In early February 2020, the New York Times reported that Trump released his Middle East peace plan, the Abraham Accords. You know, the one negotiated by Jared Kushner with no input from the State Department at all.
“Mr. Trump’s announcement ended years of suspense over a highly anticipated peace plan that was widely criticized even before its details were known. Rather than viewing it as a serious blueprint for peace, analysts called it a political document by a president in the middle of an impeachment trial working in tandem with Mr. Netanyahu, a prime minister under criminal indictment who is about to face his third election in a year.
“But the guests invited to the East Room, including the conservative Republican megadonor Sheldon G. Adelson and evangelical Christian leaders, greeted the plan with enthusiastic applause.”
Well, it was backed by Sheldon Addison and evangelical Christian leaders. What could go wrong?
Almost exactly one year later, in the very first days of the Biden Administration, a State Department spokesman indicated that the Biden Administration would seek to build on the Abraham Accords, and appeared to give the Trump Administration credit for them. Days later Blinken appeared on the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. Blitzer asked Blinken about this strange announcement. Blinken replied “Well, first, Wolf, yes, we applauded the Abraham Accords. This is an important step forward.”
Trump’s policy, one ostensibly “negotiated” by Kushner but actually formulated by Netanyahu, was now Biden’s policy. The U.S. would offer lavish inducements — tens of billions of dollars, security guarantees and military equipment — to bribe and cajole Arab states to sign on to a deal that, were it to be agreed to by Netanyahu, would have to leave the Palestinians without any hope of a state of their own.
Incredibly, all of this was happening just days after McCarthy went to Mar-a-lago to kiss Trump’s ring; just days after it became apparent that Trump could well face Biden again in four years. And here was Blinken lavishly praising Trump for the Abraham Accords.
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The New York Times reported when Trump announced the Abraham Accords:
Democrats were largely critical. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland sent a letter to Mr. Trump on Tuesday, signed by 11 of his colleagues, calling the proposal a “one-sided” blow to prospects of a “viable” two-state solution.
“Previous presidents of both parties successfully maintained the respect of both Israelis and Palestinians for the United States’ role as a credible player in difficult negotiations. Your one-sided actions have made that impossible,” the senators wrote, calling the plan “a recipe for renewed division and conflict in the region.”
Mr. Trump’s potential opponents were similarly withering, a reminder that a Democratic victory in the presidential election in November could result in a much different approach.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said the proposal was “unacceptable” and called for an end to “the Israeli occupation.” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote that a plan lacking Palestinian involvement “isn’t diplomacy, it’s a sham.”
Despite Blinken’s enthusiasm for the Abraham Accords, Biden apparently had some concerns, perhaps because of the scathing criticism of the Trump/Kushner plan from numerous congressional Democrats. Biden’s skittishness with the Abraham Accords was apparent when he declined early in his administration to appoint an official envoy for the Abraham Accords. However, by late June 2023, Biden appointed Dan Shapiro to a newly created position to “”support U.S. efforts to advance a more peaceful and interconnected region, deepen and broaden the Abraham Accords and build the Negev forum,” Blinken tweeted. It was widely reported that this appointment came amid a concerted U.S. push to normalize ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The Jerusalem Post noted in July 2023 the evolution in the Biden administrations stance with regard to the Abraham Accords:
The apathy with which the Biden administration has treated the coming anniversary of the Abraham Accords reflects a tin ear," Ferziger wrote. "Letting Trump retain ownership of this breakthrough in Arab-Israeli peacemaking and not working aggressively to extend its reach is a mistake on which Republicans are sure to capitalize as they plot their return to the White House in three more years."
Those words were written two years ago. Since then, the Biden administration has long since embraced the accords and "even" adopted the name Trump gave them. And now it is getting even more deeply involved by appointing Shapiro as a special Abraham Accords envoy.
As the old saying goes, “You can't argue with success.” And with the US elections now just 16 months away, the Biden administration is clearly keen on mining one of the few recent successes in the region.
By early September of last year, approximately one month before October 7, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times was freaking out. He cautioned that there were two possible formulations for Biden’s implementation of the Abraham Accords.
The one that is definitely not in our interest is the one that Netanyahu will try to sweet talk the United States into. He is trying to pull off a four-corner shot — undermine the power of Israel’s Supreme Court to restrain his extreme government, while making himself a domestic hero by pulling off a peace deal with Saudi Arabia without having to give the Palestinians anything of significance, thereby advancing his coalition’s dream of annexing the West Bank — all while getting Saudi Arabia to pay for it and Joe Biden to bless it. That deal Biden and M.B.S. must reject out of hand……For now, the only thing I’m certain of is what has to be stopped: This Israeli coalition has to be stopped. And, even more important, a bad deal — one that enables Netanyahu to crush the Israeli Supreme Court and win normalization from Saudi Arabia and pay such a small price to the Palestinians that the right-wing zealots in his cabinet can continue driving Israel over a cliff — absolutely has to be stopped.
Just one month later, days after the October 7 Hamas attack, Friedman wrote the following:
I believe one reason Hamas not only launched this assault now — but also seemingly ordered it to be as murderous as possible — was to trigger an Israeli overreaction, like an invasion of the Gaza Strip, that would lead to massive Palestinian civilian casualties and in that way force Saudi Arabia to back away from the U.S.-brokered deal now in discussion to promote normalization between Riyadh and the Jewish state. As well as to force the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, which were part of the Abraham Accords produced by the Trump administration, to take a step back from Israel.
I do not cite Friedman because he is a reliably astute and objective observer of the Middle East. He is not. He famously and fatuously backed the Iraq War, proclaiming that it was sending the message to Iran and the Arab States “suck on this.” I cite Friedman precisely because of his prior shortsightedness: even Tom Friedman could tell that the Biden Administrations overtures in the summer of 2023 to Saudi Arabia would be catastrophic if Biden did not make clear that Palestinian statehood had to be part of any expansion of the Abraham Accords.
The Washington Post reported that concerns regarding the connection between the Biden Administration’s implementation of the accords and the October 7 terrorist attack were widely shared among American, Israeli and Arab officials:
The accords were perhaps Trump’s signature foreign policy achievement. Yet the diplomatic process they set in motion — especially the prospect of Saudi participation — contributed to Palestinian alienation that hastened the attack by Hamas, say current and former American, Israeli and Arab officials. And the attack, in turn, is now testing whether normal Israeli-Arab relations can hold.
These are the questions I keep coming back to:
Why did we adopt a set of policies that furthered Netanyahu’s desire to inflame the region by communicating so unambiguously to the Palestinians that Israel and the U.S. were luring Saudi Arabia and the butcher MBS into a deal that would leave the Palestinians stateless and wretched forever?
How could Biden and Blinken believe that a plan cooked up by Netanyahu, and foisted on the witless Trump and Kushner, was a path to peace rather than a recipe for disaster?
Why did Biden clothe himself in the Abraham Accords, and in effect subcontract U.S. policy in the middle east to Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Givr?
And why, after the massive failure of our interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, would a Democratic President appoint a compulsive interventionist and neocon sympathizer like Blinken Secretary of State?
There must be a reckoning for this after the election. Blinken must go. Like McNamara had to go. Like Rumsfeld had to go. If we are fortunate enough to somehow avoid the full political consequences of this catastrophe in Gaza and re-elect Joe Biden, we need to know how it happened that the Biden Administration imported Trump’s signature foreign policy “achievement” wholesale into its own policies for the middle east, and how it came to be that the Gaza disaster will be remembered as Joe’s fuck up and not Trump and Kushner’s.