Steven Witkoff Says The Trump Administration Will Expand The Abraham Accords.
Steven Witkoff Teases An Upcoming Expansion Of The Abraham Accords, a Move That Will Further Isolate The Palestinians In The Region.
In a recent interview with CNBC, Trump’s Special Envoy To The Middle East, Steven Witkoff, teased an upcoming announcement about the expansion of the Abraham Accords.
In the interview, Witkoff said, “One of the president's key objectives is that the Abraham Accords be expanded, that more countries come into it, and we are working on that in my team and in coordination with the secretary of state and the entire state department, and we think we are going to have some pretty big announcements on countries that are now coming into the Abraham Accords. And we are hoping for normalization (with Israel) with an array of countries that maybe people would have never contemplated would come in”.
Far from an actual peace deal, the Abraham Accords were an Israeli-led plot to get powerful Arab states to drop any concessions for Palestinians or a need for a Palestinian state as a condition for normalization with Israel, sidelining the Palestinians.
In this article, I will explain the history of the Abraham Accords and the significance of this move.
Sidelining The Palestinians.
In reality, Israel’s path to full normalization with its neighbors could be simply done by supporting a two-state solution- something all Arab states have accepted, but Israel has refused to do.
The Arab peace initiative, supported by all 22 members of the Arab League in 2002, agreed to full normalization with Israel in exchange for a
“Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the June 4, 1967 lines as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon.”
The “Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194”
And “the acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital”.
In exchange, the member states of the Arab League would:
Consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, and enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region.
Establish normal relations with Israel in the context of this comprehensive peace.
As Middle East Monitor reported. at the time, “The Arab Peace Initiative enjoyed near global support from the UN, with US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair endorsing it”.
As the outlet noted, Israel soon after effectively destroyed the agreement when “On 29 March 2002, a day after the Arab Peace Initiative was announced, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield, a massive military operation in the West Bank, allegedly in response to terrorist attacks. Israeli forces blasted their way into Ramallah, Jenin and Nablus. More than 500 Palestinians, as well as 29 Israeli soldiers, were killed in the four-week military operation.”
Yet again, at the “Arab League summit in Riyadh in March 2007,” the Arab Peace Initiative “was re-endorsed fully.”
At the time, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said, “The Arab Peace Initiative is one of the pillars of the peace process… it sends a signal that the Arabs are serious about achieving peace”.
Yet again, Israel rejected the initiative. As Middle East Monitor wrote:
Israel, meanwhile, turned further to the political right with the re-election of Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009 as Prime Minister. The Likud leader, who secured a second term in office, was (and still is) leading a party that recognises neither the right of the Palestinians to statehood nor the solution for peace endorsed by virtually everyone, framed within the Arab Peace Initiative.
Netanyahu cemented his position and with it the Israeli far right by going on to win three further elections. Latterly, the Arab Peace Initiative has suffered a huge blow.
This compromising solution from the Arab League to the overall conflict in the Middle East went against the agenda of the Israeli Likud Party and its neo-con collaborators in the United States, whose plan was to prevent a Palestinian state and overthrow every government in the region that supported Palestinian resistance.
In 1996, Richard Perle- one of the architects of the Iraq war as the head of the Defence Policy Board Advisory Committee under the Bush administration- wrote a document alongside some of his fellow neo-conservatives and Israel lobbyists titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”, and sent it to Benjamin Netanyahu when he first assumed power.
The document called for him to make “hot pursuit into Palestinian-controlled areas” to “Change the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self-defense into all Palestinian areas” and abandon the Oslo Accords.
This is exactly what Benjamin Netanyahu did in his first term in office from 1996-1999.
He even bragged about it in a shocking leaked video from 2001.
In the video, he boasted about sabotaging the Oslo Accords by refusing to sign anything unless he decided what counted as a “specified military location”.
He bragged in the video that this allowed him to violate the agreement and expand into any Palestinians territory he wanted if he could define it as a “specified military location” , saying “I’m going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the ’67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I’m concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue”.
“From that moment on,” he bragged, “I de facto put an end to the Oslo accords.”
When asked what the American reaction to this could be, he bragged that “I know what America is, America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way”.
As Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy wrote, “No more claims that the Palestinians are to blame for the failure of the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu exposed the naked truth to his hosts at Ofra: he destroyed the Oslo accords with his own hands and deeds, and he's even proud of it. After years in which we were told that the Palestinians are to blame, the truth has emerged from the horse's mouth”.
This strategy of preventing the creation of a Palestinian state has been the defining issue of Israeli foreign policy since then.
When Israel officially “left” Gaza in 2005, the advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Dov Weissglass, bragged that, “The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary, so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians. By freezing the political process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem”.
Netanyahu even propped up Hamas during this period to prevent any unification between Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Abraham Accords were Israel’s next deceptive trick. Through this “peace deal,” Israel could normalize relations with Arab States while preventing the conditions laid out for normalization in the Arab peace initiative.
The deal, created between Trump and Netanyahu, using Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner as their intermediary, allowed Israel to normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco in 2020.
