What happened in the Middle East last week?
The Biden visit points to a steady regional realignment, but no one is really happy with it just yet
The world’s eyes were on Joe Biden’s visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia last week. His administration was not overly keen to continue Trump’s policies and the president had also been very clear to take on the Saudi de-facto leader Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (‘MBS’), following the gruesome Khashoggi murder. At the same time the US and its European partners have been at the table to resurrect the nuclear deal with Iran that Trump had scrapped. Biden would steer US foreign policy in a different direction, a shift seen with particular apprehension in Israel.
How different last week was on each and every file. Not only did Biden state that a two-state solution for Israel and Palestinians was not going to happen soon, he also proclaimed that you do not need to be a Jew to be a Zionist. For good measure he added that his tenth visit to Israel felt like coming home. So in short order he neutralized the Israel-critics in his own party, notably the anti-Israel squad, and he also signalled a continuation of his predecessor’s approach to Israel. And upon taking a direct flight to Jeddah from Israel - a first in history - no one stopped talking about his fist bump with MBS. Uncle Joe had basically taken a U-turn on almost everything he had said out about the Middle East before he entered the White House. So, what happened?
Peace comes not from a sudden realization where people think, ‘it’s time to stop fighting, let’s make a deal and live together in harmony’. No, peace arrangements are almost always the result of global shifts, new alliances and rapidly changing circumstances. And so it is with Israel and the Palestinians who were always fully supported by the Arab world. After years of war and terror the collapse of the Soviet Union forced the then leader of the Palestinians Arafat to come to the table and start negotiating a possible deal. The resulting Oslo Accords of the 1990s provided a map for peace, but in the end the deal collapsed and violence resumed. The only exceptions were Egypt and Jordan with whom Israel had signed deals in 1979 and 1994 respectively. The rest of the Arab world remained hostile; a situation not helped by American insistence (read: John Kerry’s insistence) that no Israeli-Arab peace arrangement could be made ahead of any settlement for the Palestinians.
And yet, that is exactly what happened. Israel signed deals - the Abraham Accords - with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. These are often panned as a Trump media stunt, but credit where it is due, this one of the few areas where the former president can point to serious success with a long term positive impact. Not that it was entirely a Trump engineered feat, the train had left the station years before where Israeli government officials had started to informally meet representatives of Arab governments to get things moving. When I attended the OurCrowd conference in Jerusalem in early 2020 Arab nations were already virtually present (photo) as travel was not yet possible, something the host Jon Medved hinted at as something that might happen soon. Israeli and Arabs could indeed not wait to get together to start doing business and with good reason. They were brought together by: (1) the common threat of Iran as an aggressive and potentially nuclear entity; and (b) the opportunity to use tech to create a prosperous and liveable Middle East (think blooming deserts and post-oil economies). The menace posed by a nuclear Shi'ite power that was fuelling the fire in places like Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq worked as an accelerant uniting the Sunni Arab world and as an emerging new member of the club, Israel. The latter of course had been earmarked first as a target for total annihilation by the regime in Tehran. Now the sworn enemies had sealed a pact, leaving the Palestinians behind. A new reality had emerged on the ground. If Israeli soldiers of Arab descent appear on Saudi magazine covers, you know that a monumental shift is happening.
So Biden essentially build on the framework for an Arab-Israeli peace that he inherited from Trump. The US needs a unified front in a Middle East where a nuclear Iran is increasingly assertive and it will need the Saudis in the fold too. And yes, he also wanted the Saudis to loosen up their oil delivery machine in order to stabilize a US and world economy that is headed for a severe energy crunch this winter. So in one four day sweep he put the Israelis at ease, threw a bone to the Palestinians, re-energized the relationship with the Saudis and on the face of it brought everyone a bit closer together.
When you do this it is guaranteed that no one is happy and that many will roll their eyes. His warm words for Israel and Zionism disguise the fact that he failed to visit the spiritual and historic heart of the Jewish nation, the Western Wall. There are deep concerns in Israel over the long term direction of US foreign policy that is growing increasingly isolationist, something Europeans fear too. Normalization between Israeli and Saudi Arabia will indeed not go forward as quickly and smoothly as we would like and MBS was not overly keen to open up the oil tap just yet. Back home the criticism of meeting with a Saudi royal who has blood on his hands continued unabated and even family members of 9/11 victims were angered by the ‘fist-bump’. And: it is far from clear that we have a unified front against Iran and an agreed plan to support this dangerous journey.
So it was a mixed bag and thus no one is happy. The reality is that Joe Biden came from behind and needed to catch up. It is far from clear that he has the political capital to force a unified and firm front against Iran as well as the diplomatic wherewithal to secure a real deal between Israel and the Saudis. If no one is happy we probably have some sort of an interim compromise. But at the very least things are moving and Biden travelled to the Middle East to engage with the key actors directly. It’s a minor but not unimportant step forward.
For newcomers: I have written about Israel at length here and here, also about the incredible success that is Israeli tech. The complexities on the Arab side I discussed here after reading Kim Ghattas’ excellent book which focuses on the Shi’a - Sunni history.