“Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came,” went the anti-Vietnam War slogan that became the title of a 1970 film. “Suppose they made peace, and not everybody liked it” could be the title of a documentary about the Abraham Accords, the treaties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed at the White House this week. The West’s useless professional peace-processors are strangely glum, to put it mildly.
The Emiratis and Bahrainis became only the third and fourth Arab states ever to recognize the Jewish state. And more good news may be on the way: Oman issued a statement of support for the accords; there is talk of Sudan following suit and Morocco opening direct flights. And though Saudi Arabia may be the last Sunni-majority state to formally recognize Israel, it is now permitting Israeli aircraft to cross its airspace.
No less remarkably, when the Palestinian Authority petitioned the Arab League for a denunciation of the deal, the league voted it down.
We might expect the usual suspects to object: Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and the English faculty of our more expensive universities. And it would be excessively idealistic to expect the immediate lying down of lions with lambs, though more than possible to imagine tech-minded businessmen and security experts pragmatically sitting together under vines and fig trees in Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv.
But why the sour grapes among the ostensible supporters of peace in the Middle East?
Since the 1990s, the prospect of peace in the Middle East has created and sustained a class of professional peace-processors in the capitals of the West. Their gravy train, the Oslo Accords, was supposed to deliver peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Instead, it delivered the Palestinians’ war of suicide bombings and a mini-caliphate in Gaza.
No matter: The peace-processors failed up. As the region slid into the hell of religious war, and the Israeli public abandoned its trust in the Palestinians’ various leaderships, the peace-processors kept the faith on their “front lines”: think tanks and chairs at universities.
This year, Saeb Erekat, the late Palestinian arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat’s yes-man who said no to everything, is teaching diplomacy at Harvard: from peace-processor to peace-professor. You couldn’t make it up. You don’t need to: Erekat makes it all up anyway.
Imagine the pique of Aaron David Miller and Martin Indyk, professional negotiators who failed to negotiate anything at all for 30 years. Or John Kerry, who pontificated in 2016 that there could never be an Arab-Israeli treaty without a Palestinian state.
And then comes President Trump, a man whose prior experience in international diplomacy was limited to negotiating the price of gilded faucets. Trump ignored the founding principle of the peace-processing fantasy: a Palestinian state as the precondition of Israeli-Arab reconciliation. He circumvented the Arabists of the State Department and instead negotiated through his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his ambassador to Israel, David Friedman.
How the experts laughed as the boyish developer flew to the Persian Gulf. How wrong they all were.
Trump, as would be expected from the Everyman from Queens, is a connoisseur of the “Godfather” films. He dealt with the Gulf royals as one family syndicate with another: You send your family to talk to theirs, and if your son-in-law is their cousin’s cousin, so much the better.
The one-eyed doctrine of “evenhandedness” and the chin-stroking of the Obama era always went over well with the Democratic-majority media and the pro-Arab chancelleries of Europe. But they have been repudiated by reality: Arab-Muslim reality. It’s now clear that the Western left, especially in Europe, cares more about a Palestinian state than the new generation of Muslim-Arab leaders do.
So we are told that this peace means less than the others because it is between leaders, not people — as if Egypt’s and Jordan’s recognition of Israel were not. We are told that the UAE wants Israeli know-how because it is a high-tech police state — as if the current alternatives among Arab states were not low-tech police states.
A diplomatic transformation, CNN tells us, was “always inevitable” — though it took everyone by surprise.
Our institutionalized cadres of failed peace-processors will not take kindly to their superannuation. So be it. It’s time to ditch the failed strategists and ignorant experts of our professional analyst class.
Times change, and even the Middle East can change, too.
Dominic Green is deputy editor of The Spectator.
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