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In September 1993, Arab and Israeli leaders met on the South Lawn of the White House to open what they hoped would be a wide avenue to peace. Bill Clinton, then president of the United States, smiled when Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, and Yassir Arafat, president of the Palestine Liberation Organization, shook hands. He greeted his “brave bet that the future can be better than the past.”
That bet, the Oslo peace accords, seemed like a milestone in conflict resolution. But Rabin was assassinated in 1995 and Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Israeli prime minister, was elected the following year. The Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank continued to expand.
What happened last week in the South Lawn, when President Donald Trump received Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain for the signing of their “normalization” agreements with Israel, is hardly in the same category.
“This day is an axis of history. Heralds a new dawn of peace, ”Netanyahu said. But the United Arab Emirates, much less Bahrain, has never been at war with Israel. So far, this is an improvement on a low-key but growing relationship based mostly on mutual enmity towards Iran.
The grandly named Abraham Accords may be a boon to Trump as he enters the final stages of a difficult re-election campaign. It’s a boost for Netanyahu, haunted by his trial on charges of corruption, handling the Covid-19 pandemic and failing to deliver on electoral promises to annex up to a third of the occupied West Bank. Bahrain’s move was likely spurred on by its sponsor, Saudi Arabia, even though Riyadh is not ready to jump on this train.
Trump continues to hint that more Arab states are rushing to open relations with Israel, in vindication of its policies in the Middle East. These are framed to benefit Israel at the expense of the Palestinians and to paralyze Iran and its regional proxies with sanctions. The United States is renewing its attempts to persuade Sudan, for example, that it can be removed from Washington’s list of state sponsors of terrorism if it follows the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and opens relations with Israel.
There is certainly a wind of change blowing across the Gulf. For many Arab leaders, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is overshadowed by their shared antagonism toward Iran and their hostility toward Turkey. Iran’s construction of a paramilitary axis through the Levant through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, and into Yemen and the Gulf, is seen as a Shiite Muslim incursion by the new Persian imperialists.
Antipathy for Ankara’s military interventions in Arab countries from Syria to Libya, and for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s support for Islamist opponents of the status quo, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, abounds from Cairo to Riyadh.
That’s one of the reasons the Trump administration is working to end the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, the gas-rich maverick emirate. The Qataris are allied with Turkey and have open lines with Iran, with which they share a vast gas field. But they pioneered contact with Israel in the 1990s. One way to end ostracism from their neighbors would be to do so again.
Yet how much of this tentative new dispensation will survive if Trump is defeated by Joe Biden, his Democratic opponent, in November?
Mr. Biden is a pro-Israeli Democrat. But he wants to go back to some form of the nuclear restriction agreement that Iran signed in 2015 with the United States and five world powers, from which Trump withdrew. A President Biden, moreover, may not be as forgiving of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince who has retained Trump’s support despite his recklessness and ruthlessness.
Yet for many new Arab leaders, the cause of a Palestinian state is a past that overshadows the future. Many Palestinians for the most part have given up on their corrupt, faction-dominated and ossified leaders.
Mr. Netanyahu (or a successor) can postpone a de jure incorporation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank within Israel’s expanded borders, while de facto annexation proceeds with incremental expansion of occupied lands.
Taken together, this means that the two-state solution, the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, is over, along with the diplomatic formula to end the conflict by exchanging land for peace. That will gradually force Palestinians in the occupied territories to seek equal rights within an enlarged Israel.
As Daniel Levy, president of the US Middle East Project and former post-Oslo peace negotiator, put it: “Israelis may, over time, discover that the alternative to ‘land for peace’ with the Palestinians is not ‘ peace for peace ‘but’ equality for peace ‘”. In that case, current diplomatic advances with the Arab states will provide no shield against a stormy future for Israel.
