The Handshake That Wasn't
The ink on the Abraham Accords was barely dry when the celebration began in Washington. It was September 2020. Crystal chandeliers gleamed inside the White House as leaders from Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain smiled for the cameras. Paper fluttered. Pens clicked. On screen, it looked like a geometric shift in the tectonic plates of the Middle East. It felt like a new dawn.
But thousands of miles away, in a quiet, dimly lit living room in Riyadh, an elderly Saudi man named Tariq watched the broadcast with a furrowed brow. He sipped his cardamom-scented coffee. His expression was not one of hope, but of profound caution. For Tariq, and for millions like him across the Muslim world, peace is not a transactional real estate deal settled by Western political brokers. It is a deeply spiritual, generational equation tethered to a specific piece of land: Jerusalem.
Donald Trump’s vision for his return to foreign policy relies on a simple, seductive premise. If you can convince the UAE and Bahrain to sign, you can convince anyone. The strategy treats the remaining holdout Muslim nations like dominoes waiting for a gentle push. Expand the circle. Bring in Saudi Arabia. Bring in Pakistan, perhaps even Indonesia. Treat the geopolitical map like a corporate merger spreadsheet where every brand eventually has its price.
It is a beautiful theory. It is also entirely divorced from the human reality on the ground.
The push to rapidly expand the Abraham Accords ignores a fundamental truth that diplomats have learned through decades of bloodshed. True diplomacy requires more than a willing leader; it requires a willing populace. By treating ancient, deeply felt religious and national identities as mere obstacles to be managed with economic incentives, the strategy hits a wall of human conviction that cannot be bought.
The Weight of the Invisible Crown
To understand why this grand expansion is a mirage, one must look closely at Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is the ultimate prize in this diplomatic chess game.
Imagine a hypothetical, yet highly accurate, composite figure within the Saudi royal court—let us call him Prince Faisal. Faisal is young, educated in the West, and acutely aware of the economic benefits of tech partnerships with Tel Aviv. He looks at Israel's Silicon Wadi and sees a mirror of his own country’s Vision 2030 goals. On paper, a signature makes perfect sense.
Then, Faisal walks out of his modern office and looks at the title his family holds with fierce, uncompromising pride: Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.
This is not a ceremonial corporate title. It is the absolute bedrock of the Saudi monarchy's legitimacy. The moment a Saudi King signs a treaty that sidelines the Palestinian claim to East Jerusalem—home to Islam’s third-holiest site, the Al-Aqsa Mosque—that legitimacy begins to fracture. The Kingdom does not exist in a vacuum. It competes constantly for the spiritual leadership of the world's two billion Muslims against rivals like Iran and Turkey.
Consider the leverage. If Riyadh capitulates without securing a sovereign Palestinian state, it hands its rivals an ideological nuclear weapon. The rhetoric writes itself: The custodians have sold out Islam for a trade deal.
The stakes are not financial. They are existential.
The UAE and Bahrain could sign the accords precisely because they did not carry this immense spiritual baggage. They are commercial hubs, nimble and relatively young nations whose domestic stability relies on economic prosperity rather than pan-Islamic leadership. Applying the Emirati blueprint to Saudi Arabia is like expecting a local boutique hotel chain and the Vatican to operate under the identical business model. The scale is different. The history is heavier.
The Chasm Between the Palace and the Street
Public opinion in the Arab world is often treated by Western analysts as something that can be molded, suppressed, or simply ignored. This is a catastrophic miscalculation.
Let us look at the data. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has consistently tracked public sentiment across the Gulf. Even before the devastating escalation of violence in Gaza that began in late 2023, support for the Abraham Accords within the signatory nations themselves was cratering. In the UAE and Bahrain, positive views of the accords dropped to single digits among the general populace.
People do not live their lives in policy briefs. They live them through images on their phones, through shared language, and through a visceral sense of justice.
Think of a young university student in Islamabad or Jakarta. She has no personal animosity toward Israeli citizens. But every day, her social media feed is flooded with the raw, heartbreaking realities of Palestinians living under occupation. When Western leaders talk about "normalization," she does not hear a story of progress. She hears a story of erasure. She sees a powerful nation asking her government to look away from suffering in exchange for defense contracts and surveillance technology.
