The Middle East Accords: An Arab Perspective.

• Author: Harb, Imad K.
• Position: Abraham Accords - Viewpoint essay

Title: The Middle East Accords: An Arab Perspective

Author: Imad K. Harb

Text:

The recent agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Sudan will not help the cause of regional peace.

On August 13, President Donald Trump boasted of shepherding the so-called "Abraham Accords" for normalizing relations between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel. (i) Almost a month later, the president announced that Israel and the Kingdom of Bahrain will follow suit. (ii) Less than two weeks before the US presidential election, he added Sudan to the list of normalizing countries. (iii) The three will become the third, fourth, and fifth Arab states, respectively, to normalize relations with Israel after Egypt and Jordan. The UAE also announced on August 29 that it will suspend its participation in the decades-old Arab boycott of Israel and establish economic relations and cooperation with it; (iv) and Bahrain and Sudan have done the same. (v)

The Emirati and Bahraini agreements became official on September 15 when President Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Emirati and Bahraini foreign ministers Abdulla bin Zayed and Abdul-Latif al-Zayani signed them while declaring that they will help peace in the Middle East. (vi) President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have also floated the idea of others supposedly lining up for normalization. (vii) Despite Sudan joining in on October 23, however, there are clear indications that some of the other potential normalizers--such as Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Morocco--are balking at the prospect (viii). While the big prize appears to be Saudi Arabia, this has not yet come to pass and may not happen, at least not before the U.S. presidential election. (ix) But given that the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and other suggested countries were not actively at war with Israel, signing such agreements is mere wheel-spinning away from the real arena of peacemaking. Indeed, only serious negotiations leading to an equitable and fair resolution that guarantees the Palestinians' national and human rights can achieve the goal of peace in the Middle East. The more Israel and the United States continue to bury their heads in the sand about the centrality of the Palestinian question for said peace, the more likely it is that instability and deadly and costly conflict will persist in the region.

The Agreements Do Not Secure Peace

While President Trump thinks Israel's agreements with the three states are historic and expects them to lead to a long-awaited and sought-after peace in the Middle East, the reality is that they are anything but. Only a peace between Israel and the Palestinians will serve the ultimate goal of giving the Middle East the respite it has sought for over seven decades. To be sure, Israel has already become normalized with some Arab officials for quite some time, in political, economic, security, and other terms. (x) The question remains as to whether said normalization will become popular and change the Arab public's opinion about Israel, which has expanded and continues to threaten further expansion at the expense of the Palestinians.

In a public opinion poll (xi) conducted between 2019 and 2020 in 13 Arab countries totaling more than 300 million people, a full 89 percent of respondents said Israel represented the greatest threat to the Arab region, followed by the United States (81 percent) and Iran (67 percent). A full 88 percent rejected recognizing Israel and only six percent welcomed establishing diplomatic relations with it, citing its expansionist policies and its racism toward Palestinians. Seventy-nine percent said Palestine remains a major concern for all Arabs. The above-mentioned poll showed that 79 percent of Sudanese oppose relations with Israel before it ends its occupation of Palestinian lands and allows the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. These figures have been practically unchanged since 2011. It is thus no wonder that the Egyptian-Israeli and Jordanian-Israeli peace treaties of 1979 and 1994, respectively, remain examples of a cold peace decades after they were signed. And it will not be surprising if the latest agreements fail to change this reality. There also has been no state of war between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, or Sudan that the new agreements could end. In fact, the normalizing states' old commitment to a belligerent stance toward Israel has generally been limited to obligatory solidarity at the United Nations and an Arab economic boycott. Many Palestinians believe that the UAE leaders' contention that the normalization project was to...