How the Abraham Accords Broke the Old Formula for Middle East Peace

For about forty years, the foreign-policy establishment held a belief with the confidence of a priest explaining the tides. It went like this: the Palestinian issue is the key. Solve it, and the Arab world will make peace with Israel. Don't solve it, and nobody will. Every diplomat, every think-tank panel, every serious op-ed said the same thing, and anyone who suggested otherwise was treated as if he had proposed a trip to Mars by pogo stick.

Then, in the late summer of 2020, a handful of Arab governments walked into the White House and made peace anyway.

I want to make an argument about what that tells us. It is not that the Palestinian question is unimportant. It is that the old formula, as a rule of how the world must work, turned out to be something else: a veto. And a veto, unlike a law of nature, can be taken away.

The thesis

Here is my case in four numbered steps.

1. For decades, the established view held that normalization between Israel and Arab states had to wait for a settlement of the Palestinian issue.
2. That view was presented as realism, a description of how Arab governments and publics would always behave.
3. In 2020, several Arab governments acted against it, because their own interests had changed.
4. Therefore the old formula was a political position, one that gave a veto over regional peace to whoever held out longest. When circumstances changed, so did the veto.

If that sounds abstract, the history makes it concrete.

The old wall

Start with where the Arab world was after 1967. In September of that year, an Arab League summit in Khartoum adopted a position often summarized as the "three noes": no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. That was the official stance of the Arab states for a decade.

It cracked once. Egypt's president, Anwar Sadat, broke with it by flying to Jerusalem in November 1977, and the road led through the Camp David Accords of September 1978 to the Egypt-Israel peace treaty signed on March 26, 1979. Egypt was the largest Arab country and the one with the strongest army, and it got the Sinai back. The Arab League responded by suspending Egypt's membership and moving its headquarters out of Cairo. Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by members of his own army.

Jordan followed on October 26, 1994, with a treaty signed in the Arava desert. These two peace treaties were the exceptions that proved the rule. Both involved countries that shared a border with Israel and had fought it. Both were reached through direct negotiation, with American help. And both left the broader Arab world pretty much where it was.

In March 2002, the Arab League endorsed a plan put forward by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, known as the Arab Peace Initiative. It offered the prospect of normal relations between Israel and the entire Arab world, but only after Israel withdrew from the territories it captured in 1967, agreed to a Palestinian state, and found a just solution to the refugee issue. It was a serious proposal. It was also a package deal in which the Palestinian settlement came first and normalization last.

Think about what that structure meant. It meant that a Palestinian leadership that rejected a settlement could, by refusing, freeze everyone else's relations with Israel. The party least willing to compromise held the key to the whole lock. A formula that puts the veto in the hands of the most intransigent actor is not a recipe for peace. It is a recipe for waiting.

What changed

By 2020, three things had moved.

The Iran problem. Several Gulf governments looked across the water at Iran's missile program, its proxies, and its regional ambitions, and concluded that they shared a major threat with Israel. When your neighbor's biggest worry is also your biggest worry, he starts to look like a potential partner. I cover the history of that threat in From the Shah to the Hostages, the Real History of America and Iran.

The economy. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain had spent years trying to diversify away from oil. Israel is a leader in technology, water management, agriculture, cybersecurity, and medicine. A deal offered investment, tourism, and trade.

The fatigue of the old posture. A generation of younger Gulf leaders and citizens had grown up in a region where the old confrontation had produced a great deal of rhetoric and few results for them. They were less interested in subsidizing a veto.

Then came the diplomacy, and credit goes where it is due. The Trump administration, with senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and a small team, pursued the agreements by talking directly to the Gulf capitals and offering things they wanted, rather than waiting for a Palestinian breakthrough that had been "imminent" for twenty-five years. Whatever you think of that administration, the approach worked in the narrow sense that it produced signed agreements.

The dates

• August 13, 2020: the United States, Israel, and the UAE announced an agreement to normalize relations. As part of it, Israel agreed to suspend its plan to apply sovereignty to parts of the West Bank.
• September 11, 2020: Bahrain announced it would follow.
• September 15, 2020: the signing ceremony at the White House. The Israeli prime minister and the foreign ministers of the UAE and Bahrain signed. The documents were called the Abraham Accords, after the patriarch revered by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike.
• October 23, 2020: Sudan announced that it would normalize relations. The United States moved to remove Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, a step with real financial meaning for Sudan's government, which was emerging from a period of upheaval.
• December 10, 2020: Morocco announced its normalization with Israel, and the United States announced recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara.

Note what sits inside that list. Every deal involved something. The UAE got a suspension of annexation plans. Sudan got a path off the terrorism list. Morocco got a statement of American recognition on an issue it cared about. That is not a scandal. It's what diplomacy is. Sadat got the Sinai. It does mean that anyone who says these were gifts from Israel to the Arab world, or gifts from the Arab world to Israel, is missing the trading.

What the old formula got right

Let me give the establishment its due, because a good argument should not need a straw man.

The Palestinian cause has been, for generations, a powerful symbol across the Arab world, and no government that signs a deal with Israel can pretend otherwise. The experts who warned that normalization would meet resistance in the street were not inventing the resistance. They were right that it existed. Where they went wrong was in treating it as a permanent wall, rather than a cost that a government might decide to pay.

