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. An 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.

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.

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.

Despite these obstacles, Trump is keen to finish the job he began in his first term and Biden carried forward, by clinching a U.S.-Israeli-Saudi mega-deal in a return to the original vision of the Abraham Accords, which involves upgrading Israel and downgrading the Palestinians. All signs indicate that Trump continues to believe that Israel’s integration in the region is more important to Arab leaders than is the cause of Palestinian freedom. According to Greenblatt, it is a mistake to “think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the be-all and end-all, and if everything gets resolved between Israel and the Palestinians, all will be great in the Middle East.”

Critics of the Abraham Accords, however, have never claimed that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would end all other disputes in the region. They have instead argued the opposite: that regional peace and security are not possible without a resolution of the Palestinian question. Indeed, the central premise of the Abraham Accords—that regional peace and stability could be achieved while sidelining Palestinians—has been totally upended by Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israel, and everything that has happened since. A cease-fire deal that went into effect this week underscores the centrality of the Palestinians to regional security and stability, but it also potentially creates diplomatic space for renewed Israeli-Saudi engagement under Trump’s leadership. 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 could coexist with war, chaos, and dispossession in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Peace on paper

Despite being lauded as a diplomatic triumph, the Abraham Accords were premised on a number of faulty assumptions. Indeed, much of the excitement surrounding the normalization deals in 2020 had less to do with their intrinsic value than with the almost reflexive need, particularly in Washington and other Western capitals, to rally around something that was so obviously in Israel’s interests, regardless of its actual alignment with U.S. policy objectives, 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 the U.S.-led diplomatic process and a key reason for its failure over the past several decades.

Although many have tried to fit the square peg of normalization into the round hole of a two-state solution, the fact remains that the Abraham Accords were originally conceived as a way to bypass the Palestinian question and suppress Palestinian agency in the hope that Palestinians would have no choice but to accept whatever long-term arrangement the United States, Israel, and the region imposed on them. In fact, the Abraham Accords were themselves one of the many trends working against a two-state solution—a sign that certain Arab states had moved on and were no longer willing to subordinate their bilateral or geopolitical interests vis-à-vis Israel to the unicorn of an independent Palestinian state.

The absence of constraints on Israel has left Palestinians ever more vulnerable. 

Moreover, the Abraham Accords removed one of the few sources of leverage Palestinians had in their already highly asymmetrical conflict with Israel: pressure from Arab neighbors whose publics were still overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. In so doing, they also eliminated some of the last remaining incentives Israel had to end its occupation of Palestinian territory or otherwise acknowledge Palestinian rights. The absence of constraints on Israel has left Palestinians ever more vulnerable to the whims of an increasingly violent and maximalist Israeli occupation, which saw unprecedented settlement expansion, settler violence, and Israeli army repression against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as more routine wars in Gaza in 2021 and 2022. These issues have only worsened under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose return in late 2022 marked the arrival of the most far-right government in Israel’s history.

Meanwhile, claims that Arab states could leverage their budding relations with Israel to advance the cause of the Palestinians or that of a two-state solution have simply never materialized. Neither Bahrain, Morocco, nor the United Arab Emirates have sought to intervene with Israel to prevent home demolitions or evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem, or to address record-breaking settlement expansion and settler violence across the West Bank. They have not wielded their supposed influence to step in regarding Israel’s assault on Gaza—an offensive that has already killed more than 46,000 Palestinians and annihilated most of its civilian infrastructure. On the other hand, Emirati officials have shown little compunction about doing business with Israeli settlers or investing in occupation infrastructure such as Israeli checkpoints. Whereas Biden and congressional Democrats have strained to elide these inconsistencies, Trump and his fellow Republicans, most of whom have already abandoned even the pretense of support for a two-state solution, can simply ignore these contradictions altogether.

Unfinished business

Even with the slight opening provided by the cease-fire, however, bringing the Saudis into the Abraham Accords will remain an uphill battle for the Trump administration. If prospects for an Israeli-Saudi deal seemed remote before October 7, the environment today is considerably less hospitable. The horrific scenes of death, destruction, and starvation coming out of Gaza over the last 15 months have inflamed public opinion across the Arab and Muslim worlds and shredded Israeli and U.S. credibility across the global South. (Some traditional Western allies in the global North, such as Ireland, Norway, and Spain, have also begun distancing themselves from Israel.) Even the United Arab Emirates, once the poster child for Arab-Israeli normalization, has been forced to downplay its ties to Israel: Emirati businesses no longer boast of their Israeli connections, and UAE leaders’ once warm relationship with Netanyahu has cooled. In other words, the Gaza war may not have ruptured the Abraham Accords—but it has effectively put them on ice.

For the Saudis, the price of normalization with Israel has increased considerably since October 7 and the ensuing assault on Gaza. Whereas the country’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, had previously sought only a rhetorical commitment from Israel to a Palestinian state, Riyadh is now demanding concrete steps toward statehood. Having despaired of U.S. mediation, the Saudis have teamed up with France to launch a new initiative aimed at rescuing whatever may be left of a two-state solution. In any case, it would be difficult for the crown prince, who is not known for his sentimentality toward Palestine, to normalize relations with a state that he and his government have accused of committing “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” The International Criminal Court’s indictments of Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity present yet another barrier for Riyadh. Saudi Arabia’s current stance may be best reflected by a communiqué adopted by the Arab-Islamic summit held in Riyadh last month, which not only reiterated the genocide charge but called for expelling Israel from the United Nations—that is, precisely the opposite of normalization.

Israeli-Saudi normalization will remain an uphill battle for the Trump administration. 

Moreover, as the costs of regional engagement with Israel have gone up, the expected returns have only gone down. The one thing Saudi and other (Persian) Gulf leaders value above all else is stability. But the last 15 months—which have seen Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, an extensive war with and occupation of Lebanon, tit-for-tat strikes with Iran, and the invasion and seizure of large swaths of Syrian territory following the fall of the Bashar al-Assad 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 one of endless bloodshed and instability. What is on offer today is not a vision involving the peaceful integration of Israel in the region but one based on Israel’s violent domination of it.

Not only have the Abraham Accords not brought peace and security to the Middle East, but they have actually helped to produce the opposite by emboldening Israeli triumphalism, entrenching Israeli maximalism, and ensuring Israeli impunity. The belief that Arab-Israeli normalization could proceed over the heads or at the expense of the Palestinians was at best misguided and at worst dangerous, as recent events clearly demonstrate. It took nearly three years and the deadliest violence in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the Biden administration to finally come to terms with this reality; the Trump administration would do well to learn the same lesson.

Khaled Elgindy is a Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the author of Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, From Balfour to Trump.

(Source: Foreign Affairs)