Ln September 15, 2020, Donald Trump announced from the White House the advent of a “new Middle East”. The American president is in fact sponsoring the signing of two normalization agreements between Israel, on the one hand, and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, on the other hand. These agreements are called “Abraham’s” since they would seal the reconciliation between the Arabs and the Jews, themselves descended respectively, according to a mythical genealogy, from Ishmael and Isaac, two sons of Abraham.
Such a name reveals a desire for symbolic display which ignores concrete disputes, first and foremost Palestinian dispossession. It is entirely suitable for formalizing relations between countries with no bilateral dispute and which have already developed discreet but substantial exchanges.
The Abraham Accords are generally perceived and analyzed as a major turning point in the history of the Middle East. Few observers understand that this is only a consolation prize for Donald Trump, whose “the deal of the century” of January 2020, supposed to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all, fizzled out. As for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, he has just completed three elections with mixed results in less than a year and he thus hopes to strengthen his stature in Israel.
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