By Bret Stephens
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
In November 2013, I participated in an
interview at the Wall Street Journal
with Alwaleed bin Talal, a Saudi prince of legendary riches and blunt, if
sometimes unsavory, views.
To New Yorkers with long memories,
Alwaleed was the man who, after September 11, 2001, had sought to donate $10
million to the city, along with the suggestion that the U.S. government “adopt
a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause.” (Then-mayor Rudy Giuliani
returned the check.) To the Journal,
he was a major shareholder in News Corporation, the paper’s parent company.
Getting a meeting with the editorial board, of which I was then a member, was
not a problem.
It turned out to be an exceptionally
interesting interview. Three months earlier, Barack Obama had surrendered his
red line in Syria, refusing to make good on his prior threats of military
action in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Instead, Obama
seized on a Russian proposal to have Assad voluntarily relinquish his declared
arsenal—a proposal that proved remarkably easy to violate while heralding a new
era of American fecklessness in the Middle East.
“The U.S. has to have a foreign policy,”
Alwaleed said that day. “Well-defined, well-structured. You don’t have it right
now, unfortunately. It’s just complete chaos. Confusion. No policy. I mean, we
feel it. We sense it.”
As dismayed as Alwaleed was by Obama’s
climbdown in Syria, he was even more alarmed by Obama’s turn toward Iran, in
the form of an interim nuclear deal that would later become the 2015 Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. The prince warned that Iran’s
supposedly moderate leaders were not to be trusted, and that the only policy
that could work was to “put maximum pressure now on the United States not to
succumb to the president of Iran’s soft talk.” He also hinted that Saudi Arabia
had a nuclear option thanks to an “arrangement with Pakistan.”
And then Alwaleed dropped a little bomb of
his own. “For the first time,” he said, “Saudi Arabian interests and Israel’s
are almost parallel. It’s incredible.”
That a prominent Saudi prince was willing
to say it on the record, in the pages of a leading U.S. daily and in impolitic
defiance of an American president, proved how right he was.
In many ways, the meeting with Alwaleed
was the first hint of what, seven years later, would bear fruit in the peace
deals known as the Abraham Accords. Israel signed the first of them in
September with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. It is in the process of
finalizing (with the help of some U.S. diplomatic bribery) ententes with
Morocco and Sudan, will probably soon make a deal with Oman, and seems
ultimately destined to strike one with Saudi Arabia itself. The prospect that
the Arab–Israeli conflict, long thought to be the world’s most intractable,
might be brought to an end much sooner than anyone dreamed possible offers
powerful lessons to the incoming Biden administration for how to conduct a
successful Mideast peace policy—provided it has the humility and good sense to
learn them.
This is a story in three parts. The first
is about the Arab world and its belated reckoning with the consequences of
decades of domestic misrule. The second is about Israel, and the policies it
pursued in defiance of relentless international condemnation. The third is
about the United States, and what it can achieve when it abandons decades of
conventional wisdom regarding the nature of the Middle East’s problems and the
solutions to them.
ONE
THE ARAB RECKONING
It is not much of an exaggeration to say
that Arab civilization at the beginning of this millennium resembled nothing so
much as a gigantic prison of desperate inmates, dangerous gang leaders, cruel
wardens, and crumbling walls. It was also a civilization that had long been in
denial about the causes of its failures. As the historian Bernard Lewis pointed
out at the time, for centuries much of the Arab world had developed an almost
reflexive habit of accounting for its misfortunes by asking: “Who did this to
us?” There was never a shortage of scapegoats: Mongol invasions in the 13th
century, Ottoman overlords in the 17th and 18th, British and French
imperialists in the 19th and 20th, and then, after 1948, the Zionists and their
friends in America.
The endless search for outside culprits,
Lewis noted, served to deflect a more difficult, if also more productive,
question: “What did we do wrong?” That began to change in 2002, when the United
Nations Development Program published the first of five landmark studies, written
by prominent Arab scholars. The Arab Human Development Reports collectively
served as a kind of 360-degree mirror for a civilization that had spent decades
trying either to deny its own problems or otherwise locate their source in
anyone and anything except itself.
