“We’re here this afternoon to change the course of history. After decades of division and conflict, we mark the dawn of a new Middle East,” Trump said from the White House balcony, adding that the agreements would “serve as the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region.” In the following months, both Sudan and Morocco entered their own processes of normalization with Israel.
But the gambit from its inception was met with plenty of cynicism. Neither the UAE nor tiny Bahrain was ever at war with Israel. They already maintained numerous channels of clandestine cooperation with the Jewish state. The agreements they signed, as would later be the case with Sudan and Morocco, came with significant geopolitical sweeteners from the Trump administration. And as nondemocratic states, their ruling elites could not claim to even represent the abiding views of their small numbers of citizens, let alone the critical mass of regional public opinion.
Yet the accords were cast as “a pivot of history,” as Netanyahu put it in September. The monarchs had opted to dispense with nearly two decades of Pan-Arab consensus on Israel by normalizing ties before a meaningful conclusion to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was reached. Their decision reflected a real political exhaustion with the Palestinian cause on the part of some political elites in Arab countries, who are more concerned about the new challenges posed by the Iranian regime or political Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood than the old struggle of the Palestinians. Supporters of the agreements claimed the “comprehensive peace” Trump promised would emerge because of the greater leverage governments like the UAE would now have over both the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Now, with Trump gone and Netanyahu only barely clinging to power, regional politics may already be pivoting away from the Abraham Accords. For all the happy optics of Emiratis vacationing in Tel Aviv and Israelis partying in Dubai, no new countries have joined on since the initial flurry under Trump. While the Biden administration welcomed healthier relations between Israel and the Arab world, it’s unclear how much it intends to build on Trump’s major foreign policy initiative. President Biden delayed his direct outreach to Netanyahu upon taking office; the first Middle Eastern leader that he spoke to was Jordan’s King Abdullah II, whose country is far more directly involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than the Gulf states. Relations between Jordan and Israel are also at a low ebb, a reflection, in part, of Trump and Netanyahu’s bruising disregard for Jordan as a traditional gatekeeper for Palestinian concerns.
Then came this week’s spasm of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, triggered after weeks of unrest and clashes in Jerusalem. On Tuesday, militants in the blockaded Gaza Strip launched one of the largest salvos of rockets ever fired into Israel, killing at least three people.
“The onslaught was even fiercer in Gaza, where Israel waged one of its most intense air campaigns since a 2014 war engulfed the sides for more than a month,” my colleagues reported. “The Israeli military said it struck more than 500 targets in retaliation for the rocket attacks from Gaza. By Tuesday evening, the Palestinian Health Ministry said the strikes had killed 30 Gazans, including 10 children, and injured about 200 others.”
The escalation followed spiking tensions in Jerusalem, where recent marches of far-right Jewish supremacist groups, an Israeli push to evict Palestinian residents in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and brutal crackdowns by Israeli security forces on Palestinian protesters all laid the tinder for a far bigger spark. The unrest spread to cities outside the occupied territories, as Palestinian citizens of Israel rallied in support of their brethren.
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Disclaimer: The Abraham Accords have already become a Middle East afterthought By Ishaan Tharoor - Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Latheefarook.com point-of-view