If a government like Pakistan’s—already teetering on the edge of economic collapse and political volatility—were to force normalization through, the streets would ignite. The political cost would far outweigh any transactional benefit dangled by Washington.
The underlying assumption of the transactional approach is that human beings are entirely rational, economic actors. It assumes that if you offer enough investment, enough tourism, and enough shared security against a common enemy like Iran, people will eventually forget their historical solidarity.
But memory is a stubborn thing. It persists long after the press conferences are over.
The Ghost at the Negotiating Table
The fundamental flaw of the expanded accords strategy is the systematic exclusion of the very people at the heart of the conflict. You cannot build a lasting roof while refusing to lay the foundation.
Imagine trying to settle a bitter, multi-generational family feud over a property line by negotiating exclusively with the neighbors next door. You buy off the neighbor to the left. You cut a deal with the neighbor to the right. Everyone shakes hands on the front lawn. Meanwhile, the family inside the disputed house is still sitting in the living room, completely ignored, holding the original deed.
It is an absurd premise. Yet, this is precisely how the push for a broader Arab-Israeli peace operates when it bypasses the Palestinian issue.
The original accords were billed as a way to halt annexation of the West Bank. Instead, they served as a green light to bypass the core problem entirely. The tragedy of this approach became brutally apparent to the world. Peace cannot be engineered from the top down if the bottom is on fire.
The current political reality in Israel complicates this even further. The nation's leadership has made it explicitly clear that a sovereign Palestinian state is off the table. This creates a logical paradox for any potential new Muslim signatories. To join the accords now is not to promote peace; it is to formally acquiesce to a permanent status quo of occupation.
For nations that have spent seventy years conditioning their foreign policy on the liberation of Palestine, that leap is not just unrealistic. It is political suicide.
The Illusion of a Shared Enemy
Proponents of the expansion often point to Iran as the great unifier. The argument goes that fear of a nuclear Tehran will inevitably drive the Sunni Muslim world into the arms of Jerusalem. Fear, after all, is a powerful motivator.
But fear also breeds calculation.
Saudi Arabia and its neighbors have watched the geopolitical landscape shift. They saw the United States hesitate when Saudi oil facilities were attacked in 2019. They realize that American security guarantees are subject to the whims of the next election cycle. Because of this, their strategy has shifted from confrontation to hedging.
Look at the landmark deal brokered by China in 2023 that restored diplomatic ties between Riyadh and Tehran. It was a clear signal to Washington: the Gulf states are no longer interested in being foot soldiers in a binary, Western-led cold war. They are playing a multi-polar game.
Why would Saudi Arabia risk its fragile detente with Iran by signing a highly provocative defense pact with Israel, when it can instead maintain a quiet, lucrative intelligence-sharing relationship under the table? The status quo gives the Gulf states exactly what they need—security cooperation—without any of the public backlash or regional instability that would accompany an official embassy opening.
The push for public normalization ignores the utility of the shadow. In the Middle East, the most effective alliances are often the ones that are never spoken of aloud.
The Cost of the Quick Win
We live in an era that worships the disruptive deal. We want complex, centuries-old historical grievances resolved with the speed of a venture capital funding round. We want the photo-op. We want the signing ceremony.
But history does not move at the speed of a cable news cycle.
When we look at the maps and the treaties, it is easy to lose sight of the human element. The true obstacle to expanding the Abraham Accords is not a lack of political will among elites, nor is it a lack of imagination. It is the deep, enduring reality that human dignity, religious devotion, and national identity cannot be managed like line items on a balance sheet.
Tariq still sits in his living room in Riyadh. The coffee is cold now. He looks at the television, watching politicians speak of a transformed region, of a new Middle East built on the foundations of trade and tech. He knows what the architects of these deals so often forget.
A bridge built over a chasm of unresolved injustice will always collapse under the weight of the people walking across it. Empty handshakes cannot sustain the burden of a peace that refuses to look the forgotten in the eye.
