In a speech in Israel today, President Biden embraced one of his predecessor’s chief foreign-policy accomplishments: The Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab countries.
Biden pledged to deepen U.S. support for the normalization push: “We will also continue building on the Abraham Accords, which I strongly support because they deepen, they deepen Israel’s integration into the broader region and establish lasting ties for business, cooperation and tourism.”
CNN reported yesterday on how U.S. officials are thinking about this effort:
In the lead-up to the trip, US officials have been working to deepen Israeli-Arab security coordination and broker agreements that will inch Israel and Saudi Arabia — which do not have diplomatic relations — closer to normalization.
People familiar with the matter said Saudi Arabia is expected to announce this week that it will allow all commercial flights to and from Israel to use its airspace and allow Israel’s Muslim minority to take charter flights directly to Saudi Arabia to participate in the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Biden will also fly directly to Saudi Arabia from Israel, a moment that he called a “small symbol of the budding relations” between the two countries.
Senior Biden administration officials said full Saudi-Israel normalization remains out of reach, though covert coordination between the two countries has expanded.
“It’s changed the security situation in the Middle East,” a senior US official said of the Abraham Accords signed in late 2020. “Our job is to go deeper with the countries that have signed up and to go wider if we can.”
The administration had previously taken a cagey approach to the accords, with the State Department reportedly declining to even use the phrase “Abraham Accords.” At one point last year, that led to a bizarre exchange between the Associated Press’s Matt Lee and State Department spokesman Ned Price during the daily briefing.
This awkward exchange between @APDiploWriter and @StateDeptSpox about the ever-elusive name of the peace deals between Israel and its Arab neighbors is—dare I say—Price-less. It's also instructive about the Biden Administration's regressive approach to the Middle East. pic.twitter.com/OwwSoEqRU8
— Len Khodorkovsky (@MessageFromLen) April 1, 2021
Now, however, it sounds increasingly like the Biden administration is accepting the premises on which Trump-era officials built out their Mideast diplomacy. As CNN reported:
The Biden administration’s focus on expanding normalization agreements between Israel and Arab countries has frustrated Palestinian officials who would prefer the US focus on reviving the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But US officials say their focus on Arab-Israeli normalization is a recognition of realities in the region: The momentum for growing Arab-Israeli ties coupled with dead-end political conditions in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
That sounds remarkably similar to what top Trump officials, such as Mike Pompeo, were saying in late 2020: “We can’t stand by as we have for 40 years and allow that conflict to be the precondition for further enhancement of peace and stability.”