A Review of Elham Fakhro, The Abraham Accords: The Gulf States, Israel, and the Limits of Normalization (Columbia University Press, 2024)
On September 15, 2020, US President Donald Trump was joined at the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to sign the Abraham Accords.
A billboard in Tel Aviv in June 2025 by the “Coalition for Regional Security” Israeli political-security initiative depicting (L to R) leaders of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United States, Israel, UAE, Oman, Morocco and Bahrain, with the Hebrew slogan “A time for war, a time for settlement; now is the time for the ‘Abrahamic Covenant.'” Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images
By signing the multilateral agreement, they became the first Arab states to normalize relations with Israel since Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. In the five years since, the initial surprise among citizens in the region and international pundits has given way to a sense that the Accords were merely a transactional reflection of regional realignments. Rather than a bold strategy to reshape the region, they are now seen more as a symptom of shifting US power—an arrangement that highlights Washington’s reliance on proxies at a time of enduring militarism but waning global hegemony.
In Elham Fakhro’s meticulous new telling, however, the Abraham Accords are more than a footnote to an inevitable remaking of the Middle East. They offer a powerful lens to decipher geopolitical and economic transformations in the past quarter century that have ushered in a chaotic and violent interregnum dominated by dictators and plutocrats from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and beyond. While the Accords are often packaged by mainstream media outlets as part of an Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Fakhro dispels this notion by showing that they have little to do with Palestinian lives and are instead a security compact for a narrow slice of political elites and capitalists spanning many countries.
Mining English and Arabic media accounts, WikiLeaks and interviews conducted by Fakhro herself with officials and observers in several countries, The Abraham Accords: The Gulf States, Israel, and the Limits of Normalization recounts how multilateral backchannels and private actors brought the parties together and have been the initial beneficiaries, despite many frustrations and contradictions. Although Morocco and Sudan subsequently signed onto the Accords, the book is primarily focused on Israeli and US relations over the past decade with the leaders of a troika of families ruling the UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
‘Waves of Normalization’
The Abraham Accords were modeled on a long-standing idea held by some Israeli strategists: Bilateral agreements with Arab states would deliver security through trade and economic exchange, while sidelining Palestinians and deferring any reckoning with their demands for self-determination. Indeed, the Accords did not require Israel to relinquish any land, contrary to the principle of land for peace set by the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242 and reflected in the 1990s peace process and treaties signed with Egypt and Jordan. Even the UAE’s claim that it had secured a halt to Israel’s planned annexation of the West Bank prior to signing the deal quickly unraveled—undermined by conflicting translations of the agreement’s text and Israel’s unchecked colonial appetite.
Fakhro identifies a concatenation of forces and perceptions that set the stage for normalization. Israeli and Arab Gulf decision makers alike feared Iran’s advances in its nuclear program as well as the US-led Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—which aimed to restrain that program and threatened to improve US-Iranian relations. In their view, these developments would undermine Israeli supremacy and the security of neighboring Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, the instability that followed the US toppling of Iraqi President Saddam Hussain in 2003 was compounded by the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. Both Israel and the Gulf monarchies interpreted the popular uprisings as challenges to their regimes because they endeavored to overthrow dictatorships and bring to power more democratic and Islamist forces. Finally, US policymakers championed greater cooperation between its main regional partners—Israel and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—as a means to head off threats, including real and imagined challenges from China.
Fakhro is careful to contextualize these developments within the longer histories of GCC countries. She devotes the book’s first chapter to recounting how, since the 1930s, the plight of Palestinians has animated political struggles in Eastern Arabia, including labor movements and anti-British sentiments. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, official support for the Palestinian cause increased significantly. She includes an informative retelling of the “waves of normalization” that took place after the 1993 Oslo Accords and then again after the 2003 US occupation of Iraq. She also reminds readers that it was Omani and Qatari officials, rather than Bahrain and the UAE, who took the first steps to recognize Israel.
Critically, since the early 2000s, normalization was spearheaded by a generational shift in leadership in the GCC, the subject of Chapter 2. Younger members of the ruling families, who began managing key political, security and financial portfolios, were enamored by breakthroughs such as the use of information technology to build post-oil economies and as tools to monitor citizens and vulnerable migrant workers. Private and public Israeli ventures played key roles in many of these sectors. Gulf states, especially the UAE, developed diplomatic channels that were brokered not only by government ministries but also by private firms, such as ImageSat International or Asia Global Technologies International (45–6).
