September 15, 2024
This piece originally appeared in The Times of Israel.
When Americans watch the images coming out of the Middle East these days, it is easy to think about the region as hopelessly mired in chaos and war. It is therefore all the more important to recall the promise of a region moving toward cooperation, dialogue, and mutual understanding as represented by the Abraham Accords, which were signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and also Israel and Bahrain, at a White House ceremony on September 15, 2020. The Abraham Accords established fully normal relations between Israel and each of these two Arabian Gulf countries. From the other end of the Arab world, Morocco established its own relations with Israel about three months later.
The Abraham Accords marked a different approach to Arab-Israeli peacemaking, including people-to-people engagement in the form of trade, investment, and tourism, as well as scientific, technological, and medical exchanges, and interreligious dialogues. I have had the privilege to watch these relations flourish since I assumed the position of director of the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) office in Abu Dhabi, three years ago. While there is no question that this new approach to peace has been challenged by the vicious Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023, and the resultant multi-front war that Israel is waging against Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian proxies, it is essential to bear in mind that the Abraham Accords remain intact. It is greatly to the credit of the courageous leadership in the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco that this is the case. The success of these relations is very much an American interest as well, since a peaceful Middle East has been the aim of successive US administrations for decades.
The possibility of normalizing Saudi Arabia’s relations with Israel remains the subject of intensive, ongoing discussions, despite the October 7 Hamas attacks and the subsequent multi-front defensive war in Gaza. While the completion of a series of interrelated Saudi-US and Saudi-Israeli agreements may be dependent on the American political calendar as much as on the end of hostilities in Gaza, the fact that the Saudis continue to express interest in the benefits of deepened security and energy relations with the United States, in tandem with a peace agreement with Israel, is a strong indication that Riyadh’s interest has not waned in building a new regional security and economic architecture.
The Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7 was the product of an Islamist extremist ideology of hate and destruction, the same ideology that gave us the September 11, 2001, attacks. In both cases, terrorism on a vast scale triggered wars that continue to shake the international order. The extremist project aimed at radicalizing the region’s youth threatens peace and stability across the world.
The Abraham Accords represent the antithesis to this fanatical nihilism, an antithesis in which Israel is an accepted part of a Middle East. This is the vision in which Jews, Muslims, and Christians all contribute constructively to the phenomenal economic growth of a region that represents the world’s highest concentration of capital, energy, and transportation connections. Linking in India, as outlined in the India-Middle East Economic Corridor (IMEC) initiative, offers the further possibility of transportation, energy, shipping, and railroad connectivity stretching from India to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, on through Jordan and Israel, and finally Europe, to create a thriving commercial and logistical network that will benefit millions of people.
The Iranian regime’s obsessive pursuit of Israel’s destruction is a threat to the achievement of this hopeful vision. In the past 20 years, Iran has steadily developed its network of proxies and clients throughout the region. Its goals are to tighten a “ring of fire” around Israel, to undermine the security and stability of key Arab neighbors, and to raise the pressure on the United States to withdraw from the Middle East. Iran’s pursuit of Israel’s annihilation is not rhetorical excess, as some claim, but a centerpiece of the regime’s ideology. Israel deserves the support and understanding of the international community as it fights to regain the security of its borders and its airspace. An encouraging development, the result of years of effort by the United States Central Command, is a new regional network of early warning, intelligence sharing, and counter-ballistic missile and counter-drone capabilities. This network, including several Arab countries, contributed significantly to the failure of Iran’s launch of a multi-pronged attack of more than 300 missiles and drones against Israel on the night of April 13 and into the early morning hours of April 14. As Iran moves ever closer to becoming a nuclear-armed power, it is essential that we further develop this regional network, while backing Israel’s efforts to push back the Iranian threat.
As we talk about this cooperation and this new vision for the region, we must also speak about Israeli-Palestinian peace. Before October 7, I believed that the Palestinians would gain a lot if they embraced the Abraham Accords and the regional peace and prosperity that they promised. Now, it will take time to rebuild that sense of hope and opportunity that existed one year ago, but with the support of the emerging networks of regional partners, this work must resume once the fighting ends, the hostages are released, and Hamas’s catastrophic reign of terror in Gaza has ended.
