Strategic alliance helps Abraham Accords hold strong despite Gaza War, conflict in Lebanon

Four years on, the Abraham Accords continue to be one of the most significant foreign policy achievements of the U.S. government in the Middle East. 

The Accords, negotiated by U.S. President Donald Trump during his first term and announced in September of 2020, upended decades of foreign policy approaches to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and turned conventional wisdom on its head. 

For decades, foreign policy experts in the West and in the Middle East had proclaimed that without settling the Palestinian issue, there would be no hope for achieving peace or even normalization between Israel and the Arab nations of the Middle East. 

Suggestions that the Palestinian issue could be handled separately, or perhaps even as a later part of improving ties between Israel and other Middle Eastern nations, were considered to be out of touch with reality. 

Late in Trump’s first term, rumors began to circulate that, with the persistent efforts of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, the president had managed to broker a peace deal with several Arab states.

The agreement which was labeled as the Abraham Accords, based on the shared importance of the biblical patriarch Abraham to the three monotheistic faiths of the Middle East – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam –, marked a clear break from previous attempts to negotiate peace by forcing Israel to make concessions to Palestinian and Arab demands. 

Instead, the Abraham Accords were based on a different concept, the importance of a strategic alliance of Middle Eastern nations focused on resisting Iranian aggression while developing economic ties. 

The Abraham Accords did not ignore the Palestinian issue, but simply removed it from being the necessary precondition to normalization between Israel and its Middle Eastern neighbors. 

ALL ISRAEL NEWS Editor-in-Chief Joel Rosenberg led Evangelical delegations to the Middle East in the years leading up to the Abraham Accords. He said the decision by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to normalize relations with Israel actually came before the Abraham Accords, based on a “strategic decision” by the Emirati government. 

“The United Arab Emirates made a strategic decision, this was several years ago, in 2019, early 2020, that Israel was not the enemy of the Arab people, it was not the enemy of the Gulf states, of the Arabs, or the Muslims,” Rosenberg related. 

“In fact, Israel, as a high-tech power, as a military power, as a financial power, a superpower in the region, was a country that the UAE leadership felt, ‘You know what? Maybe we should actually start working with them.’” Rosenberg explained. 

The UAE leadership understood that the strategic threat in the region was radical Islamism, particularly Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, all funded, encouraged, and armed by the Iranian regime. 

As Iran had also threatened the UAE, among several other Arab countries, “the UAE came to the conclusion, especially as Iran moves steadily towards nuclear weapons, that the UAE leadership had to make a choice: Is Iran their partner, or is Israel.” 

The UAE understood that partnership with the United States could balance the Iranian threat, and if it wanted to partner with the U.S., it made strategic sense to also partner with the primary Middle Eastern ally of the United States – Israel. 

In 2018, Rosenberg travelled to the UAE with an Evangelical delegation, the first ever, to visit then-Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. While on that trip, Rosenberg received a startling bit of information, “He told me personally, that he was the next Arab leader that was going to make peace with Israel.” 

“Now this was two full years before he brokered a deal with President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu to be the first country in what became known as the Abraham Accords,” Rosenberg explained. 

The peace agreement was not based on a specific set of concessions regarding the Palestinian cause, which is very important to bin Zayed, but rather, on the “strategic, national, financial, military, political, and geopolitical interest to have an alliance, or at least a relationship with, and peace and normalization with Israel.” 

Rosenberg explains that the Abraham Accord countries are not ignoring the Gaza War. 

“All of them have been very troubled by this war, very pained by how many Palestinians are suffering and and dying in Gaza. They've been troubled and critical of some of Israel's conduct in this war,” he clarified. 

“The UAE leadership, and Bahrain, has decided to stick, and Morocco too. They haven’t pulled their ambassadors out.” 

In fact, during the war, the countries have used their relationship with Israel, and the trust gained through that relationship to benefit the Palestinians, sending humanitarian aid, helping establish field hospitals, and even helping to take injured or sick Gaza residents for treatment outside of the war zone. 

Rosenberg says the countries “are hopeful that we’re going to get through this, the worst of it, and that 2025 might be an opportunity to re-engage in a much bigger way.” 

They’re also encouraged by Trump’s desire to extend the Abraham Accords and bring the war in Gaza and the larger regional conflict with Iran and its terror proxies to an end. 

The UAE recently announced their willingness to participate in the rebuilding of Gaza, and due to their relationship with Israel throughout the war, the Israeli government appears to trust them as a partner in that project. 

The Abraham Accords nations are also encouraged by the signs that Trump is planning to pick up where he left off - by bringing Saudi Arabia into a similar alliance with both the U.S. and Israel. 

“President Trump wants to expand this relationship into Saudi Arabia as well,” Rosenberg said. “And the first call to a foreign leader that President Trump made, just last Thursday, was to the Saudi Crown Prince, the de facto leader of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.” 

“The Saudis don’t want to be alone in a region where Iran is so dangerous,” Rosenberg noted. “They want an alliance with the United States, and they want peace and normal ties with Israel. And that’s what seems to be coming.”