William N. Robinson is a political analyst, researcher, and consultant specializing in security, governance and political economy. He works with a Horn of Africa‑based war and human rights monitoring organization and holds research fellowships with policy institutes in the Middle East and New Zealand. Find him on Twitter/X @wrobinsonnz.
In June 2025, a billboard appeared in central Tel Aviv. Towering above traffic, it featured a host of Arab leaders—from Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to Syria's Transitional President Ahmed al-Sharaa—flanking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump. The billboard bore the slogan: "The Abraham Alliance… It's Time for a New Middle East."
Nearly five years after the signing of the Abraham Accords—normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and later Morocco and Sudan—the message is unmistakable. Israel's ambitions have broadened beyond bilateral diplomacy toward a total reconfiguration of the regional order.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar now speaks openly of enlarging the "circle of peace and normalization" to include Syria, Saudi Arabia and beyond. Senior U.S. officials, from Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, echo this aspiration. Trump himself has described it as his "dream" for Saudi Arabia to establish official ties with Israel. In a gesture of appreciation for Washington's role in advancing the Arab–Israeli normalization framework, Netanyahu used his recent White House visit to nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.
This pageantry disguises the reality that the Abraham Accords were never intended to resolve active conflict, let alone build peace. Instead, by granting reactionary Arab regimes access to Washington and Tel Aviv's strategic capital, normalization enabled Israel to further sideline Palestinians from the regional agenda.
The resilience of the Accords amid mass atrocities is particularly conspicuous. Amid Israel's military offensives in Syria, Yemen and Lebanon—alongside its genocide in Gaza and accelerating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank—the states that normalized relations under the Abraham Accords have not conditioned their cooperation on Israeli restraint. On the contrary, many have deepened commercial and technological ties with Israeli entities implicated in war crimes. By institutionalizing a permissive diplomatic environment, regional normalization has served only to reinforce Israel's impunity, as noted by Tariq Dana, professor of Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
In September 2024, Netanyahu publicly disavowed the foundational "land for peace" paradigm while championing Israel's efforts to secure Saudi Arabia's accession to the Abraham Accords. By setting a precedent that rewarded Israel without territorial concessions, the Accords emboldened its conviction that normalization with Riyadh—the diplomatic crown jewel for both Tel Aviv and Washington—can be achieved without permitting the establishment of a Palestinian state. This assumption reflects Israel's longstanding settler-colonial logic of exogenous peace—the pursuit of agreements and legitimacy not with the colonized but with surrounding states, thereby accelerating displacement through diplomacy.
The bilateral treaties Israel signed with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) were paradigmatic examples of this dynamic. Both Israel and Washington knew that by securing financial and strategic guarantees for Cairo and Amman, both Arab capitals' material commitment to Palestinian statehood would evaporate.
The treaties marked a departure from the 1967 Khartoum Resolution's "Three No's" paradigm—no peace, no recognition and no negotiations with Israel—as well as the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which conditioned recognition on the establishment of a Palestinian state. In doing so, they deprived Palestinians of one of their few remaining sources of diplomatic leverage: the Arab consensus that Israel's regional integration must be contingent on ending its occupation of Palestine.
Ultimately, both treaties failed to deliver the benefits pro-normalization Arab pundits promised would accrue to Palestinians, whether diplomatically or in daily life. Instead, they reinforced Israel's maximalist project and, by drawing Egypt and Jordan deeper into U.S. security and economic dependency, further eroded their political autonomy.
By offering Arab regimes tangible rewards for rapprochement, the Abraham Accords reproduced the precedent set by Egypt and Jordan. They delivered advanced U.S. and Israeli weaponry for the UAE, recognition of Morocco's claim to Western Sahara at the expense of the U.N.-led process for Sahrawi self-determination, regime consolidation for Bahrain and sanctions relief for Sudan.
Israel made no concessions in return. Worse, the accords set a precedent that annexation—whether of the West Bank or Western Sahara—can be normalized as a fait accompli when aligned with U.S. or Israeli interests. Amid today's global attack on international law, bargaining such basic rights undermines human rights, state sovereignty and self-determination while establishing the permissive structure necessary to advance violations in perpetuity.
Nearly five years after the signing of the Abraham Accords—normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and later Morocco and Sudan—the message is unmistakable. Israel's ambitions have broadened beyond bilateral diplomacy toward a total reconfiguration of the regional order.
- William N. Robinson
As part of the proposed next phase of the Abraham Accords, Israel has courted both Somalia and the unrecognized state of Somaliland, appealing to their diametrically opposed manifest destinies—namely, Somaliland's quest for international recognition and Mogadishu's determination to block it.
Initial contact reportedly focused on the possibility of relocating ethnically cleansed Palestinians from Gaza to Somaliland, a scheme that Tel Aviv has floated with several other African states. Israel's readiness to exploit crises in the Horn of Africa also owes to Somaliland's geostrategic proximity to the Red Sea, positioning it as an ideal launch pad for trade securitization and for military operations against Yemen's Houthi movement.
Unilateral U.S. recognition of Somaliland—an idea now gaining traction in Washington—would provide the key bargaining chip to pave the way for a Tel Aviv–Hargeisa deal. Alarmed by this prospect, Mogadishu has lobbied the Trump administration to block any formal agreement, reportedly offering to join the Abraham Accords themselves.
Perhaps most unexpectedly, Damascus—amid the removal of U.S. sanctions and rescinding of al-Sharaa's terror designation—has acknowledged indirect negotiations with Israel. Here, Tel Aviv's imperative is to strip Damascus of its capacity to deter Israeli expansion beyond the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967.
In essence, the Abraham Accords have enabled Israel to launder its image through choreographed summits and photo-ops with Arab officials while insulating it from broader regional scrutiny. The Accords rewarded Israel with access to Arab markets and airspace, yielding significant diplomatic and economic dividends. What Israel has promoted as "historic" junctures of regional reconciliation is in fact little more than a series of optics-driven, transactional bargains between autocratic regimes, rooted in militarized geopolitics and designed less to deliver stability than to bypass the region's most central and enduring conflict.
Most crucially, by decoupling Arab–Israeli rapprochement from the Palestine question, the Accords have neither curbed Israel's settlement enterprise in the West Bank nor deterred its military offensives in Gaza, either in 2021 or since October 2023. Regional analyst Khaled Elgindy highlights this dynamic as the fallacy of the Abraham Accords "peace paradigm." As the past two years emphasize, no number of regional agreements can produce genuine peace so long as they bypass Palestinian rights.
Equally, so long as its enabler-in-chief, the United States, continues to conflate what is "good for Israel" with what is "good for peace," the very security that Israel and Arab regimes claim to seek will remain permanently out of reach.
