Abraham Accords: Trump's Middle East dealmaking still reverberates a year later
American, Israeli and Arab diplomats are celebrating Wednesday’s one-year anniversary of the signing of the Abraham Accords — the historic normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab powers that many saw as the greatest diplomatic game-changer of the Trump administration.While President Biden has yet to appoint a special envoy to focus on building upon the agreements, White House officials emphasized on Tuesday that the administration “strongly supports” the normalization deals and is “working to expand” them.15, 2020, hosted then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain for a formal signing ceremony on the White House grounds, hailing the deal as the “dawn of a new age” for Middle East diplomacy.
Trump in other foreign policy areas, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is slated to gather for a virtual event Friday with his counterparts from Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Bahrain to mark the anniversary, while U.N.
While critics say the Biden administration remains reluctant to promote the Trump-era initiative, foreign policy experts generally contend the administration has had little choice but to embrace the Abraham Accords.Partisan politics clouded the process,” said Jonathan Schanzer, a Middle East scholar with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
He added that the “environment is still ripe” in the Middle East for the accords to expand.The accords were made possible by an unprecedented Trump administration push to pressure Arab and Israeli leaders to put aside long-standing disputes over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and instead focus on direct diplomacy between Israel and individual Gulf Arab powers.Kushner who served as a top Middle East adviser to the president, elevated the push throughout 2019, culminating with the September 2020 ceremony inking of the normalization agreements between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain.
The accords, named after the prophet recognized by Judaism and Islam, were subsequently expanded to include diplomatic deals by Israel with Morocco and Sudan.But there are indications that the issue is being closely considered in Riyadh, and there is consensus among regional experts that the agreements marked a milestone: the first public acknowledgments of Israel by Arab nations since Egypt and Jordan broke from the rest of the Middle East and established diplomatic ties with Israel in 1979 and 1994, respectively.
The accords have drawn sharp criticism, most notably from Iranian, Turkish and Palestinian leaders, who argue that they undermine a long-standing Arab consensus that recognition of Israel should be granted only in exchange for Israeli agreement to give the Palestinians their own state.The accords, the Palestinians argue, have only emboldened the Israeli government to accelerate the annexation of Palestinian-claimed areas of the West Bank.But it’s the historic nature of the accords that the celebrations have been mainly focused on, with some emphasizing the potential for expanded normalizations and relations between Israel and Arab powers across the Middle East, including, potentially Saudi Arabia.Some analysts say the Biden administration, distracted by COVID-19 and the Afghanistan crisis, has dragged its feet in getting behind such thinking, having moved quickly during its first weeks in office to remove National Security Council staff who had worked on the accords.“By neglecting to take ownership of the Abraham Accords and mumbling only faint praise for Israel‘s new ties with former Arab adversaries, [President Biden] is helping drag Arab-Israeli peace — the rock of bipartisan Middle East policy — into partisan politics,” Mr“We believe these accords demonstrate the benefits to breaking down barriers and increasing cooperation in the Middle East,” the spokesperson said, “particularly in ways that promote economic development and people-to-people ties.”