Khaled Elgindy
U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to cement his legacy in the Middle East were well underway even before he reclaimed the White House. “There’s just no way that President Trump isn’t going to be interested in trying to expand the Abraham Accords,” Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s former Middle East envoy, told thousands of international delegates at Qatar’s Doha Forum in December. The Abraham Accords, a series of normalization deals signed in 2020 by Israel and Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates, remain Trump’s signature foreign policy achievement from his first term, and one hailed by both his allies and his staunchest political opponents—including former President Joe Biden.
Indeed, Biden not only wholeheartedly embraced the Abraham Accords but sought to build on them by securing a landmark deal with Saudi Arabia, the most powerful and influential Arab state. Biden’s offer was that, in return for Israeli-Saudi normalization, the Saudis would get a major upgrade in the strategic partnership with the United States, on par with that of a NATO ally. A Israeli-Saudi agreement would be the biggest breakthrough in Arab-Israeli diplomacy since Egypt broke ranks with 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 nations to follow suit.
This approach to Arab-Israeli peacemaking, however, is contingent on sidestepping the Palestinian question. Until 2020, the consensus among Arab states had been that normalization with Israel would come only after the creation of an independent Palestinian state. The decision by Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates to break ranks therefore effectively robbed Palestinians of an important source of leverage against Israel. Since then, Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel in 2023 and Israel’s devastating war on Gaza have effectively derailed the Israeli-Saudi track, in an explicit reminder that the Palestinian question cannot be ignored or subordinated to Arab-Israeli normalization.
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