Among their findings: Spain translated
more foreign books into Spanish in a single year than the Arab world had
translated foreign books into Arabic in a millennium. Spain also had a larger
gross domestic product than all 22 states of the Arab League combined. Half of
all Arab women were illiterate. Per capita income growth in Arab countries was
the second-lowest in the world, after sub-Saharan Africa’s, with 20 percent of
people living on less than $2 a day. Unemployment was high and getting higher,
especially among the youth. In terms of demography, nearly 40 percent of all
Arabs were under the age of 14, the largest youth cohort in the world.
What kind of future could such a world
have in store for them?
Though the report contained the obligatory
throat-clearing about the alleged evils of Israeli occupation, it was
refreshingly candid about where the real problems lay. The Arab world, it
argued, suffered from critical deficits in political and personal freedoms,
educational resources and scientific know-how, and women’s empowerment. These
were not the result of perfidious outsiders, but of repressive leaders, corrupt
elites, and a broader inability to master the challenges of modernity. Barring
urgent domestic reforms, the inevitable endpoint for such failures was social
collapse of the sort that would soon come to places like Libya, Yemen, and
Syria.
If the conclusions of the Development
Report seemed academic, its point would quickly be driven home by a more direct
set of challenges. From about 2003 onward, Islamist terrorism—hitherto directed
mainly against non-Muslims—turned the weight of its savagery inward. The same
Arab leaders and secular intellectuals who privately saw the attacks of 9/11 as
an overdue comeuppance for the United States, or had celebrated suicide attacks
against Israelis during the second intifada, quickly learned how easily such
methods could be turned against them. That was true not least in Saudi Arabia,
once the leading financier and practitioner of Islamic extremism and then,
suddenly, among its leading targets.
The hard consequences of Arab economic
mismanagement came home to roost as well. In 2007–08, global food prices rose
sharply. Arab countries, which import most of their food, were especially
vulnerable. In Egypt, consumer prices for bread rose as much as fivefold in the
months before the 2011 collapse of Hosni Mubarak’s regime. In 2014, oil prices
collapsed, brought about in part by a fracking revolution that lessened U.S.
dependence on Middle Eastern energy.
The hardest shock of all was the Obama
administration’s abrupt abandonment of decades of U.S. policy in support of our
allies. This came in the form of serial decisions to call for Mubarak’s
departure, withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq, steer clear of involvement in
Syria, accept a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, negotiate a nuclear
deal with Tehran guaranteed to strengthen its regional hand, and treat Russia’s
military reentry in the Middle East with near-indifference. If much of the Arab
world’s street had been infuriated by the Bush administration’s invasion of
Iraq, its leaders were no less appalled by the policy of American disengagement
carried out deliberately under Obama.
Taken together, these developments
underscored to Arab leaders—at least those still standing—the tenuousness of
their position. Could they survive major internal upheaval? Would the U.S.
continue to guarantee their security? Was it possible to return the genie of
Islamist fanaticism to its bottle? How could they reform their economies and
societies in ways that provided opportunity and hope? Above all, what could be
done to halt Iran’s seemingly unstoppable rise?
TWO
ISRAEL’S RISE
As Arab leaders struggled to come to grips
with their vulnerabilities, Israel was gaining a keener sense of its own
strengths.
The Jewish state had also been in a bad
state at the turn of the millennium. The misbegotten 1993 Oslo Accords
collapsed seven years later in a diplomatic humiliation at Camp David for
then-prime minister Ehud Barak. This was followed by an eruption of Palestinian
terrorism, in which more than 1,000 Israelis—the proportional equivalent of
43,000 Americans—were murdered. The economy went into a deep recession. The
Israeli left, along with its fellow travelers abroad, could not understand the
flaw in their almost messianic belief that the creation of a Palestinian state
had to be realized at great speed and almost any cost. Media solons insisted
that Israel could not possibly defeat terrorism through military means. In many
places, Israel was treated as a pariah state.
Yet within a few years, and despite
stumbles such as the 2006 Lebanon War, Israel had turned itself around. The IDF
crushed the second intifada. The economy recovered and thrived, with GDP rising
from $132 billion in 2000 to almost $400 billion in 2019. Israel’s demographic
picture did not, contrary to the usual anxious predictions, darken: On the
contrary, as the Herzl Institute’s Ofir Haivry has shown, Israel’s fertility
rate is by far the most robust in the developed world, while fertility rates in
the Arab world (including among Palestinians) have gone into a steep decline.
