Man on a Mission 4: The Abraham Accords
Man on a Mission 4: The Abraham Accords
Book Review--Benjamin Netanyahu's Bibi: My Story
“This was a day my sons would describe to their grandchildren.”—Benjamin Netanyahu, on the signing of the Abraham Accords
In my previous entry in this series, I wrote about the free market reforms that Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu introduced during his 2003-2005 stint as Israel’s finance minister, and the economic miracle that ensued. If genius is the ability to turn conventional thinking upside down, ignore what “everybody knows,” and follow some alternate path, then these reforms were true genius. At a time when “everybody” knew that socialism was the way to run an economy—it was, after all, the vision of Israel’s larger-than-life founders—Netanyahu guided his nation in a decidedly capitalist direction—with spectacular results.
It would not be the only spark of genius in Netanyahu’s career.
This is the final installment of my review of Benjamin Netanyahu’s autobiography, Bibi: My Story (To read the review from the beginning, start here). In it I will cover the Abraham Accords, the peace treaties that Netanyahu signed with four Arab states in late 2020/early 2021. I’ll discuss how they unexpectedly got started as a result of the vengefulness and pettiness of US President Barack Obama. I’ll then describe Netanyahu’s efforts to bring President Trump on board, the distraction known as the “Deal of the Century,” and the Accords themselves. In a follow-up post, I cover the results of the Accords and what the future holds. Check it out here (Premium Content-Paid Subscribers only).
Conventional wisdom held that negotiating with Arabs other than the Palestinians was not Israel’s path to peace. Before Israel could make peace with neighboring countries, or so the narrative went, it needed to make peace with the Palestinians in the territories it occupied. Netanyahu calls this the “Palestinian Centrality Theory.” The Deep State Department, lurking in the swamps of Foggy Bottom, was particularly enamored of it. For example, in 2016, US Secretary of State John Kerry said in a speech,
There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you. I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying “Well, the Arab world is in a different place now, 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… There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace. Everyone needs to understand that. That is a hard reality.1
According to Netanyahu, “When Kerry finished delivering his remarks, he received thunderous applause.”2
There was just one tiny flaw in the Palestinian Centrality Theory: the Palestinians. Or to be be precise, the Palestinian leaders. Over the years, they had repeatedly spurned attempts to reach an accommodation with Israel. For examples, see my post, “4 Times Palestinian Leaders Rejected Peace (Premium content—Paid Subscribers Only)”.
After decades of watching peace initiatives launch with great hope and hype, only to go down in flames, Netanyahu had the brilliant idea of turning conventional wisdom upside down. That idea would eventually become the Abraham Accords—so called because Abraham was the common ancestor of the Arab and Jewish signees. As Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly in 2014,
Many have long assumed that an Israeli-Palestinian peace can help facilitate a broader rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world. I think it may work the other way around: a broader rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world may help facilitate an Israeli-Palestinian peace. To achieve that peace, we must look not only to Jerusalem and Ramallah, but also to Cairo, Amman, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and elsewhere.3
The story of how the Abraham Accords went from idea to reality started in a rather surprising place: a bitter dispute between Netanyahu and Barack Obama.
Mr. Netanyahu Goes to Washington
As the starting gun fired for 2015, the Obama Administration was racing to complete the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—its agreement with Iran to curb that nation’s nuclear ambitions. Netanyahu, who had returned to the Prime Minister’s residence in 2009, believed that the proposed deal would be a disaster. He had long argued that the greatest threat to Israel was not the Palestinians, but rather the specter of an Iranian atomic bomb, “the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons.” As for the proposed deal, he was convinced that “It doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb. It paves Iran’s path to the bomb.”4
When US Speaker of the House John Boehner invited him to address a Joint Session of Congress on the topic, Netanyahu suffered considerable consternation over whether to accept. One the one hand, he wrote, “I was given the opportunity to speak before Congress and the American people on a matter vital to Israel’s very survival.” On the other hand, “The nuclear deal was Obama’s top priority. Blocking it was my top priority. Placing this conflict on such a global stage would put me on a head-on collision course with the president of the United States.”5 A host of voices urged him to decline, including longtime friends in Congress and members of his own cabinet and staff. On top of that, the invitation was for March 3, two weeks before Netanyahu faced re-election. He was behind in the polls and could not ignore the potential domestic political fallout of a confrontation with Israel’s closest international ally.
