strengthen his legacy in the Middle East were well underway even before he regained the White House, citing what Jason Greenblatt, Trump's former envoy to the Middle East, told thousands of international delegates at the Doha Forum in Qatar last December about President Trump's focus on expanding the Abraham Accords, a series of normalization agreements signed by Israel, Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates in 2020, which is considered a distinctive achievement for Trump in foreign policy since his first term, and was praised by his allies and his most vocal political opponents - including former President Joe Biden.
Biden not only wholeheartedly embraced the Abraham Accords, but sought to build on them by securing a historic deal with Saudi Arabia, the most powerful and influential Arab state, notes Elgindy, who advised the Palestinian Authority on peace negotiations in the 1990s. Biden’s pitch was that in exchange for Israeli-Saudi normalization, the Saudis would receive a major upgrade in their strategic partnership with the United States, on par with a NATO ally. An Israeli-Saudi agreement would be the biggest breakthrough in Arab-Israeli diplomacy since Egypt broke away from the Arab world and became the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979—and would pave the way for other Arab and Muslim states to follow suit.
However, Al-Jundi says: “This approach to Arab-Israeli peacemaking is conditional on ignoring the Palestinian issue. Until 2020, the consensus among Arab states was that normalization with Israel would only come after the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Thus, the decision by Bahrain, Morocco, and the UAE to defect effectively deprived the Palestinians of an important source of leverage against Israel. Since then, Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and Israel’s devastating war on Gaza have derailed the Israeli-Saudi track, in a stark reminder that the Palestinian issue cannot be ignored or subordinated to Arab-Israeli normalization.”
Despite these obstacles, Trump is keen to finish the job he started in his first term, and which Biden has continued, by striking a grand deal between the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia in a return to the original vision of the Abraham Accords, which entailed upgrading Israel and downgrading the Palestinians. All indications are that Trump still believes that Israel’s integration into the region is more important to Arab leaders than the cause of freedom for the Palestinians. According to Greenblatt, it is a mistake “to think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the be-all and end-all, and that if everything is resolved between Israel and the Palestinians, everything will be great in the Middle East.”
But critics of the Abraham Accords never claimed that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would end all other conflicts in the region. They claimed the opposite: that regional peace and security are not possible without resolving the Palestinian issue. Indeed, the central premise of the Abraham Accords—that regional peace and stability can be achieved while marginalizing the Palestinians—has been upended by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, and everything that has happened since. The ceasefire agreement that went into effect this week underscores the centrality of the Palestinians to regional security and stability, but it also creates potential diplomatic space for renewed Israeli-Saudi engagement under Trump. The Abraham Accords represent a revealing point of continuity between Trump and Biden. Their reasons and tactics may differ, but both presidents have peddled a dangerous illusion—that peace, stability, and prosperity in the broader Middle East can coexist with war, chaos, and displacement in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Peace on paper
The researcher points out that while the Abraham Accords were hailed as a diplomatic triumph, they were based on a number of false assumptions. Indeed, much of the excitement surrounding the normalization deals in 2020 had less to do with their intrinsic value than with the almost automatic need, especially in Washington and other Western capitals, to rally around something that was clearly in Israel’s interest, regardless of its actual alignment with U.S. policy goals, such as a two-state solution or regional stability. This tendency to conflate “good for Israel” with “good for peace” is in fact a standard feature of U.S.-led diplomacy and a major reason for its failure over the past several decades.
While many have tried to fit the square peg of normalization into the round hole of the two-state solution, the fact remains that the Abraham Accords were originally designed as a means of bypassing the Palestinian issue and suppressing the Palestinian factor in the hope that the Palestinians would have no choice but to accept whatever long-term arrangement the United States, Israel, and the region imposed on them. Indeed, the Abraham Accords were themselves one of many trends working against the two-state solution—a sign that some Arab states have moved on and are no longer willing to subordinate their bilateral or geopolitical interests vis-à-vis Israel to the unicorn of an independent Palestinian state, the researcher said.
Moreover, the Abraham Accords removed one of the few sources of leverage the Palestinians had in their already unequal conflict with Israel: pressure from neighboring Arab states whose publics remain largely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. In doing so, they also removed some of the last remaining incentives Israel had to end its occupation of Palestinian territories or recognize Palestinian rights.