Nurtured by McKinsey and other consulting companies, immediately prior to and after the Accords were signed, private and public Israeli and Gulf interests, sometimes involving US firms, clustered around everything from diamonds to defense with particular cross-fertilization in aeronautics, spyware, biotechnology, energy and artificial technology. A question for future study is why some of the first movers of the early waves of détente with Israel, such as Qatar and Oman that share some of the same characteristics as the UAE and Bahrain, have not joined the Accords and are rarely mentioned as imminent signatories.
Formalizing the Rapprochement
The cover of Elham Fakhro’s book The Abraham Accords: The Gulf States, Israel, and the Limits of Normalization.
In Fakhro’s telling, the presidency of Donald Trump “played a pivotal role in the shift” from covert and isolated ties to the formal pact of the Abraham Accords and full diplomatic relations (71). The book’s third chapter details how, from the very outset, a set of cabinet members and advisors helped forge links between the US administration and Netanyahu and his closest allies. In particular they steered the impressionable Trump toward the long-standing “outside-in” approach that right-wing Israelis advocated: building ties with Arabs states before—or instead of—engaging with Palestinian demands for self-determination. David Friedman, Jason Greenblatt, Jared Kushner, Avi Berkowitz and Mike Pompeo held key roles mediating relations between the Oval Office and Tel Aviv.
In parallel, a set of officials and Trump’s business confidantes worked to shape US-GCC relations and bind them to Israel. Erik Prince, the former founder of Blackwater and an informal advisor to the president, was central to these efforts. Other key brokers included George Nader, a former consultant for Prince, and Tom Barrack, a real estate investor, friend of and fundraiser for the president. They were hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and served as key channels for other GCC governments. Fakhro also identifies the pivotal role played by UAE’s ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba. Together, they convinced the Trump administration to depart from decades of US policy on settlements, UNRWA and sales of advanced weapons and technology to Arab states. Arguably the most consequential step taken by Trump in his first term was withdrawing in 2018 from the JCPOA and imposing a “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran, which only heightened regional conflicts.
Momentum was on the side of bringing all the parties together and initiating the Abraham Accords—even Netanyahu’s last-minute foot dragging and electioneering, which reportedly irritated Trump on more than one occasion, did not ultimately derail the pact. When the United States agreed to recognize Morocco’s claims to Western Sahara and to remove Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and repay its debts to the World Bank, the two North African Arab states joined the Accords at the end of 2020.
Saudi Arabia, assumed to be the jewel in the crown of this initiative, has yet to join the Accords, but not for lack of effort by the Trump administration or that of his successor US President Joseph Biden. Fakhro shies away from offering a full accounting for Saudi Arabia’s strategy of not signing a version of the Accords, or why the kingdom turned to Iraqi and Chinese mediation in an effort to mend fences with Iran in March 2023. It is too early to say whether the hellfire response unleashed by Israel on Gaza, Lebanon and Iran after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel will ultimately scuttle the aspirations for broader normalization or merely change the terms of trade for the United States, Israel and would be new partners.
Military coordination also became an impetus for the UAE and Bahrain to purchase more advanced and more expensive military technology from both US and Israeli firms. In 2021 alone, Bahrain and the UAE purchased over $853 million in arms from Israel. As tariffs were lifted and trade agreements penned, the UAE earmarked $10 billion in investments in “Israel’s most strategic sectors, including across energy, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors” (112). Many of these commercial arrangements involved an array of Israeli firms and Emirati sovereign wealth funds, including Mubadala and Abu Dhabi Development Holding Company. To the dismay of many of their own citizens, both Bahrain and the UAE went so far as to extend commercial agreements to firms based in settlements in the West Bank.
An underappreciated dimension of the Abraham Accords, the role it played in “tolerance-washing,” or resuscitating the reputations of Bahrain and the UAE, is the focus of Chapter 5. Tarnished by the Bahraini state’s violent suppression of a popular uprising in 2011, the GCC war on Yemen, as well as a litany of stories about the dire human rights conditions of guest workers and citizens in their own countries, Emirati and Bahraini rulers recruited the Abraham Accords to extend their public diplomacy campaigns. As the name of the Accords suggests, the idiom of religious kinship and coexistence presents a highly manicured image of these countries as tolerant, modern and cosmopolitan. Crucially, it offers a way to differentiate themselves from the stylized post-9/11 images of the Middle East as a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, anti-Western sentiment and xenophobia.