The clincher came toward the middle of February, during a meeting in his office with his closest advisor, Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer. “If you don’t do the speech,” Dermer asked, “What’s the point?”
“The point of what?” Netanyahu replied.
“The point of you sitting in that chair.”6
Bibi got the point. He would give the speech.
Obama responded with a vindictive and childish campaign of retaliation, unbecoming to the leader of a great nation. “The Obama administration has engineered a series of highly visible snubs of Netanyahu,” wrote The Guardian.
From refusing a White House invitation and levelling accusations that the Israeli government is not trustworthy to a humiliating leak about new limitations on intelligence sharing – just weeks before the Israeli leader faces a tight general election.
Top administration officials, including Vice-President Joe Biden and the US secretary of state, John Kerry, have made a point of meeting Israeli opposition leaders who have seized on the dispute to characterise Netanyahu as jeopardising relations with Israel’s most important ally.7
The address went ahead anyway—with mixed results. It was a smash hit with the American and Israeli publics, and Netanyahu went on to win another term in office. It did change some minds on Capitol Hill about the JCPOA—but not enough to sink the thing. However, one of the speech’s most lasting impacts came from an unexpected quarter:
As I’m giving the speech, in a Joint Session of Congress, my delegation receives calls in real time from these Arab states—some of them—And they say, ‘We can’t believe what your prime minister is doing. He’s challenging a sitting American president—the most powerful man in the world.’
They respected that. They wanted to talk.
That led to clandestine meetings between me and these Arab leaders…They were in the Gulf, they were in the Red Sea, they were on a yacht—I landed in a helicopter on a yacht. You can believe it? My security people said, “That’s too dangerous,” I said, “Skip it. We’re doing it.” And this led to the Abraham Accords that were later culminated with the help of President Trump.8
Bringing Trump on Board
Trump was a loyal and necessary partner. Whatever one thinks of his other policies, or of him personally, one has to admit that he was a great friend to the State of Israel.9 As President of the United States, he was able to bring moral suasion to the table, not to mention financial and diplomatic incentives above and beyond what tiny Israel could offer. However, bringing him on board was a story in itself.
A mere three weeks after the inauguration, at their first Oval Office meeting, Netanyahu attempted to enlist Trump’s support for a deal between Israel and Arab governments. “Donald,” he said, “there’s a tremendous opportunity for an historic breakthrough with the Arab states. They’re terrified of Iran. I propose we begin with a Middle East security alliance led by you and including Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. This could quickly lead to formal peace agreements.” Alas, Trump, like his predecessors, was mired in the Palestinian Centrality Theory. “What I saw as ripe low-hanging fruit,” Netanyahu wrote, “President Trump saw as a distraction from the real prize: the Holy Grail of an Israel-Palestinian peace.”10
That the two leaders were at cross purposes was evident from their press conference after the meeting. It was friendly enough. Trump teasingly asked whether Netanyahu understood that both sides would need to compromise in any peace negotiations. Netanyahu joked back about “The Art of the Deal.” But while Trump called for “working toward a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians,” Netanyahu said,
We can seize an historic opportunity -- because, for the first time in my lifetime, and for the first time in the life of my country, Arab countries in the region do not see Israel as an enemy, but, increasingly, as an ally. And I believe that under your leadership, this change in our region creates an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen security and advance peace.11
To complicate matters, not only had Trump bought into conventional “Palestine First” thinking, but also into the notion that the Palestinians were eager for peace but that the Israelis in general, and Netanyahu in particular, stood in the way. When he visited the Jewish State in May and met with President Reuven Rivlin, he “blurted out, ‘Bibi doesn’t want peace.’”12
Netanyahu was more than prepared to set him straight. “When I met the president and his team shortly afterward in the King David Hotel,” he wrote,
I flipped on a video that I hoped would help adjust his thinking about [Palestinian President] Mahmoud Abbas, and about me.
