Can peace efforts break through the barbed wire of war?

Egypt breakthrough paves the way for other peace treaties

The most significant breakthrough to date came in 1979 when Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt — the Arab world's most populous country. Egypt was suspended from the Arab League for about a decade for making that separate peace. Still, the deal opened a new era of increasingly open talks between several Arab countries and its neighbours during the 1980s and 1990s.

Read more: Impact of October War still felt 50 years later

After the 1991 Gulf War, the United States led a process that brought several countries together in Madrid, all while different rounds of talks were happening between Israel and many in the region. The fact that the United States was generally viewed as the unrivalled power in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union was an important part of the equation.

The two most tangible outcomes of peacemaking efforts in the 1990s were the 1994 Jordan-Israel peace treaty and the Oslo process between Israelis and Palestinians, which led to the creation of a self-governing Palestinian Authority in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with severely limited powers.

Read more: 30 years after Oslo, Palestinian state elusive as ever

The Oslo process was aimed at building confidence between Palestinians and Israelis; it was also intended to increase political support at the popular level for peace. But it ended up doing the exact opposite things on both scores – it reduced trust between Israelis and Palestinians, and popular support amongst both peoples decreased for a variety of complicated reasons.

The lack of a just, sustainable resolution to this conflict is one of the reasons why violence and barbaric extremism still endure in the Holy Land. 

During this period, there were extensive talks to open up ties between Israel and Syria that never fully came to fruition, and there were also regional multilateral talks on several human security issues like water resources, the environment, refugees, economic development, and arms control, among other issues.

These talks didn't produce major new openings, but they created linkages and relationships on issues still relevant today.

20-year lull

It took another two decades before another major breakthrough occurred in the fall of 2020 with the normalisation deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. Much had transpired in the Middle East and wider world that dramatically shifted the landscape in that period between 2000 and 2020, with four key notable shifts:

1. Israel grew stronger as Palestinians became weaker and more divided.

A second intifada erupted in Palestine, leading to a stronger impulse to separate and isolate Palestinians, who were increasingly walled off from Israelis, even as Israel continued to expand its settlements in occupied territories and increase its presence in disputed territory in East Jerusalem.

Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon, which it had occupied to maintain a security buffer, but these withdrawals didn't produce calm stability.

Palestinian divisions grew, with the Islamist movement Hamas grabbing power in the Gaza Strip, and Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation maintaining a grip on the Palestinian Authority centred in Ramallah in the West Bank. This hold was increasingly weaker and lacked popular legitimacy.

Israel's economy soared, quadrupling in size, driven by technological advances and strong investments in human capital, and its military power remained unrivalled in the region.

"We used to fear Arab strength, but now we fear Arab weakness," one former senior Israeli official told me during a visit to Israel during this period, explaining that in the first 25 years of its history, Israel faced threats from large conventional militaries but increasingly the bigger challenge came from failed and failing states in the region.

The attack by Hamas and other terrorist groups against innocent civilians shows just how weak and illegitimate these forces are.  Depending on Islamic State-like tactics to advance an agenda is a road to nowhere and shows they have no vision for the future.

2. The regional threat from Iran grew.

Also, from 2000 to 2020, Iran increased its reach and capacity to threaten Israel and many Arab countries, particularly in the Gulf. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran had strained the regional state security system. Still, in the past two decades, it embarked on an even more aggressive effort to shape the regional landscape to its advantage, and it began to pursue obtaining nuclear capabilities, an effort that continues until this day.

The 2003 US-led war in Iraq contributed to Iran's growing regional power and influence, as it ended a policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq and contributed to the problems of failed and failing states and increased zones of instability exploited by non-state terrorist networks.

In addition, the Iran threat opened up quiet conversations between Israel and several Gulf states, and these discussions were focused on cooperating against what they viewed as a common enemy.

3. Increased challenges to America's regional and global influence.

The 9/11 attack provoked a military reaction from the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Still, a series of unforced errors combined with the absence of a coherent strategic framework for its policies in the Middle East during four US presidencies created increasing doubts about America's position in the region and world.

The pendulum swings of policy between and even with US administrations confused leaders in the region and disappointed millions of people, particularly during the 2011 Arab uprising and the confused and often-contradictory responses from the United States.

At the same time, the United States was seen by many of its regional partners as out of sync with them on what they saw as an existential threat — the one posed by Iran. During this period, China continued its steady rise, and Russia became more aggressive in punching above its weight in places like the Syria conflict.

4. Growing self-confidence and assertiveness of certain Arab leaders.

Over the past 20 years, a new generation of leaders rose to power in the Arab world, with new figures possessing high ambitions emerging in several Gulf states.

