[For the signatories of the Abraham Accords, peace means squashing
peoples freedoms to unlock unfettered exchanges of technology and
weapons. This “peace treaty” is a strategic realignment against
Iran and a blueprint for increasing authoritarianism.]
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THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS: A FEVER DREAM OF DICTATORS, A NIGHTMARE FOR
PALESTINIANS
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Karim Kattan
September 17, 2020
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_ For the signatories of the Abraham Accords, peace means squashing
people's freedoms to unlock unfettered exchanges of technology and
weapons. This “peace treaty” is a strategic realignment against
Iran and a blueprint for increasing authoritarianism. _
US Protocol Chief Cam Henderson aids President Donald Trump, Bahrain
Foreign Minister Abdullatif Al-Zayani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan at the
Sept. 15th Abraham Accords signing. , Andrea Hanks/Official White
House photo
On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump, with much fanfare, hosted a
ceremony for the signing of the so-called peace agreements between
Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. With smug smiles
plastered on their faces, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and
Foreign Minister of Bahrain Abdullatif Al Zayani together hailed the
dawn of a new period in the region. According to the poetically-titled
Abraham Accords, the aforementioned heads of state and their
representatives will work together to achieve a “stable, peaceful
and prosperous” Middle East.
Peace and prosperity, uttered in the same breath as if they were a
single term, were indeed the keywords of the ceremony and of the
years-long process spearheaded by Trump’s senior advisor and
son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Kushner is no neutral broker: he sits on
the board of his parents’ foundation, which has funded programs in
the Israeli settlement of Beit El.
Much has been said about this alleged peace treaty. It is mostly a
strategic realignment of these countries against Iran and a blueprint
for increasing authoritarianism in the region, which follows decades
of clandestine relations and sharing of intelligence between Israel
and the UAE.
Yet the accords remain a fiction — the fever dream of dictators. In
the seven-page document, far-reaching issues such as the peaceful uses
of outer space are repeatedly mentioned, but one would be hard-pressed
to find any mention of Palestine. It only appears as half of an
infamous adjective, when the text refers to the so-called
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The rest of the agreement reads like a business proposal for
cooperation between accelerationist theocracies that believe in
colonizing Mars and the historicity of Abraham — but certainly not
in the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, freedom or
dignity. That erasure is an attempt to hasten the disappearance of
Palestinians as a polity, a territory, and a nation.
In the text, one character steals the limelight: the eponymous
patriarch Abraham, who is referred to here as if he had really
existed, and whose bountiful seed spawned all those present at the
ceremony. “The Parties undertake to foster mutual understanding,
respect, co-existence and a culture of peace between their societies
in the spirit of their common ancestor, Abraham,” the document
reads, as if peace could only occur between those who shared a common
ancestry. This betrays the signatories’ exclusive, wildly
ethnocentric vision of what a just world should look like.
This wouldn’t be the first time that Abraham is used as an
ecumenical symbol. It is a vapid but efficient strategy that requires
expunging the Biblical text from its darker elements and flattening
our geopolitical realities’ ugly, jagged edges.
According to various religious sources, Abraham left his homeland to
become a sojourner in a land promised to him by a god. In its
brightest interpretations, Abraham’s story is that of exile
coalescing into promise; of belonging that blooms into becoming; of
ossified identities surrendering themselves to defiant and vibrant
futures. At its darkest, however, Abraham is an embodiment of
religious dogma and obscurity; of patriarchy and enslavement; of
violence visited upon innocent children because of blind faith; of the
first colonizer, leaving the land of his fathers to settle another’s
land. In short, everything the oppressive regimes that signed the
accords believe in and thrive by.
On Tuesday, we were afforded the spectacle of religious extremists
signing a futuristic manifesto for zealots. Religious extremists, by
definition, attempt to force the world into the shape of their
beliefs, often by twisting language and resorting to violence. The
Abraham Accords thus endorse an ethnoreligious worldview, according to
which — though without verifiable evidence — the Jewish people are
descendants of Isaac and the Arabs are descendants of Ishmael,
half-brothers now reunited after centuries of estrangement, thanks to
the efforts of real-estate developer Jared Kushner and business
magnate Donald Trump.
A world neatly divided into clear-cut ethnicities and religions
(which, here, are the same thing) is sure to please Trump’s
pro-Israel Evangelical base and Netanyahu’s right-wing voters.
It’s an updated version of extremism, enhanced with talk of
pioneering technology and techno-optimism to suit the dictatorial
city-states of the Gulf and the unhinged colonialism of Israeli
society, without shaking their respective bedrocks of religious
identity and exclusionary politics.
Here, as often is the case with religious extremists, organized faith
is an essential and coercive component of identity, rather than a
series of acts and beliefs that can be reinvented, enriched, and
liberating. Here, much like in Israel proper and in most Gulf states,
there is no place for those who exist in liminal spaces and those
whose labels are slightly more complicated. In the far-right hellscape
drawn by this new axis, there is no place for Arab Jews, in their
diversity, or Arab Christians, or Muslims who are not Arabs, or
agnostics, or any other possible combination of faith, lack thereof,
and communities that flourish across our region.
One shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that the biggest scandal on
Sept. 15 was the normalization of relations between the UAE, Bahrain,
and Israel. This would be falling into the trap of pan-Arabism, whose
failures and crimes need no demonstration any more. Those who expected
the oppressive Gulf regimes to support Palestinian rights were
willfully naïve. The UAE and Bahrain did not betray Palestine, nor
did they stab us in the back. They were never allies to begin with.
Much like Israel, they were built on the corpses, and through the
labor, of Palestinians and other oppressed groups.
The Abraham Accords are an alliance of repression. What was signed on
is a shared worldview, violent, dark, and tribal, where peace cannot
be an earth-shattering, future-altering reality. Peace, to the
signatories of these accords, means squashing the voices of the
people. It is merely a synonym to the “unlocking” (a favored word
of the treaty and of Trump’s “Deal of the Century”) of the
potential for free, unfettered exchanges of technology, finance, and
weapons.
Palestine, an unfortunate collateral damage of these accords,
represents a rebellious and dangerous future. This, beyond any other
ideological claims, is why they have rejected it to the margins of
this text, and of their worlds.
[_Karim Kattan is a writer and Ph.D. candidate based in Bethlehem. His
first collection of short stories, Préliminaires pour un verger
futur, was published in 2017._]
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