The video showed Abbas extolling peace in English for Western audiences and then a string of his statements in Arabic intended for Palestinian audiences and calling for the destruction of Israel and glorifying the Palestinian terrorists who murdered our people.
“Mahmoud Abbas pays the families of terrorists sitting in our jails. The more Israelis they murder, the more money they get,” I said.
I could see that the video registered with Trump, at least momentarily.
“Wow,” he said. “Is that the same guy I just met in Washington?” (Abbas had visited Washington in early May.) “He seemed like such a sweet, peaceful guy.”13
Having made a friend of Donald Trump, the Man on a Mission saw an opportunity to influence the president on four “great tasks”:
US withdrawal from the JCPOA
US recognition of Israel’s capital by moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem
US recognition of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights
Normalization of relations with the Arab States14
The “Deal of the Century”
The first three were accomplished in short order. But on the fourth, Trump stubbornly refused to budge from Palestinian Centrality. He was determined to broker the “Deal of the Century” between the Israelis and the Palestinians, to be negotiated by his son in-law Jared Kushner. Trump was after all, first and foremost, a dealmaker.
By this point, Netanyahu’s career in public life had spanned the administrations of five previous US presidents. He had watched every one of them come into office determined to mediate an Israeli-Palestinian peace, and fail miserably. So, as a sixth president headed down the same path, Netanyahu tolerated it, even though he thought the path was the wrong one: “Faced with the president’s fixation on the Palestinian issue, I decided that the best strategy was not to fight him over it but to work with his administration in a way that would still enable us to reach a breakthrough with the Arab states.”15
It took three years before the Deal of the Century was ready for prime time. Bibi and Trump officially unveiled it on January 28, 2020, in a press conference at the White House. No representatives of the Palestinian Authority attended.
An hour and a half later, a furious Abbas rejected it.
“We just heard President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu talking about the slap of the century,” he told a meeting of the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. “If God wills, we will strike them back with slaps.” Further, “We say a thousand times: No, no and no.”16
To be honest, it was a terrible deal from the Palestinian point of view. As with many things Trump, the reality did not live up to the hype.
I have previously been outspoken in calling out Palestinian leaders for their intransigence, including earlier in this post. They repeatedly expected Israel to make all the concessions, and made none themselves to speak of. But in this case it was the other way around. Trump seems to have forgotten what he said in his 2017 press conference with Netanyahu about both sides needing to compromise. Israel got almost everything it wanted while the Palestinians had little to show for it. Where earlier proposals incorporated over ninety per cent of the West Bank into a Palestinian State, the Deal of the Century only gave them seventy; Israel would annex the rest. Where earlier proposals permitted some small number of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel proper, the Deal of the Century featured no “right of return” at all. Where earlier proposals split Jerusalem between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Deal of the Century left a largely intact city—including the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque—in Israeli hands. The Palestinians could have three small, crime-ridden, outlying, disconnected neighborhoods as their capital. They were not even entirely inside the city limits, but the Palestinians could still call them “al-Quds” (the Arabic name for Jerusalem) if they wanted to.
The only sweetener at all was a $50 billion infrastructure investment fund, to be bankrolled by the Arabs. Not a big enough bribe to give up on fifty years of ideology and settle for a Palestine which Aaron David Miller, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, described as “a state in name only. Israel will control its borders, air space, electro-magnetic spectrum, foreign policy and security.”17
So I can’t blame Abbas for telling Netanyahu and Trump to go pound sand. Albeit my sympathy is tempered by the fact that, had he or his predecessor Yasser Arafat accepted one of the much better deals offered to them over the years, he wouldn’t be in that position.