On the diplomatic front, Jerusalem significantly strengthened its ties with
India, Japan, Greece, Oman, Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, and Chad—all
countries of strategic significance to Israel. And while Israel fought three
wars against Hamas following the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, the Palestinian
question has, for the time being at least, become less of an existential threat
and more of a chronic condition, manageable rather than fatal.
What makes Israel’s progress all the more
remarkable is that it achieved it by consistently defying the reigning
international consensus as to what it should do.
In 2011, then-secretary of defense Leon
Panetta said that Israel was becoming increasingly isolated in the region and
that it was time for it to get to “the damn table.” Said Panetta: “I understand
the view that this is not the time to pursue peace, and that the Arab awakening
further imperils the dream of a safe and secure, Jewish and democratic Israel. But
I disagree with that view.”
In 2014, Obama warned in a Bloomberg
interview that time was running out for Israel to come to terms with the
Palestinians. “If Palestinians come to believe that the possibility of a
contiguous sovereign Palestinian state is no longer within reach,” the
president said, “then our ability to manage the international fallout is going
to be limited.”
Secretary of State John Kerry added his
own confident prediction in 2016. “There will be no separate peace between
Israel and the Arab world,” he said. “I’ve heard several prominent politicians
in Israel sometimes saying, ‘Well, the Arab world’s in a different place now,
and we just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab
world, and we’ll deal with the Palestinians.’ No. No, no, and no.”
What was it that Israel’s leaders
understood about the region that the Obama administration didn’t? The answer
could fill a book. But four main points stand out.
For starters, Israelis distrusted the
so-called Arab street and hence were not enthusiastic about the so-called Arab
Spring. Where many Westerners saw images of Cairo’s Tahrir Square filled with
anti-Mubarak demonstrators and thought of the pro-democracy protests in Eastern
Europe in the late 1980s, many Israelis were put in mind of the mass
demonstrations that brought down the Shah of Iran in the late 1970s. In other
words, Israelis understood, in a way that relatively few Westerners did, that
the two most plausible alternatives to a secular dictatorship like Mubarak’s
were, on the one hand, a radical theocratic regime led by the Muslim
Brotherhood, or, on the other, chaos. (It was a lucky break for Israel that
Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s 2013 military coup averted that outcome in Egypt—at least
for now.)
Israelis had also tired of the standard
Western analysis that it was “two minutes to midnight” before the last hopes
for peace with Palestinians expired. A solution for the Palestinians would have
to wait until Palestinian leaders stopped rejecting every Israeli peace offer
and brushing aside every Israeli olive branch. In the meantime, Israel would
continue to thrive.
Israelis understood, too, how vulnerable
Arab leaders were in the face of Tehran’s tightening grip over a crescent of
Arab capitals that stretched from Baghdad to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza to
Sana’a. That vulnerability was all the more acute as it became clear that the
Obama administration was not interested in standing up to Tehran’s imperialism
and was in fact happy to abet it in the form of sanctions relief. If Arabs
wanted a determined and capable ally, they would have to look elsewhere.
Finally, Israelis knew that, in the Middle
East, the coin of the realm isn’t love. It’s respect.
In bidding for the world’s love during the
Oslo years, Israel had lost much of that respect. But in the last 20 years, the
Jewish state won it back by: crushing the Palestinian terror apparatus;
locating and eliminating a North Korean nuclear reactor in eastern Syria;
assassinating powerful Hezbollah commanders such as Imad Mugniyeh in Damascus;
challenging Iran across a wide domain; standing up to Barack Obama in
Washington; and responding forcefully to attacks and provocations from Hamas.
In doing all this, Israel demonstrated to its neighbors that, far from being
their enemy, it could well be their most valuable asset against their enemy.
