by JOSEPH MASSAD
Repeatedly sold as a path to peace, the historical record shows Arab normalisation deals have delivered only violent expansionism, regional destabilisation and Israeli impunity
One of the key US policies in the Arab world is to bring about “normalisation” of relations between all Arab countries and Israel in order to encircle the Palestinians with allies of their colonisers and deprive them of any external support.
Previously, the 1993 Oslo I Accord transformed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from a liberation movement into a subcontractor of Israel’s occupation to encircle the Palestinians within the occupied territories themselves.
This containment strategy was meant to quash the Palestinian struggle
once and for all. When Palestinian resistance persisted, culminating in
the October 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood operation, the strategy was not
reconsidered but rather further accelerated.
Since the 2020 announcement of the Abraham Accords, normalisation
efforts have expanded beyond Arab states to include Muslim-majority
countries that were never at war with Israel, yet did not have
diplomatic relations with it.
Most recently, in November, the Trump administration touted Kazakhstan‘s formal accession to the Accords, even though it already maintained “full diplomatic relations” with Israel.
Indonesia, which does not have diplomatic relations with Israel, is also reportedly weighing normalisation.
This expansion comes as several Arab initiatives have stalled in the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, most notably with Saudi Arabia, and even Libya, whose foreign minister
met with her Israeli counterpart in Italy in August 2023, before the
ongoing mass slaughter of Palestinians rendered the process untenable.
Long before the US advanced normalisation with Israel as a regional strategy, it had already been articulated as a Zionist one.
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