The centre of gravity in the region, which used to be in Egypt — the region's most populous country — started to shift towards the Gulf, where this younger generation started to deploy strategies and resources to build something new in their own countries and act more assertively in their own self-interest.

New regional landscape

"2023 is not 1991," one Arab diplomat told me in a discussion earlier this year. As the wider world became increasingly multipolar, a new regional landscape has emerged in the Middle East.

For these four main factors, in addition to several other smaller ones, today's Middle East continues to lean further towards peace and away from regional war. The "three nos'" of the 1967 Arab League resolution in Khartoum – no peace, no negotiations, and no recognition of Israel – are no longer relevant in this new strategic landscape.

It is within this context that the 2020 Abraham Accords took place – the shifting of tectonic plates gradually over time produced a new landscape. Like tectonic plates on our actual Earth, the changes often came more gradually and were only fully realised when earthquake moments occurred.

Another earthquake moment just occurred in the region on 7 October, and it is still shaking the region in a very bad way.

The 2020 deals were discussed more as normalisation accords rather than peace deals for two main reasons. First, two of the Gulf states actually didn't exist as independent modern states when Israel was created and didn't participate in the Arab-Israeli wars during the first quarter century of Israel's modern existence.

Morocco didn't get complete independence from France until 1956, as an era of Western colonialism ended. Secondly, all of these countries had long-standing ties and contacts for decades, so much so that some in Washington D.C. joked that the actual name for the 2020 normalisation deals should be the "coming out of the closet" accords.

Constructing enduring bridges

The summer and early fall of 2023 may be remembered as the period when Middle East policy analysts started to detect actual signs of the most significant transformational shift to come in recent decades: a normalisation deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel, two major regional powers.

It remains to be seen how long such a deal might take, and how comprehensive it might be. There are many open questions, like whether such a deal would do a better job of helping Palestinians achieve some sense of justice and dignity in an agreement and how retrograde actors like Iran and its networks of proxies might respond.

Another key question is whether such an agreement might transform the broader regional environment that helps the Middle East become a stronger, sturdier bridge between the world's leading economies just as it grows and strengthens its own regional economic potential.

Here, the metaphor of a bridge is quite useful, and it is perhaps instructive to think about the noble decades-long efforts to achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace as an effort to construct a bridge that's built to last.

The past agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco helped create parts of the bridge for regional integration, but those agreements remained incomplete and didn't realise their full potential.

Read more: Impact of October War still felt 50 years later

Weak points

However, a couple of major weak points still remain.

The fact that the status of about 14 million Palestinian people (about a third in the occupied territories) remains undetermined is a key weakness. Ignoring their rights and concerns, as many in this current right-wing Israeli government would like to do, won't result in the regional environment needed to produce prosperity and improve living conditions for the people of the region.

This weak part of the bridge was nearly entirely blown up by the 7 October attacks and the aftermath, and a massive reconstruction effort lies ahead after the conflict is done. 

A second major weakness in constructing this bridge includes those who continue to threaten to blow the bridge up – the current leaders in Tehran who continue to live in the past and their partners in movements like Hezbollah and governments like the al-Assad regime in Syria, which continues to pose an extreme challenge to the Arab world despite the recent normalisation efforts with it.

There are also extremists in terrorist networks like the Islamic State (IS) who want to take the region and the world backwards by a thousand years.

It is noteworthy that in the Middle East's recent years, the deadliest violence in the region didn't occur on the Arab-Israeli fault lines, but instead was seen in civil wars and conflicts in places like Syria, Iraq, and Yemen – and these are places where too many people suffered because of the ideologies of those looking to the past.

Another further complication to these regional dynamics is the increased geopolitical competition between the United States, China, and Russia and the risk that the Middle East itself could be used as a pawn in that competition.

But a template exists for a comprehensive, lasting peace – and it's what Saudi Arabia put forward in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. Some elements of this idea have been overtaken by events, for sure, and the current Israeli government seems quite unlikely to accept key ideas in it. But times are changing, and political changes in many places can come quicker than expected.

The big dividing line in today's Middle East is no longer between Arabs and Israelis. Rather, it's between those who are looking to the future and trying to bring their societies into it while remaining rooted in their deep heritage as they work to build bridges with others, versus those who remain stuck in the past without an inspirational or practical idea for the future, all while continuing to sow division and discord.

Building coalitions across long-standing divides takes time, and building trust and confidence doesn't happen overnight. The simple answer to the question of whether the era of hostility between Israel and its Arab neighbours is over is: not yet, but it's getting there.

Nothing short of a full, comprehensive and just settlement will produce the regional environment needed for long-term prosperity.