Former Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher, a confidant of King Abdullah, has published a wholesale attack on the Abraham Accords. Muasher claims that they are "a recipe for violence, not peace," and he urges the US to stop offering incentives to Arab governments to join the accords "so long as Israel continues to take Palestinian land."
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Muasher's mordant article appears in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, a high-brow journal published by the NY-based Council on Foreign Relations – which is close to the Biden administration. Combined with the fact that President Biden recently has met twice with Jordanian King Abdullah, and with the fact that Biden is traveling to Jerusalem and Jeddah next month, one begins to suspect that Muasher's mugging of the Abraham Accords was coordinated with Washington.
According to Muasher and his co-author Zaha Hassan (a Fatah functionary and legal adviser) – both of whom now sit pretty in posts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – Israel's aim in signing the Abraham Accords "was to redirect world attention away from its military occupation, not to end it."
Worse still, "the Abraham Accords opened a political back door to implement the Trump peace plan without Palestinian acquiescence," they aver.
Consequently, Muasher wants Biden to roll-back everything Trump did and achieved, and instead revert to Oslo-era coddling of the Palestinians while tossing the blessed Abrahamic peace process into the dustbin. He wants Biden to reprioritize Palestinian rights while putting the Abraham Accords on ice.
He wants to bring back the bad old days of Palestinian primacy in Arab politics and hold back true progress towards peace and prosperity for the entire region.
Israel and its friends must be ready to counter such perfidious naysaying. To begin with, Muasher's militant assault on the Abraham Accords is a classic piece of Jordanian chutzpah – coming from a rickety monarchy that is totally dependent on US, Israeli, and Saudi aid, and from a regime that wants to see the radical Islamic Iranian juggernaut crushed just as much as Jerusalem decisionmakers do.
Muasher's thrashing is of a piece with Abdullah's other recent onslaughts against Israel, especially his galling attempts to claim "custodianship" over Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem and to run Israel off the Temple Mount. (Beware Jordanian collusion with Biden here too.)
Most of all, the Abdullah-Muasher offensive is based on a wholly inaccurate narrative of what went wrong in Mideast peacemaking over the past 50 years. The Arab-Israel conflict persisted for so long not because of Israeli West Bank "occupation," but because of the refusal, initially of defeated Arab states and still-today of self-governing Palestinians, to accept the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.
By contrast, the beauty and the promise of the two-year-old Abraham Accords lie in the implicit acknowledgment by Arab states (finally!) that Jews are a Biblical people indigenous to the Land of Israel – hence reference to the Abrahamic common heritage of Moslems and Jews in the accords' foundational document. This is a joyous revolution that overturns generations of Arab and Islamic ideological delegitimization of Israel.
This is what also could open the door to reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. All Palestinian leadership needs to do is put aside its genocidal goals and its addiction to violence and terrorism (and corruption and kleptocracy), and instead consider real compromise with Israel. This will then tap into Gulf Arab development budgets for the Palestinian polity/polities, and into Israeli generosity too.
Consequently, President Biden indeed should encourage the expansion of the Abraham Accords, especially with Saudi Arabia. Aside from cementing a coalition of moderate countries in the region (which advances US strategic goals for regional security and energy stability), the ascension of the Saudis would signal Palestinian leadership that the time to compromise with Israel irrevocably has come.
In short, expansion of the Abraham Accords can only improve, rather than impede, prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. The accords need not "sideline" the Palestinians (as Muasher charges) if the Palestinians don't sideline themselves.
In this regard, let's hope that President Biden listens less to Abdullah and Muasher (and to the discredited leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and to stuck-in-Oslo-mindset European leaders), and more to Israeli Prime Minister Bennett and Gulf Arab leaders.
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