Their language is polished, their branding religiously evocative, and their promise simple: replace a history of conflict with a future of shared interests. Yet beneath this attractive packaging lies a structural problem that cannot be ignored: a regional project that normalizes with Israel while leaving the core injustice in Palestine unresolved is not building peace, but managing conflict on new terms.
The choice of the name “Abraham” is not accidental. It seeks to cloak a hard geopolitical move in the language of shared faith and common ancestry, as if invoking a revered patriarch could compensate for the absence of a just political settlement. The message is that Muslims, Christians, and Jews who trace their spiritual lineage to Abraham should now join in a new order centered on economic and security cooperation. But an evocative title cannot erase the reality that millions of Palestinians still live under occupation, displacement, or siege, with no serious horizon for self‑determination.
Supporters of the accords insist that “interests before issues” is the rational sequence: build regional infrastructure, trade corridors, energy integration, and security arrangements first, and political problems will become easier to solve later. This logic treats the Palestinian question as a secondary file that can be gradually softened by prosperity. The problem is that history teaches the opposite. Attempts to bypass a central injustice through economic sedatives rarely produce stable outcomes; they produce fragile arrangements that unravel the moment the underlying grievance resurfaces—as every escalation in Gaza or the West Bank starkly reminds the region.
Turkey’s ambivalent position exposes a central contradiction in the Abraham narrative. Ankara recognized Israel decades ago and maintains relations with it, which means it is not opposed to the principle of dealing with Israel as a state. Yet, it has resisted being folded into the Abraham framework as it currently stands, explicitly linking any deeper integration to real movement on Palestinian rights and an end to large‑scale violence in Gaza. In other words, Turkey distinguishes between bilateral relations, which many states already have, and endorsing a regional project that normalizes the status quo while Gaza burns and occupation deepens. That distinction is precisely what the glossy discourse of “regional connectivity” tends to obscure.
Egypt’s experience offers an even clearer warning. For more than forty years, Egypt has lived what might be called the “Abraham Accords in slow motion”: a pioneering peace treaty, full diplomatic relations, sustained security coordination, and expanding economic and energy ties. And yet, despite all this, popular sentiment has not translated into a warm acceptance of Israel. The term “cold peace” did not emerge from ideology, but from lived reality. A society that endured the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, and that has watched the unfolding Palestinian tragedy ever since, has not been persuaded that economic dividends can substitute for justice.
This gap between official peace and societal peace is not a marginal detail; it is the central weakness in the Abraham project. Agreements signed above people's heads, without addressing what their collective memory and conscience experience as injustice, can endure on paper—but they lack depth, resilience, and legitimacy. They can coordinate airspace and pipelines, but they cannot rewrite the emotional and moral map of the region. Washington may believe that trade and technology will, over time, soften public opinion. Large segments of Arab societies, Egypt foremost among them, see such an approach as reversing the natural order of things: resolve the core injustice first, then build the regional architecture on solid ground.
There is also a broader strategic risk. By treating the Palestinian file as something to be managed around rather than confronted honestly, the Abraham Accords threaten to freeze an unsustainable status quo in place. That may yield short‑term gains for governments eager for investment or external backing, but it leaves the underlying fault line more combustible than ever. Each new round of violence in Gaza, each new settlement, each televised image of civilian suffering erodes the moral credibility of a “peace” that asks the region to move on while the central wound remains open.
The Middle East does not need more slogans about coexistence; it needs a serious covenant of justice. A regional order that springs from genuine respect for Palestinian rights, from mutual security guarantees grounded in law rather than force, and from transparent, accountable diplomacy would find societies far more willing to engage and even to reconcile. The tragedy of the Abraham Accords is that they aim for speed and spectacle instead. They offer the image of a “new Middle East” where flights and trade flourish, while hoping that public memory can be edited out of the picture.
Egypt’s own path suggests a different lesson: treaties may stop wars, but they do not, by themselves, create peace. Real peace in our region will not be born in conference halls that ask people to forget; it will be born when people most affected feel that their dignity, security, and rights are no longer negotiable footnotes to someone else’s grand design.
*The writer is a Senior adviser to the Grand Mufti of Egypt.
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