In 2014, senior Israeli and Saudi figures,
led by Israeli diplomat Dore Gold and retired Saudi general Anwar Majed Eshki,
began holding a series of secret talks. In March 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu
delivered his speech to Congress to warn against the Iran deal over the
administration’s furious objections. Much of the commentariat, both in the U.S.
and Israel, fretted that Netanyahu was needlessly driving a wedge between
Washington and Jerusalem while risking Israel’s bipartisan support in Congress.
But Netanyahu had a broader audience in
mind when, in the middle of his address, he went out of his way to note that
Iran had tried to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States in a Washington,
D.C., restaurant. Though Arab ambassadors had declined invitations to attend
the speech, it was no secret that the Israeli prime minister was speaking for
them.
In November 2015, Israel opened a
full-time diplomatic office in Abu Dhabi, officially as part of the
International Renewable Energy Agency, making it the first permanent Israeli
foreign-ministry station in a Gulf country. Such contacts would only become more
frequent in the years leading up to the Abraham Accords. There were handshakes
between senior Saudi and Israeli figures at the Munich Security Conference;
there was intensified intelligence cooperation; and Benjamin Netanyahu made a
public visit to Oman. To anyone paying attention, the Abraham Accords could not
have come as any sort of surprise.
THREE
AMERICAN FECKLESSNESS
Near the end of the Obama administration,
a friend of mine half-joked that Obama had belatedly earned his 2009 Nobel
Peace Prize—by uniting Arabs and Israelis in horrified opposition to him. There
was more than a grain of truth to it. In the space of a few years, Obama, whose
election was supposed to herald a new era of global respect for America, had
succeeded in infuriating or betraying nearly all of America’s traditional
allies in the region while winning no new friends.
This was no way to conduct U.S. foreign
policy. Much as many Americans may wish it otherwise, the U.S. continues to
have vital interests in the Middle East. The U.S. cannot allow a hostile power
to dominate a region that accounts for close to 40 percent of global oil
production (and oil that is much cheaper to produce than what is extracted by
fracking from shale). We cannot allow the world’s most fanatical regimes to
acquire nuclear capabilities, setting off an arms race in the world’s most
combustible region. We cannot accept the permanent establishment of jihad
incubators similar to what the Taliban established in Afghanistan, the Islamic
State in Iraq and Syria, Hezbollah in much of southern Lebanon, and Hamas in
Gaza. We cannot allow chaos in the region once again to spill into Europe,
setting off the chain of events that produced not only a massive humanitarian
crisis but also a populist backlash in the West.
Finally, we have a long-term interest in
encouraging reformers in the region wherever we might find them—whether it’s in
government ministries in Riyadh, a protest movement in Tehran, or a TV station
in Dubai. But such encouragement is a far cry from the sort of democracy
promotion that was embraced by the Bush and later Obama administrations, which
wound up legitimizing political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
or the Sadrists in Iraq that view democracy merely as a vehicle to establish
their own authoritarianism.
Where does the creation of a Palestinian
state rank on this list of American priorities? Not high, in the final
analysis. There’s a shopworn argument that the failure to “solve” the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a major reason for ideological extremism and
jihadist terrorism. Yet to the extent that extremists and jihadis care about,
and act upon, their Palestinian grievance, it’s to destroy Israel in its
entirety, not to create a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one. There is
also an argument that a Palestinian state of some kind will be necessary to
preserve Israel’s Jewish and democratic character. But even if one concedes the
point, it’s an argument about Israeli
interests, not American ones.
The upshot is that the infatuation so many
U.S. policymakers have with Palestinian statehood has disserved American
interests in myriad ways.
·
It confuses a vital national interest with
a political wish—in this case, the wish of American presidents like Bill
Clinton and secretaries of state like John Kerry to be lauded as peacemakers.
·
It wastes the White House’s political
capital and diplomatic time.
·
It perpetuates the damaging myth that the
plight of the Palestinians is the gravest in the region—to the detriment of
other Middle Eastern people, such as the Kurds, who have fared far worse at the
hands of Turks, Iraqis, and Syrians alike.
·
It perpetuates the false notion that a
solution to the Palestinian issue would somehow solve everything else.
·
It allows the Arab world to go on asking
“Who did this to us?” rather than “What did we do wrong?”—thereby fostering a
mindset of blame-avoidance, conspiracy thinking, and political prevarication.