The point of the deal was to sideline Palestinians as a condition for normalization. As David Remnick wrote in the New Yorker, “The Trump Administration, led by Jared Kushner, helped draft the Abraham Accords, which aimed to normalize relations between Israel and the Sunni-ruled states”. This had the intended effect of “sidelining the Palestinians yet again”.
Whereas the Arab peace initiatives required a return to the 1967 borders, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and the recognition of a Palestinian state as the conditions for normalization, the Abraham Accords took this, and any concessions for Palestinians, off the table.
As Mother Jones put it , the Abraham Accords, “essentially kicked the Palestinians and their grievances (the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, its apartheid policies, and its blockade of Gaza, which turned the strip, according to Human Rights Watch, into an ‘open-air prison’) to the curb”.
The Expansion Of The Abraham Accords.
Times have changed since the first Abraham Accords. When the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco normalized relations with Israel in 2020, they had a brutal blockade on Gaza, turning it into an open-air concentration camp, and were expanding settlements in the West Bank
Now, Israel is actively committing genocide in Gaza and weaponizing aid to force the population into the south of Gaza and into concentration camps, killing many and planning to force the rest out, while the Israeli regime is promising to annex the West Bank by the end of this term.
An expansion of the Abraham Accords will make this plan easier, allowing Israel to normalize relations with Arab states while committing genocide and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.
One possible candidate for normalization is Saudi Arabia.
Netanyahu has always presented normalization with Saudi Arabia as the “lynchpin” of his ethnic cleansing plan (which he announced before October 7th).
As Journalist Jeremy Scahill reported :
Just two weeks before the October 7 attacks, the Israeli leader delivered a speech at the UN general assembly in New York, brandishing a map of what he promised could be the ‘New Middle East.’ It depicted a state of Israel that stretched continuously from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza and the West Bank, as Palestinian lands, were erased.
During that speech, Netanyahu portrayed the full normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia as the linchpin of his vision for this ‘new’ reality, one which would open the door to a ‘visionary corridor that will stretch across the Arabian Peninsula and Israel.’
While Saudi Arabia has held out for a Palestinian state as a condition for normalization, it is likely that Steven Witkoff and the Trump administration are offering concessions to the country in exchange for full normalization without it.
As Middle East Monitor put it:
Netanyahu pledged that he would make Arab countries normalise ties with Israel under the status quo, under terms favourable to the Zionist state, without conceding territory or statehood for Palestinians. The arrival of Donald Trump on the international scene opened the door for turning what were once Israeli far-right fantasies into reality.
During the administration of the former US president (2017-2021), Israel normalised ties with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. The four countries abandoned the principles for peace laid out in the Arab Peace Initiative. Saudi Arabia, having led the 2002 initiative, remains committed to it. But for how long?
Another likely candidate for normalization is Syria, the intended consequence of the U.S./Israeli regime change war in the country.
The United States and Israeli regime change policy, which started by spending a billion dollars a year from 2012 to 2017 arming and training rebels to overthrow the Assad regime, and concluded with placing starvation sanctions on the country and militarily occupying the oil and wheat-rich areas of it, eventually led to the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in 2024 and his replacement Ahmed al-Sharaa coming to power.
The point of this operation was always to install a more U.S./and Israel-friendly leader in Syria.
A Leaked U.S. State Department Cable supported the regime change policy for this exact reason, stating, “Victory will not come quickly or easily, but it will come. And the payoff will be substantial. Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East. The resulting regime in Syria will see the United States as a friend, not an enemy…And a new Syrian regime might well be open to early action on frozen peace talks with Israel. Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut off from its Iranian sponsors since Syria would no longer be a transit point for Iranian training, assistance, and missiles”.
The cable stated, “America can and should help them [Syrian rebels] - and by doing so help Israel”.
Syria’s new leader, the “former” Jihadist Ahmed al-Sharaa, while supporting jihadist rebel groups as they slaughter Syrian ethnic and religious minorities, has been open to normalization with Israel.
Referring to Israel, al-Sharaa said, “The reality is, we have common enemies, and we can play a major role in regional security”.
He has also signaled support for signing onto the Abraham Accords, saying “that Syria is interested ‘under the right conditions’ in joining the Abraham Accords”.
While Trump will certainly present this expansion as bringing “peace to the Middle East,” in reality it is a cynical ploy to abandon the Arab Peace initiative and allow Israel to normalize with more Arab states as it genocides and ethnically cleanses Palestinians.
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When I first read of the Abraham Accords, I referenced Abraham, the Biblical 'spiritual father' of the People of the Book, Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Well, the Zionist entity in occupied Palestine has as little to do with Abraham as I do with my daughter's hound dog. Perhaps this is the fundamental subterfuge, claiming spiritual kinship when there is none.
Sock puppets do what their handlers handle. And the genocide goes on... I'm guessing the Nobel Peace Prize is in his future based on past recipients and their Noble Peace like actions. Kissinger, Obama, soon to be Trump. I wonder if it'll be before or after all of the Palestinians are ethnically cleansed.