They also had history on their side in one narrow respect. The Camp David framework of 1978 included a second document on the Palestinian question, a plan for autonomy talks that came to nothing. Egypt made its peace, and the broader settlement stayed unfinished. Anyone who thought the 1979 treaty would produce a regional domino effect was disappointed for forty years. So when the diplomats said it was hard, they had the scars to show for it.

But notice the gap between "hard" and "impossible." The formula said that a Palestinian settlement was a precondition, and the precondition was being used as an excuse. When the Emirates and Bahrain decided that their own security and prosperity mattered more than waiting, they showed that it was a choice. That is the test of a law of nature: does it stop applying when people stop obeying it? Gravity does not. The formula did.

This is also where the economic logic deserves a closer look. Small, wealthy states with ambitious modernization programs do not need Israel's help to survive. They want it because the partnership is useful. It is a very different thing for a government to say "we will cooperate with the country that leads the region in water technology and cyber defense because it helps our people" than to say "we will cooperate because we were pressured." The first kind of arrangement is sturdier. It lasts as long as it keeps paying off.

The strongest objection

Now let me do what the format demands and give the other side its best case.

The critics have three points.

First, the accords left the Palestinians out. A deal that normalizes relations between Israel and four Arab states does nothing, on its own terms, for the Palestinians' political status. If anything, critics say, it reduced their leverage, because the old formula had given them influence over the whole Arab world, and now that was gone.

Second, the accords were about governments, not peoples. Governments sign treaties, but publics do not always follow, and a peace between rulers is only as durable as the rulers. Egypt and Jordan have what is often called a "cold peace," with limited popular warmth, and these new ones might turn out the same.

Third, some of the deals involved trade-offs that were not about Israel at all, such as Morocco's recognition on the Western Sahara, which many international observers view as a separate question with its own history.

These are fair points. I don't think the proper reaction is to dismiss them.

The answer

Here is the reply, in order.

On the Palestinians. It is true the accords did not settle their status. They were never designed to. But it does not follow that they hurt the cause of a settlement. A fair reading is that the old formula had stopped delivering anything. After decades of the Palestinian question being treated as the gatekeeper, the gate was not opening. When something fails for decades, trying a different approach is not a betrayal. And the accords did produce one concrete benefit for the Palestinian issue: the UAE agreement suspended annexation plans. Whether that suspension lasts is a matter for the future, but it was a real outcome of the diplomacy.

I would add that a settlement of the Palestinian question still requires negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians. Nothing in the accords changes that. What they changed was the assumption that nobody else could do business with Israel until it happened.

On governments versus peoples. Right, a peace between rulers is only as durable as the rulers. But that was true of Egypt in 1979. The cold peace there has outlasted many governments and many wars, and it has held in the sense that matters most, which is that the two armies have not fought each other since. If a cold peace is the worst outcome, it is a lot better than the alternative. And the new agreements have a feature the older ones lacked: direct commercial and people-to-people ties that give each side a reason to keep the arrangement. I'll leave the volume of trade for you to check at the relevant ministries, because the figures change and I would rather not guess.

On side deals. True, and the same objection could be made of nearly every treaty in history. Camp David came with American aid to both Egypt and Israel. The Senate's treaties have always come with attachments. What matters is whether the whole package serves American interests, and a peace that ends a state of war and puts more regional partners at the same table does.

Why this matters for America

Look at it from the vantage point of an American family. A region where more governments talk to each other is a region where there is less risk of miscalculation. It's a region where American diplomats can work with partners who share information, trade, and a common interest in containing a hostile regime. It also lets Washington allocate its attention and its forces more wisely.

There is a broader lesson, and it is about how Washington thinks. The consensus that said "this cannot be done" was made up of intelligent people who had read every book. They were wrong not because they were fools, but because they treated a political arrangement as a physical fact. Conservatives have a good reason to remember this whenever Washington's experts tell us a thing is impossible. Sometimes the thing is simply untried.

I would add one caution to my own side. A single breakthrough does not make a permanent peace. The agreements need tending. They need to be defended against spoilers, and they will be tested whenever the region heats up. If we claim the achievement, we also claim the job of keeping it.

For a view of how the Senate and the presidency share responsibility for this kind of agreement, see Why Republicans Said the Iran Deal Should Have Been a Treaty. For the longer history of the alliance behind it, see From Truman's Recognition to Camp David, the US-Israel Alliance in Dates. And for a candid set of questions skeptics ask about the broader relationship, read Eleven Hard Questions About Israel and American Interests, Answered.

The bottom line

• The old rule, that no Arab state would normalize with Israel before the Palestinian issue was settled, was a political position. In 2020 four governments acted against it.
• Each deal had a price, from the suspension of annexation plans to the removal of Sudan from the terrorism list to recognition for Morocco. That is what negotiation looks like.
• The fair criticism stands: the Palestinian question is still open, and a peace between governments needs to take root among peoples.
• Next time someone tells you a diplomatic outcome is impossible because "everyone knows" it cannot happen, ask what would happen if one party stopped holding the veto.
• Ask your representatives what they are doing to keep these agreements working, and to bring in more partners.