·
It plays into the propaganda of America’s
radical enemies, led by Iran, that Israel’s
behavior, rather than their own, is the chief source of turmoil and injustice
in the region.
·
It asks that this same ally, Israel,
weaken its defenses and take the proverbial “risks for peace,” when what
America most needs from Israel is a strong country that can defend itself, come
to the aid of its neighbors, provide the U.S. with critical intelligence and
tactical know-how, and serve as a bulwark against the region’s radicals.
·
It puffs the vanity of Palestinian leaders
and encourages them to pursue maximalist demands and reject every compromise,
since it is only through the perpetuation of conflict that they remain relevant
actors on the world stage. The paradox of the Palestinian issue is that the
greater the public and diplomatic attention paid it, the harder it is to solve.
·
It stands in the way of full normalization
of ties between Israel and Arab states by tying normalization to demands that
Israel cannot safely meet, such as relinquishing the Jordan River Valley or
allowing the descendants of Arab refugees from 1948 to return to Israel.
·
It feeds anti-Semitic stereotypes. As one
French ambassador put it not long after 9/11, “All the current troubles in the
world are because of that shitty little country, Israel. Why should the world
be in danger of World War III because of those people?”
In sum, not only did the Obama
administration harm U.S. interests and values by overworking the
Israeli-Palestinian issue, it harmed Israeli, Arab, and even Palestinian
interests as well. Could the Trump administration do better?
To its credit—and to the pleasant surprise
of some of its critics, including me—it did, in spades.
FOUR
TRUMPIAN DISCONTINUITY
In February 2017, toward the end of my
tenure at the Wall Street Journal, I
wrote a column titled “Mideast Rules for Jared Kushner.” Donald Trump’s
son-in-law had been handed the Israel–Palestine brief by the new president, and
so I addressed him directly. “For Mr. Kushner,” I wrote,
the goal
of diplomacy isn’t to “solve” the Palestinian problem. It’s to anesthetize it
through a studied combination of economic help and diplomatic neglect. The real
prize lies in further cultivating Jerusalem’s ties to Cairo, Riyadh, Amman and
Abu Dhabi, as part of an Alliance of Moderates and Modernizers that can defeat
Sunni and Shiite radicals from Raqqa to Tehran. The goal should be to make
Palestinian leaders realize over time that they are the region’s atavism, not
its future.
I don’t know whether Kushner read the
piece, but the ideas I was expressing offered an intellectual foundation for
what would become the Abraham Accords.
To the extent that the Accords are about
the Palestinian issue at all, it is that they turn conventional thinking about
it on its head. Instead of the usual view that a Palestinian state is the precondition to full Arab-Israeli
normalization, the Accords suggest that a Palestinian state will happen only as
a result of that normalization. There
is an intuitive and compelling logic to this. If Israel does not have to fear a
hostile or chaotic neighborhood, either now or in the future, it has less to
fear from a Palestinian state. And if Palestinians observe that good relations
between Israel and other Arab states are the norm, there’s less of a reason for
them to stand out as the violent exception.
Yet the Abraham Accords are not, at
bottom, about the Palestinians at all. On the contrary, they are about
decoupling the Israeli–Palestinian conflict from the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Doing so has obvious benefits for all sides. Israeli airliners no longer have
to take a circuitous flight path to avoid overflying the Arabian peninsula. Abu
Dhabi can acquire state-of-the-art F-35 jets from the U.S. without risking a de
facto veto from Israel’s friends in Congress. American military strategists and
intelligence operatives can leverage this burgeoning alliance both as an added
deterrent and a force multiplier against regional enemies.
The significance of the Accords goes deeper.
Had raison d’état governed the
calculations of Arab statesmen, their quarrels with the Jewish state would have
ended long ago. But the longstanding Arab refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy
is the expression not of national interests. It’s a civilizational impulse. It
stems from centuries of faltering confidence and wounded pride, which even the
most clear-eyed Arab statesmen—including Anwar Sadat and Jordan’s late King
Hussein—found hard to challenge. Overcoming it requires a change not just of
policy but also mentality, a willingness to rethink assumptions that are as
much cultural and psychological as they are political and strategic. It means
looking at Israel as a regional role model and strategic partner, and at
Palestinians as just another nation. That at least two Arab leaders were
prepared to do all this in exchange for no territorial concessions by Israel is
a considerable tribute to their farsightedness. In this sense, the Accords are
about finally coming to grips with the fundamental causes of the decline of the
Arab world, not just the immediate threats to its existence.
