When President Donald Trump ordered the bombing of Iran, he alienated substantial chunks of his isolationist base, who had seen him as a supposed “anti-war” and “peace” president. In response to this internal rift, Trump and several members of his administration began hinting that Syria could soon be pushed to join the so-called “Abraham Accords,” thus normalizing relations with Israel.
While “normalization” and “peace accords” between nations with a history of going to war with one another may sound positive on the surface, in practice, these deals amount to the abandonment of the Palestinian people, who remain stateless, living under occupation and apartheid. Taken in tandem with continued U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel, normalization between the latter and Syria constitutes a deepening of the war, both diplomatic and material, against the Palestinian cause.
For decades, the issue of normalization has been central to the broader Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian struggle for statehood. After the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, placing millions more Palestinians under Israeli military rule, the Arab League issued the Khartoum Resolution. This resolution, based on the “Three Nos”—no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, and no recognition of Israel—was an anti-normalization stance that insisted no Arab country should settle with Israel before Palestinian statelessness was addressed. In other words, Arab governments pledged not to pursue separate peace deals without justice for the Palestinian people.
Egypt was the first to break with this united front. In 1979, it signed a bilateral peace deal with Israel in exchange for the return of the Sinai Peninsula. This move was widely condemned by Palestinians and other Arab states as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause. In response, the Arab League suspended Egypt’s membership for a decade.
The Palestinian stance on normalization became murkier in 1993, when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people—signed the Oslo Accords with Israel. The PLO formally recognized Israel in return for the promise of a peace process that was supposed to lead to a viable, independent Palestinian state.
The Oslo Accords were deeply controversial among Palestinians. Yasser Arafat, the then head of the PLO, faced criticism from across the Palestinian political spectrum for accepting normalization without securing a concrete resolution to the Palestinians’ disenfranchisement and displacement. On the left, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and its allies withdrew from the PLO. On the right, Hamas condemned the PLO as traitors and refused to participate in the peace process.
This marked a significant blow to the united Arab front against normalization. Just one year later, in 1994, Jordan signed its own peace treaty with Israel. Unlike Egypt’s earlier deal, Jordan’s move received little pushback from other Arab governments, illustrating the erosion of collective solidarity with the Palestinians.
The Oslo process ultimately proved a failure. While negotiations for a future Palestinian state were underway, Israel continued expanding settlements in the West Bank. Palestinians accused Israel of negotiating in bad faith while entrenching its occupation. The offers made to the Palestinians reflected this duplicity: a demilitarized, fragmented “state” resembling South African bantustans, with no control over its borders or airspace, and continued Israeli military presence.
Meanwhile, Palestinians remained under occupation and apartheid. The failure of Oslo to deliver statehood or end Israeli abuses helped ignite the Second Intifada in 2000. Far bloodier than the first uprising in the 1980s, this marked the death knell of the Oslo Peace Process.
In 2002, the Arab League, led by Saudi Arabia, launched the Arab Peace Initiative. This plan sought to reframe normalization as a collective bargaining chip to secure Palestinian statehood. It promised full normalization with Israel if Israel withdrew from the territories occupied in 1967, established a Palestinian state, and addressed the plight of Palestinian refugees. It was a return to the idea of normalization as a reward for justice, not a substitute for it.
Despite some initial interest in the West, Israel never seriously engaged with the Arab Peace Initiative. Between 2000 and 2020, settlement activity surged. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, the settler population in the West Bank rose from 190,000 to 450,000. Large settlements like Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel, and Modi’in Illit were expanded. Even illegal “hilltop outposts,” initially condemned by Israeli authorities, were gradually legalized. These moves were clearly designed to make a future Palestinian state unviable.
In 2020, the anti-normalization stance suffered another major blow. Under pressure from Trump, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan signed onto the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations with Israel (though Sudan has yet to ratify the treaty). The Accords were widely denounced by Palestinian groups and global progressive movements as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause.
After Bahrain signed, the Palestinian People’s Party (PPP), a progressive member organization of the PLO, issued a statement calling the move “a public endorsement of the [Israeli] occupation’s continued aggression, settlements, blockade, and denial of the rights of our Palestinian people to freedom, return, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”
When Morocco joined the Accords in exchange for U.S. recognition of its own occupation of Western Sahara, the PPP stated: “Normalization of relations with the Zionist occupation represents a departure from the Arab Peace Initiative and a new reward for the occupation for its ongoing aggressive practices and denial of the rights of our people.”
These sentiments were echoed by progressive groups internationally. The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) argued that normalization rewards Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinian people. In 2022, Jewish Voice for Peace, the largest anti-Zionist Jewish organization in the United States, tried to lobby the U.S. Congress to reject the Accords, saying that they “normalized genocide.”
Since the Abraham Accords, the situation for Palestinians has only worsened. Today, Israel is waging what many scholars, human rights groups, and governments have described as a genocidal war in Gaza. Most estimates suggest around 100,000 Gazans have been killed, with 1.9 million displaced. In the West Bank, the apartheid regime deepens, and Palestinian members of the Knesset are increasingly silenced or persecuted.
Now, Trump wants to expand the Abraham Accords to include Syria, a move overwhelmingly rejected by the Syrian people but reportedly supported by elements of the newly U.S.-aligned government in Damascus.
Far from a step toward peace, Trump’s Abraham Accords represent an expansion of the diplomatic war on Palestinians. While Trump speaks of peace with one breath, with the other he notifies Netanyahu that more funds and weapons are on the way for the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and the expansion of apartheid in the West Bank.
As with all news-analysis and op-ed articles published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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