The Accords
With the Deal of the Century relegated to the ash heap of history, negotiations on the Abraham Accords could finally shift into high gear, starting with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The wheeling and dealing took place in Washington that summer, squeezed into six weeks. The talks were so secret that only four Israelis even knew that they were happening.
The Emiratis were motivated to reach an agreement. In addition to the benefits of technological and economic ties with the Jewish State, they needed powerful allies to stand as a bulwark against the Iranian threat, and they were skeptical that the United States fit the bill at a time when America was seeking to cut and run from its entanglements in the region. There were only about 5,000 US troops left in Iraq, down from a peak of about 170,000 in 2007; further withdrawals were underway. As for Afghanistan, Trump had inked a deal with the Taliban to remove all US forces the following year. As a Turkish general famously told Bernard Lewis in the 1950s, “The real problem with having the Americans as your allies is you never know when they will turn around and stab and themselves in the back.” Finally, while non-Palestinian Arabs continued to give lip service to the cause of Palestine, one heard whispers that they were getting just plain sick and tired of putting up with the Palestinians’ s—t.18
The agreement with the UAE was announced August 13. The treaty declared that “Peace, diplomatic relations and full normalization of bilateral ties are hereby established between the United Arab Emirates and the State of Israel.” The two countries promised to exchange ambassadors, negotiate subsequent agreements on such diverse topics as civil aviation, visa services, trade, technology, and water, work with the US in crafting and implementing a regional strategic agenda, and “foster mutual understanding, respect, co-existence and a culture of peace.”19
Bahrain agreed to a similar treaty a short time later.
On September 15, a ceremony was held on the South Lawn of the White House in which Trump, Netanyahu, and the foreign ministers of the UAE and Bahrain signed the accords.
Morocco joined the Accords in December and Sudan in January. The negotiations with these nations revealed just how important it was to have the United States as a partner. To induce them to sign, Trump agree to recognize Morocco’s claim to Western Sahara and remove Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terror.
Conclusion
It is difficult to say where Netanyahu’s career will go from here. His coalition clings to power by the slimmest of margins in the Knesset, sixty-four seats; sixty-one are required for a majority. Further, he is under the cloud of a 2019 indictment for breach of trust, fraud, and receiving bribes. A trial began in May, 2020 and continues to drag on. At this point, how it will play out is anyone’s guess.
Nor is it clear where the Abraham Accords will go from here. Ideally, the culmination of the process would be to bring the Big Cheese of Sunni Islam, Saudi Arabia, into the fold. That does not appear likely any time soon. President Biden does not share Trump’s enthusiasm for the Accords—his administration has sent out mixed signals. Further, his relationship with the Saudis is abysmal, and there has recently been a thaw in the Saudi relationship with Iran.
But however things play out, it won’t change the fact that the Abraham Accords—the first peace agreements between Israel and an Arab country in a quarter century— realigned the Middle East for the better. Netanyahu’s vision turned conventional wisdom on its head. Trump did not exaggerate, when he said at the signing ceremony:
We’re here this afternoon to change the course of history. Together, these agreements will serve as the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region—something which nobody thought was possible.
These agreements prove that the nations of the region are breaking free from the failed approaches of the past. Today’s signing sets history on a new course.20
In the final chapter of his memoir, Netanyahu reflects that if his brother Yoni hadn’t died at Entebbe, and if Moshe Arens, upon becoming Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, hadn’t launched Netanyahu’s public career by hiring him as deputy, “my life would have taken a different course.” Bibi doesn’t pretend to know whether the hand of destiny lurked in those “unpredictable twists of fate,” But, he writes, “I have clearly lived a life of purpose: to help secure the future of my ancient people who suffered so much and have contributed so much to humanity. This mission will continue to inspire me until the end of my days.”21
At age 73, Benjamin Netanyahu is still a Man on a Mission.