As for the Trump administration, whatever
else might be said about its conduct of foreign policy, it was refreshingly
indifferent to State Department formulas and shibboleths that had governed 50
years of U.S. policy and condemned it to futility. Land-for-peace? One state or
two? The status of Jerusalem? The genius of the Accords is that they bypass
these questions to achieve realizable policy objectives with major strategic benefits.
They also show how little the U.S. gains
through a policy of Mideast evenhandedness. To his considerable credit, Trump
shut down the Palestinian mission in Washington. He moved the U.S. Embassy to
Jerusalem. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He offered
a peace plan for an eventual Palestinian state that clearly tilted toward
Israel. The plan later provided the pretext for the Abraham Accords, after the
U.A.E. offered Israel a peace deal in exchange for Benjamin Netanyahu backing
off from his pledge to annex parts of the West Bank.
Simply put, U.S. policy of being maximally
pro-Israel did nothing to diminish America’s standing with its Arab allies. If
anything, it did the opposite. Why? In part because Arab solidarity with Palestinians
has always been opportunistic. But it’s also because what Arab states want from
the U.S. isn’t balance. It’s reliability as an ally. An America that supports
Israel to the hilt is one that understands the value of loyalty—an attractive
feature to any country that looks to the U.S. for support.
I write all this as someone who has never
disguised or disavowed my disdain for Trump: I supported both of his
impeachments and have never regretted my opposition to him. But I believe in
giving credit where credit is due. Nor am I optimistic about the direction of
Mideast policy under Biden, whose sole idea for the region seems to be his
eagerness to bring the U.S. back to the JCPOA. But I believe in giving new
presidents the benefit of the doubt.
In the short term, Biden’s effort to
return to the JCPOA will probably strengthen Israel’s strategic ties with its
new partners—at America’s expense. U.S. outreach to Iran will also likely
stiffen Israeli resistance to U.S. pressure to resume negotiations with Palestinians.
Jerusalem would be rash to cede an inch if sanctions on Tehran are eased, to
the benefit of Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad, and other Iranian
terrorist proxies on Israel’s doorsteps.
Still, there is no need for Biden to
replicate Obama’s Mideast mistakes. And it behooves the incoming administration
to at least consider how the Abraham Accords can advance traditional Democratic
foreign-policy objectives.
Peace: American presidents have sought, with
mixed success, to normalize Israeli–Arab relations since Harry Truman was in
the White House. This is not just a matter of altruism. The U.S. benefits when
its allies are not at daggers drawn and Washington doesn’t have to worry about
placating one side at the expense of the other. The history of Israeli–Arab
wars has also been a story of U.S. foreign-policy crises, whether it was the
Eisenhower administration’s rupture with Britain and France in 1956 over Suez,
the nuclear alert during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the U.S. intervention in
Lebanon in the early 1980s, or Iraq’s Scud-missile attacks on Israel during the
1991 Gulf War. The Abraham Accords are a major step toward ensuring that these
sorts of crises never happen again.
Global strategy: If the Biden administration believes
that the U.S. needs gradually to reduce the scale of its Mideast
commitments—perhaps for the sake of pursuing the Obama-era pivot to Asia—then
it had better do so in a way that neither leaves chaos in its wake nor creates
openings for American adversaries. Broad normalization between Israel and Arab
states can never fully compensate for a diminished U.S. footprint in the
region; no Israeli aircraft carriers exist to patrol the waters of the Persian
Gulf. But it can help. A united Israeli–Arab front could stymie Iran’s bid to
become a regional hegemon, prevent Assad from regaining full control of Syria,
and undermine transnational threats like Hezbollah or the remnants of ISIS—all
of them threats to the U.S. as well.
