May 10, 2025
This piece originally appeared in Al Ahdath Al Maghribia.
As President Trump prepares to depart for Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, expectations of consequential returns couldn’t be higher.
His special Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, promised at an Israeli Independence Day reception a week before the scheduled trip “a lot of announcements, very, very shortly, which we hope will yield great progress by next year.”
A day later, the President himself declared, “We're going to have a very, very big announcement to make, like as big as it gets.”
In a period of tension and transition across the Middle East, the prospect of dramatic change – of an American-led initiative to settle historic disputes and yield enduring peace – is tantalizing.
It also has precedent. In 1991, after leading an international coalition to expel the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the United States – as majority partner with the then-crumbling Soviet Union – organized the Middle East peace conference in Madrid that laid the groundwork for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, setting the stage for the Oslo Accords and the Jordan-Israel peace treaty in the three years that followed.
That further regional momentum stalled and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remained resistant to successive peace-making efforts doesn’t detract from the significance of Madrid. One can even trace a jagged arc of dialogue and quiet cooperation over the decades from Madrid to the 2020 signing of the Abraham Accords, the signal foreign policy achievement of the first Trump administration.
Which brings us to today – a moment of turmoil but also of opportunity. In recent days, Israel’s Security Cabinet approved an intensified military offensive against Hamas in Gaza, the Iranian-backed Houthis struck an area in Israel near Ben Gurion Airport, for which Israel forcefully retaliated, and it was announced that the temporarily disrupted U.S.-Iran nuclear talks are back on track.
With 59 hostages still held in Gaza (though many no longer alive), the wounds of October 7, 2023, far from healed, and the region still suffering from the furious aftermath of the Hamas atrocities, President Trump has it within his power to reassert American leadership and fundamentally alter realities in the Middle East – not with another international conference but with a concerted effort to advance Israel’s full integration in the region and restore hope for achieving self-governance for the Palestinian people.
It is an ambitious goal – but the steps forward are within reach.
First, the longstanding obstacles to regional peace must be removed, beginning with the state that has invested many billions of dollars in undermining regional stability, subverting normalization, and preparing for all-out war with Israel. The Iranian regime’s network of terror proxies must be dismantled – a project Israel has significantly advanced with its decapitation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and its weakening of Hamas’s offensive capabilities – and its military nuclear ambitions abandoned. With maximum economic pressure, the credible threat of imminent military action, and the support of regional and European allies, negotiations the President has already initiated could yield success.
Second, the era of half-hearted, unconvincing assertions of Israel’s acceptance by its Arab neighbors – when they have even made such assertions – must end. The Jewish people’s right to statehood in their native land must be recognized, and their cooperation – which Israel has repeatedly promised – in meeting regional challenges must be welcomed. Encouraging statements in this regard have been made over the years by wise Arab leaders, and the endurance of the Abraham Accords through 19 months of war in Gaza proves the sincerity of those states’ commitment to peace, but the message overwhelmingly heard in Israel from across the Arab world is one of rejection, condemnation, and threat. In return for an American assurance of intensified strategic partnership with Arab states, President Trump can and must break through the region’s resistance to normalization.
Finally, the President can set the region on a pathway to securing self-governance for the Palestinian people. This pathway will not yield statehood tomorrow. That step can only come when Israelis and Palestinians trust each other, recognize the necessity of sharing their sliver of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and when forces of incitement no longer seize, or even dominate, the popular narrative. But by putting forward, in consultation with Israel, a credible “day after” governance plan for Gaza that excludes extremists, and laying out the conditions for establishing a nonmilitarized, non-threatening, self-governing Palestinian political entity, the President could finally unfreeze this bitter, frozen conflict – and bring hope to the region. He could start where his “Peace to Prosperity” plan, unveiled at the start of his first administration’s last year in office, left off; significant groundwork has already been laid.
The Abraham Accords were the most positive development in the Middle East in almost three decades, tripling the number of Arab states moving to recognize Israel. Building on that historic achievement in a time when trust has worn thin will be a heavy lift. But with American prestige and power, the glaringly obvious benefits of Arab-Israeli integration and interdependence, and President Trump’s unique stature in the region, it is a goal worth pursuing.
