Columbia University Press Abraham Accords: The Gulf States, Israel, and the Limits of Normalization

"On August 13, 2020, then President Donald Trump delivered a groundbreaking announcement: his administration had brokered a peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Weeks later, the president triumphantly announced that Bahrain had followed suit. At a ceremony held on the South Lawn of the White House, foreign ministers from the two Gulf states joined Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in signing the Abraham Accords, a treaty that outlined their shared intent to establish a new era of peace and opportunity in the Middle East. The Abraham Accords marked the first peace agreement between Israel and an Arab state in over twenty-five years, and the first ever between Israel and any of the Gulf monarchies. Still in their infancy, the Abraham Accords have upended the Middle East's political landscape and shattered the Arab consensus around the Palestinian issue. The book explores three questions: Why did the Accords happen? How were they orchestrated? And what do they mean both for the parties involved and for the party most visibly excluded from the arrangement: the Palestinians? Elham Fakhro takes a bottom-up approach, looking at the perspectives of civic actors in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia to understand how shared security concerns with Israel, interest in global trade, and a desire for ties to the West led these countries to overlook a longtime solidarity with Palestinians, whose voices Fakhro also includes. She also looks at the new directionsthat Palestinian activists and politicians will need to take in the wake of these growing alliances"-- In August 2020, Donald Trump announced that his administration had brokered a groundbreaking treaty between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the first normalization agreement between Israel and an Arab state in more than twenty years. Soon afterward, Bahrain joined the agreements, known as the Abraham Accords. How were these treaties achieved, and why did the parties involved see normalization as in their interest? In what ways have the accords altered the Middle East’s political landscape, and how have they affected the question of Palestine?This book is a groundbreaking in-depth analysis of the Abraham Accords, shedding new light on their causes and consequences. Elham Fakhro demonstrates how shared security concerns, economic interests, and regional political shockwaves led to a surprising strategic convergence between the Gulf states and Israel, setting the stage for covert relations to come out into the open. She examines the role of the Trump administration in negotiating the agreements and shows how the UAE and Bahrain have instrumentalized the accords to burnish their reputations in Western capitals. Fakhro underscores how Washington’s Middle East policy shifted toward expanding the agreements at the expense of attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—with profound costs. Offering a critical lens on a much-hailed agreement, this book argues that the pursuit of normalization in isolation from a lasting solution to the conflict has entrenched the conditions that continually plunge the Middle East into crisis. This book is a groundbreaking in-depth analysis of the Abraham Accords, shedding new light on their causes and consequences. Autorid: Elham Fakhro