Michael Isenberg likes ribeyes, bourbon, and writing historical novels set in the medieval Muslim world. Please check out his latest, The Thread of Reason, at http://amazon.com/dp/0985329750.
Netanyahu, Benjamin. Bibi: My Story, New York: Threshold Editions (2022), Kindle Edition, p. 633.
Ibid.
Ibid p. 525.
Ibid, pp. 535-536.
Ibid, p. 527-528.
Ibid, p. 529.
McGreal, Chris, “How Netanyahu's speech to Congress has jeopardised US-Israel relations,” The Guardian, February 24, 2015, downloaded July 13, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/24/obama-binyamin-netanyahu-congress-speech-boehner-leaks.
“Does Israel have the Right to Exist?| PM-Elect Benjamin Netanyahu,” The Jordan Peterson Podcast, #311, Spotify, December 2022.
Some argue Trump was the best friend Israel ever had in the White House, but IMHO that honor goes to Richard Nixon (who, ironically, was seriously anti-Semitic). Taking the US to the brink of nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union, as Nixon did during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, is hard to top. Trump will have to settle for second best on this one. Still, considering the competition, that’s pretty damn good.
Netanyahu, Op. Cit., pp. 585-586.
“READ FULL TRANSCRIPT: Trump and Netanyahu's Joint Press Conference,” Haaretz, February 15, 2017, downloaded July 14, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-02-15/ty-article/read-full-transcript-trump-and-netanyahus-joint-press-conference/0000017f-f0f9-d8a1-a5ff-f0fb94ef0000.
Netanyahu, Op. Cit., p. 591.
Ibid. Full Disclosure: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson accompanied Trump on the trip and claimed the video shown by Netanyahu took Abbas’s statements out of context. It’s hard to know whether that’s true without the details of exactly what Abbas said and what the contexts were. In any case, when he raised the issue, Trump wasn’t convinced. “They got the guy on tape saying it,” he replied. Woodward, Bob, Rage, New York: Simon & Schuster (2020), pp. 65-66.
Ibid, p. 592.
Ibid., p. 617.
Rasgon, Adam, “Abbas on US plan: ‘We say 1,000 times: No, no and no to the deal of the century,’” The Times of Israel, January 29, 2002, downloaded July 13, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-on-us-plan-we-say-1000-times-no-no-and-no-to-the-deal-of-the-century/.
Milller, Aaron David, “Middle East Peace Plan Is Donald Trump’s Ultimate Deal Fantasy,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 3, 2020, downloaded July 16, 2023. https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/02/03/middle-east-peace-plan-is-donald-trump-s-ultimate-deal-fantasy-pub-80962.
See, e.g., “Palestine and the Arab World: A relationship in crisis?,” Brookings, August 27, 2020, downloaded July 14, 2023, https://www.brookings.edu/events/palestine-and-the-arab-world-a-relationship-in-crisis/; Bloomfield, Douglas, “The Saudis are growing sick of Palestine,” The Jerusalem Post, January 26, 2023, downloaded July 14, 2023, https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-729648; Cohen, Ken, “Why are Arab states rejecting the Palestinian cause?,” Jewish News Syndicate, July 2, 2019, downloaded July 14, 2023, https://www.jns.org/why-are-arab-states-rejecting-the-palestinian-cause/.
Abraham Accords Peace Agreement: Treaty of Peace, Diplomatic Relations and Full Normalization between the United Arab Emirates and the State of Israel, Archived October 22, 2020, downloaded July 14, 2023, https://web.archive.org/web/20201022092114/https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/ABRAHAM-ACCORDS-PEACE-AGREEMENT.pdf.
Netanyahu, Op. Cit., p. 628.
Ibid, p. 653.