The Abraham Accords have been good for the Middle East, but their momentum should be used to help the Palestinians achieve statehood, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud said at a virtual conference of the Aspen Security Forum on Tuesday.
“We think, overall, the Abraham Accords have worked positively to spur engagement in the region, so in that sense, the decision by those countries can be viewed positively,” he said.
The Saudi foreign minister added that the best way to build on the normalized relations between Israel and Arab states in the past year would be “to find a path to solving the issue of the Palestinians and finding a path to a Palestinian state, because that will deliver complete normalization for Israel in the region.”
Public speculation was high in the last months of the Trump administration that Saudi Arabia would become the fifth country to normalize ties with Israel under the rubric of the Abraham Accords, but those expectations never came to fruition.
The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan normalized ties with Israel last year as part of the Abraham Accords brokered by former US president Donald Trump.
Since US President Joe Biden entered office in January 2021, no additional deals have been reached.
At the security forum on Tuesday, Faisal said that peace “is a strategic choice of the Arabs” that must be used to reach a comprehensive solution for the Palestinians.
Asked if that’s a precondition for Saudi-Israel normalization, in light of the divisions among Palestinian factions making Israel-Palestinian peace unlikely in the short term, Faisal did not address the first part of the question.
Rather, he said that the PLO and Palestinian Authority are the legal representatives of the Palestinians.
“That engagement is the key engagement in order to progress towards a peaceful solution,” he stated. “I think without solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in a sustainable, long-term way, we’re not going to have real, sustainable security in the region. We need to try everything we can to make that happen.”
Faisal pointed to the new government in Israel, saying “perhaps it can deliver some progress. Let’s wait and see.”
At the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, Haim Regev spoke of the Abraham Accords and Israel’s ties with its Arab neighbors as he wrapped up five years in his role as deputy director-general for Middle East affairs and the peace process. He will soon take up the post of ambassador to the European Union.
His replacement has yet to be announced.
Regev was blunt in his assessment that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict presents a challenge when it comes to Israeli-Arab ties in the region.
Jerusalem, especially issues around the Temple Mount, is a particularly sensitive issue, Regev said.
But he insisted that, at the end of the day, Israeli ties with Arab nations could proceed even without the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Regev said that Israel’s military, economic and technological strength, particularly its battle against extremist elements in the region. including Iran, has helped sway the Arab countries to establish a connection.
“At the end of the day, we are here and constantly working to halt extremism,” he said.
Arab countries “look to the right and the left” and want to know who can help secure the region. The answer is Israel, Regev said. This gives Israel a lot of clout, he added.
The advantage that relations with Israel give the Arab countries outweighs the importance of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He was emphatic about the success of the Abraham Accords, noting that Foreign Minister Yair Lapid plans to visit Morocco next week.
“There was a momentum,” Regev said.
One must remember that there were leadership changes, both in Washington and Jerusalem, to say nothing of a war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, he said.
Then there are the Arab countries themselves, which have to weigh the formal normalization of ties with Israel against internal domestic considerations as well as regional ones, he said.
When it comes to unofficial ties, Israel has relations with almost all the countries in the Arab League short of Yemen, Lebanon and Syria and Algeria, Regev said. He noted in particular that it has unofficial relations with Iraq.
In addition, it has formal ties with six of the Arab League countries, he said, as he counted the four Abraham Accord countries and the two previous peace deals Israel struck with Egypt and Jordan.
To underscore the importance of such informal ties, he described how Israel built its relationship with the UAE under the table.
That relational infrastructure was one of the reasons that normalization ties could be established so quickly with the UAE, Regev said. When normalization was achieved, there was no need to start from scratch, because a stable base had already been built.
Regev said that Israel had also learned from the cold peace it had with Egypt and Jordan and was heavily focused on building the “people to people” connection with the Abraham Accord countries.