Several social media personalities and high-profile Zionist organizations, such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), became spokespersons for this campaign. “Bahrain and the UAE’s tolerance drive,” observes Fakhro, “would come to resemble the hasbara strategies that Israel uses to cultivate its image as a liberal haven in a violent neighborhood, or a ‘villa in the jungle’” (180). Among the set of recruited rabbis was US rabbi Marc Schneier, an interfaith advisor to the Bahraini king, who described the Gulf archipelago as “a role model in the Arab world for co-existence and tolerance” (165). Another rabbi commented that under the king’s rule “Bahrain…is a little light in a dark world of racial fundamentalism.” In this and other chapters, Fakhro delves deeply into the case of Bahrain, which has received far less attention in both media and scholarship than the UAE’s normalization or Saudi Arabia’s alignment with Israel.
Repression and Resistance
If Gulf leaders deployed the Accords to target international opinion, they did little to recruit support among their citizenry. Fakhro insightfully explains that the relative lack of appetite for deepening social, cultural and touristic relations—especially from the direction of Gulf Arabs to Israel—stems from a deep popular history of support for the Palestinian cause among societies in the Arabian Peninsula. In Bahrain, the UAE and elsewhere, the rich legacy among civil society and labor organizations of mobilizing around the question of Palestine has not ended with normalization. Fakhro points to public opinion polls and a series of effective boycott campaigns against Starbucks and several other firms and products to argue that the Abraham Accords have little popular support in the GCC. Instead, the Accords actually align with growing authoritarian conditions in Bahrain and the UAE in the past 15 years and the monarchies’ heightened intolerance for dissent.
Instead, the agreement has remained resilient despite Israel’s murder and starvation of Palestinians, siege on Gaza and expansion of Israeli control over the West Bank. In Fakhro’s telling, these developments are entirely consistent with the Abraham Accords: “Instead of forging peace between the conflicting parties, the Trump administration brokered a normalization agreement between Israel and states not directly involved in the conflict while emboldening Netanyahu to continue his expansion of settlements in the West Bank and deepening Israel’s grip over the occupied territories” (109).
By staying close to the sources, Fakhro is able to capture these dynamics and the challenges facing even the strong-willed signatories and their advisors. She parses out the multiple interests and motley set of agendas informing the attempt to build bridges between these polities, security apparatuses and investment portfolios. What is less explored are questions about the possible unstated logics at work. Is Israel’s control of Palestinian populations also a model for these Gulf rulers, whose subjects are divided by gradations of citizenship and human worth? Are there methods, laws and technologies that can travel to and from the Gulf and occupied Palestinian territories to address internal or demographic threats as much as external ones?
As for the shared menace, Iran, Fakhro often recites the vocabulary and logics of state officials but holds back on fully evaluating the allegations that Iran is a military threat or has an imperial appetite. The discussion of Iran in the book remains at the level of perceptions. The opinions of decision-makers in Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Manama and Washington are important and are shaped by the fallout of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and Hizballah’s military resilience in the 2006 war with Israel. But deterrence and shared-threat assessments can easily become alibis for aggression. As Vali Nasr has argued, Iran’s posture and policies from 2001 to 2020—let alone its actual military capacity—was less akin to hegemonic expansionism and more a product of its defensive response to the US Global War on Terror and the dozens of military bases and tens of thousands of troops deployed in close striking distance.[1]
The Abraham Accords should be read for Elham Fakhro’s compelling and lucid explanation of the origins and immediate outcomes of the agreement. She rightfully directs our attention to the Accords’ political limits and the narrow bases of support for this imagined new regional order. One wonders if, in recent months, kings and their advisors are reevaluating the strategic compromise of recognizing Israel in return for their own security. If the compact was designed to shield Arab Gulf states from external and internal threats, can they be protected from the guardian, namely Israel? The question resonates further after Israel recently violated the sovereignty of GCC-member, Qatar, by bombing a meeting of Hamas negotiators discussing a potential ceasefire in Gaza. Given that Israel—with the unwavering support of the United States—has spent most of the past two years violating sovereignty in the name of self-defense and regionally extending its policy of “mowing the lawn” beyond its original target of Gaza, what kind of security can documents signed in Washington actually bring?
[Arang Keshavarzian is a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU.]
Endnotes
[1] Vali Nasr, Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025).
