The Abraham Accords were sold as the price Israel would pay to stop annexing the West Bank. Five years on, the annexation is being openly mapped and the Gulf’s answer is a warning. The lesson is not that recognition was offered, but that it was offered without terms anyone could enforce.
In September 2020 the United Arab Emirates became the first Arab state in twenty-six years to normalise relations with Israel, breaking a consensus that recognition would wait until Palestinian statehood was secured. Bahrain followed within weeks. Morocco followed after that. Abu Dhabi did not present this as capitulation. It presented it as leverage — a seat at the table from which the Palestinian cause could be advanced more effectively than it had been from outside.
The specific consideration was annexation. The UAE conditioned normalisation on Israel suspending its plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, and framed the outcome as an achievement for Palestinian statehood rather than a concession against it.
It is worth being precise about what has happened to that bargain, because the answer is not complicated. Israel’s finance minister has publicly urged the application of Israeli sovereignty to some 82 percent of the West Bank, with maps being drawn. The remaining 18 percent would be left to the Palestinians. He described the objective in five words: maximum land, minimum Arabs.
What leverage turned out to be worth
The Emirati response has been the sharpest it has offered Israel since October 2023. Lana Nusseibeh, assistant minister for political affairs, told Reuters that annexation would constitute a red line for the UAE and would end the pursuit of regional integration. She said the Accords had been understood from the outset as a means of supporting Palestinian aspirations for an independent state, and that the annexation proposals were aimed at burying that idea altogether. Abu Dhabi carried the same message privately to the White House. A senior Emirati official reduced it to a choice: annexation or integration.
This is not the language of a state indifferent to Palestine. But note what it is. It is a warning, delivered from inside an agreement, about the imminent destruction of the one thing that agreement was supposed to secure. Five years of normalised relations, deepened trade and defence ties, and direct access to Israeli leadership have produced a position that Abu Dhabi could have stated in 2020 without signing anything.
Recognition is the single largest concession an Arab state has to offer. It was spent in advance, in exchange for a suspension rather than a settlement, and there was never a mechanism to reclaim it.
That is the flaw, and it is structural rather than moral. The Accords contained no enforceable term binding Israel on the West Bank. Suspension is not renunciation. A promise to refrain, with no penalty attached and no expiry, is worth exactly as much as the promising party’s continued interest in keeping it. The Emiratis are now discovering the difference between a condition and a hope.
The order that framed the bargain is going too
None of this occurred in a vacuum. Writing in Foreign Affairs in August, the political scientist Marc Lynch argued that the regional system in place since 1991 has not survived the war in Gaza and the American-Israeli confrontation with Iran, and that these have together dealt what he called a death blow to the American Middle East. He compares the moment to Suez in 1956, which did not end the British and French position in the region overnight but settled the question of where it was heading.
His argument is not that American power has evaporated. It is that the operating assumptions have failed — that decades of containment through sanctions and force did not produce the results claimed for them, and that support for Israel’s conduct in Gaza consumed whatever moral standing Washington retained. Lynch holds that the United States could still engage the region more healthily if it stopped propping up autocrats, shielding allies from accountability, and treating military pressure as a substitute for policy.
What this asks of the Muslim world
For Pakistan and for Muslim states more broadly, the temptation is to read all this as vindication and to reach for denunciation. That would be the least useful response available.
The instructive point is narrower and more demanding. The Gulf states that normalised did so on a calculation — that proximity would buy influence over Israeli conduct. That calculation has now been tested against the hardest possible case, and the result is on the public record. Influence was not obtained. What this establishes is not that engagement is illegitimate, but that engagement without enforceable terms delivers nothing to the people in whose name it is undertaken.
Any future arrangement, whether involving Saudi Arabia or anyone else, has to be judged against that finding. What, specifically, is Israel bound to do? What happens if it does not? Who determines the breach, and what follows? An agreement that cannot answer those three questions is not a diplomatic instrument. It is a photograph.
The reckoning ahead
Whatever Israel decides about the West Bank, the Accords have already made their point. A bargain premised on preventing annexation has arrived at the moment of annexation with nothing to deploy but the threat of its own collapse. Those who signed it are entitled to say they tried something that had not been tried. They are not entitled to claim it worked.
The Palestinian question was never a regional inconvenience to be routed around on the way to integration. It was always the condition of any order worth the name. That is the finding of the last five years, and it will be the finding of the next five unless the terms are written differently.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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