Past attempts at Middle East peace agreements put too much emphasis on the Palestinians

Bruce Abramson:

The Abraham Accords—Israel’s genuine, warm peace treaties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain just signed on the White House lawn—weren’t supposed to happen. When Obama administration Secretary of State John Kerry articulated why they were impossible, he spoke for almost every credentialed expert, Democrat and Republican.

Of course, whenever the impossible happens, the experts who spent decades assuring us of its impossibility hustle to explain why they’ve been right even as events prove them wrong. It’s an important part of being an expert in America today: Those unable to retain their arrogance and certainty when proven wrong quickly fall out of the expert game.

To hear them tell it, fundamental changes in the Middle East, entirely unforeseeable as recently as 2017, swept a new dynamic across the region. The best that could be said for President Donald Trump is that even his bumbling, belligerent, incoherent foreign policy could not derail these positive trends.

Nonsense. The Abraham Accords happened because the Trump team examined the data. What it showed was that the post-Cold War expert consensus on the Middle East had produced consistent, spectacular, and varied failure:

Experts helped George H.W. Bush isolate Israel, leave Saddam in power, allow genocidal massacres against Kurds and Shiites, tie up a half-million U.S. troops with no clear mission, and set in place an interminable stalemate.

Experts helped Bill Clinton recast the Arab/Israeli conflict as an Israeli/Palestinian conflict, resuscitate the moribund Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to enact its “Phased Plan” for Israel’s destruction and launch a terror war—while ignoring the rise of al Qaeda and Islamist terrorism.

Experts helped George W. Bush shift his focus from Afghanistan to Iraq prematurely, then topple a dictator without a plan for dealing with the bloody, anarchic aftermath.

Experts helped Barack Obama turn away from Israel, the Gulf Arabs, and Egypt, cozy up to Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the PLO, downplay Islamist terrorism, and lead the UN’s criminalization of Jewish existence in the historic Jewish heartland.

So when Donald Trump chose to sideline the experts, reinvigorate America’s ties to the Gulf Arabs, steel the resolve of Muslim leaders fighting Islamism, move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognize Israel’s annexation of the Golan, and focus on refugee resettlement and development around the region, he had nowhere to go but up. The worst that could have emerged was a fifth consecutive failed American approach to the Middle East.

Instead, the Trump team has turned in—by far—the most successful American approach to the region since at least the Truman administration. How? The “secret” is simple: By resting policy on actual facts rather than expert advice.

The stunning success of this approach teaches numerous critical lessons that transcend the specifics of Middle East politics.

First: When longstanding, widespread, conventional wisdom about a high-profile issue generates only failure, there’s something deeply flawed with that “wisdom.” Invariably, that flaw is buried deep within the fundamental assumption that all “experts” internalized early in their training and never reconsidered.

Here, that flaw was their insistent focus on an Israeli/Palestinian conflict between two national groups claiming the same territory. In fact—as the 1964 PLO charter, 1988 Hamas charter, 1915 Hussein/McMahon letters, and numerous other foundational Arab texts make clear—the “Palestinian” national identity was created for the sole purpose of negating Jewish self-determination in the Jewish homeland. The genuine Arab/Israeli conflict pitted a Sunni Arab imperial claim against a Jewish claim for self-determination.

...

There is more.

While it is clear that the past approach was fatally flawed the "experts" who pushed have been slow to concede that the Trump approach is working is likely to get more agreements.  And, even the Palestinians will have to recognize that things have changed.  The Palestinians are essentially a beggar state with little economic livelihood beyond getting money from the Arab states.  Now those states are reaching agreement with Israel and the Palestinians may finally have to face that reality also.