The lack of restraint on Israel has left Palestinians more vulnerable to the whims of an increasingly violent and radical Israeli occupation, which has seen unprecedented settlement expansion, settler violence, and Israeli military repression of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as more routine wars in Gaza in 2021 and 2022. These issues have been exacerbated under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose return in late 2022 marked the arrival of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history.
Meanwhile, claims that Arab states could leverage their budding ties with Israel to advance the Palestinian cause or the two-state solution have never materialized. Bahrain, Morocco, and the UAE have not sought to intervene with Israel to prevent home demolitions or evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, or to address the record-breaking settlement expansion and settler violence throughout the West Bank. Nor have they used their supposed influence to intervene with regard to Israel’s assault on Gaza—an assault that has already killed more than 46,000 Palestinians and destroyed much of its civilian infrastructure.
On the other hand, Emirati officials have shown little qualms about engaging with Israeli settlers or investing in occupation infrastructure such as Israeli checkpoints. While Biden and congressional Democrats have gone to great lengths to ignore these contradictions, Trump and his fellow Republicans, most of whom have already abandoned even the pretense of supporting a two-state solution, can simply ignore them entirely.
But even with the slight opening the truce has provided, “engaging the Saudis in the Abraham Accords will remain an uphill battle for the Trump administration. If the prospects for an Israeli-Saudi deal seemed remote before October 7, the environment today is far less hospitable. The horrific scenes of death, destruction, and famine that have emerged from Gaza over the past 15 months have inflamed public opinion across the Arab and Muslim worlds and shredded the credibility of Israel and the United States across the global south. (Some traditional Western allies in the global north, such as Ireland, Norway, and Spain, have also begun to distance themselves from Israel.) Even the United Arab Emirates, once a symbol of Arab-Israeli normalization, has been forced to downplay its ties to Israel: Emirati businesses no longer boast about their connections to Israel, and the warm relationship that Emirati leaders once had with Netanyahu has cooled.”
In other words, the Gaza war may not have torn up the Abraham Accords—but it has effectively put them on ice. For the Saudis, the price of normalization with Israel has risen sharply since October 7 and the ensuing assault on Gaza. “Whereas the country’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, previously sought only a rhetorical commitment from Israel toward Palestinian statehood, Riyadh is now demanding concrete steps toward statehood. Having given up on American mediation, the Saudis have teamed up with France to launch a new initiative aimed at salvaging what remains of a two-state solution.”
“In any case, it will be difficult for the crown prince, who is not known for his outspoken sympathy for the Palestinians, to normalize relations with a country that he and his government have accused of committing “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” the soldier says.
The International Criminal Court’s indictments of Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant for war crimes and crimes against humanity are another obstacle for Riyadh. The current Saudi position is perhaps best reflected in the statement adopted by the Arab-Islamic summit held in Riyadh last month, which not only repeated the charge of genocide but also called for Israel’s expulsion from the United Nations—the exact opposite of normalization.
Israeli-Saudi normalization will remain an uphill battle for the Trump administration.
The one thing the Saudis and other Gulf leaders value above all else, the soldier says, is stability. But the past 15 months—which have seen Israel annihilate Gaza, wage a full-scale war with and occupy Lebanon, exchanges of fire with Iran, and invade and seize large swaths of Syrian territory after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime—have been anything but stable. If the promise of the Abraham Accords was peace and stability, the reality of Netanyahu’s so-called New Middle East has been endless bloodshed and instability. What is being offered today is not a vision of Israel’s peaceful integration into the region, but one of Israel’s violent domination of it.
Al-Jundi concludes his analysis by noting that the Abraham Accords not only failed to bring peace and security to the Middle East, but actually helped produce the opposite by encouraging Israeli victory, entrenching Israeli extremism, and ensuring Israeli impunity. The belief that Arab-Israeli normalization could take place without Palestinian approval or at their expense at best was misguided and dangerous at worst, as recent events clearly demonstrate. It took nearly three years and the bloodiest violence in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the Biden administration to finally accept this reality; the Trump administration would do well to learn the same lesson.
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The Abraham Accords Fallacy: Why Normalization Without the Palestinians Won’t Bring Stability to the Middle East