Regional integration: Israel’s relationship with Azerbaijan,
to which it sells arms (some of them used to appalling effect against ethnic
Armenians in the recent conflict over Nagorno–Karabakh) and which it uses for
intelligence purposes against neighboring Iran, is one model for how Israel
could cooperate with, say, Bahrain. A better goal for Israeli–Arab relations
would be the old Turkish–Israeli alliance, which involved close commercial
ties, extensive tourism, and mutually productive diplomatic cooperation. That
relationship held for more than 50 years until the Islamist prime minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power. Arab–Israeli economic integration cannot by
itself address the Arab world’s social and economic challenges. But it points
the Arab world in the right direction: cultivating human capital, and not
letting past grievances stand in the way of future opportunities.
A (somewhat) more reputable United Nations: Imagine a UN whose business was less lopsidedly anti-Israel. (To adapt
a line from Lennon, it isn’t easy even if you try.) But normalization might
dampen the organization’s infamous biases against the Jewish state, restoring
some of its long-lost credibility while making the job of U.S. diplomats at
Turtle Bay easier.
Anti-fundamentalism: The biggest prize for Israel, as for the
United States, would be for Saudi Arabia to join the Accords, which seemed to
come tantalizingly close to fruition after Netanyahu paid a not-so-secret visit
to the kingdom late last year. For the Saudi royal family, now deeply riven
over the question, it would also mark the ultimate reversal of policy: from
being the principal Sunni underwriter of anti-Western, anti-Christian, and
anti-Semitic Islamism (a point abundantly documented in Dore Gold’s 2003 book, Hatred’s Kingdom) to being a friend and
partner of the Jewish state. That, in turn, would require a profound shift in
how the kingdom approaches the practice of Islam, what it teaches its
schoolchildren, the mosques and madrassas it supports overseas. If what the
U.S. ultimately needs most in the Middle East is a region that doesn’t export
misery and fanaticism, then a prime objective of the Biden administration’s
policy should be to push the kingdom toward Israel.
Yes, the Palestinians: A
Palestinian state will never come into being on account of U.S. or
international pressure. It could, however, come into existence when two
conditions are met. The first would come about when Israeli leaders have
complete confidence that territorial withdrawals in the West Bank will not lead
to Gaza-style results. And the second could happen when Palestinian leaders and
people alike abandon their long-held goal of destroying Israel as a Jewish
state, both by renouncing the so-called right of return and forswearing the use
of terror. Both those conditions would be significantly advanced in a world
where Israel had normal relations with most of its neighbors. The road from
Jerusalem to Ramallah may lead, however circuitously, through Riyadh.
FIVE
CAN BIDEN ACCEPT IT?
Will the Biden administration pay heed to
any of this? Given the usual tendency of incoming administrations from the
opposing party to view everything done by their immediate predecessor as
dangerous, stupid, or both, my hopes aren’t high. It hasn’t helped that the Abraham
Accords were treated by much of mainstream media with characteristic
churlishness, as if acknowledging that the Trump administration had
accomplished something of value was tantamount to an endorsement of fascism.
But the new administration ought to pay
heed because the alternative will be failure. Iran has made it clear that it
has no interest in returning to the JCPOA on anything but the deal’s original
terms, which would have lifted the arms embargo on Iran last year, and then
lift restrictions on centrifuges and enrichment within the decade. Whatever the
Biden team thinks of that, it’s unacceptable to Israel and its new allies. For
the U.S. to return to the deal would bring the region closer to war. Nor will a
resumption of talks between Israelis and Palestinians yield better results than
the last time they were tried, during Barack Obama’s second term. The leaders
are the same; the differences are the same; the stakes are the same. In
diplomacy as in chess, playing the same moves with the same pieces will always
yield the same result.
But what if Biden simply accepted that a
new dynamic is at last afoot in the Middle East, and that there can be immense
upsides—and more than enough credit to share—by harnessing it to American
purposes? What if the new president adopted the old maxim that there is no
limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he does not mind who gets the
credit? Even Jimmy Carter had the good sense to build on diplomatic openings
created by the Nixon and Ford administrations to get to the Camp David Accords,
the one lasting achievement of his presidency.
No matter what one thinks of Joe Biden,
America desperately needs a successful presidency. The logic contained in the
Abraham Accords offers him one shot at success in a place that matters, and
where so many others have failed.
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