The Abraham Accords: the vindication of revisionist Zionism?
26/02/2021
On 13th August 2020, Israel and the United Arab Emirates surprised the world by announcing a historic peace agreement that ensured the Emirati recognition of the State of Israel and fully normalized the diplomatic relations between both countries. In exchange, Israel dropped out plans to annex certain areas of the Palestinian-occupied territories in the West Bank that are under full civilian and military Israeli administration per the Oslo Peace Agreements. Eventually, Bahrain followed suit and stamped its signature on what was to be known as the Abraham Accords in a formal ceremony at the White House on 15th September 2020. As if this Israeli diplomatic success was not enough, Morrocco and Sudan also joined the stream and recognized Israel, while Oman openly hinted willingness to fully normalize its relations with the Jewish State in the short term.
The Abraham Accords and the subsequent peace agreements entail a critical change in the geopolitical landscape of the MENA region. Israel, to date recognized by only two Arab States -Egypt and Jordan-, expands its recognition in the Arab world to an unprecedented degree. Nevertheless, the Abraham Accords also raises questions concerning its impact on Israeli internal politics. The most important point in this regard is not analyzing its consequences in the short term, i.e, the upcoming Israeli election to be held in March and the possibilities that these huge diplomatic successes offer to Mr. Netanyahu’s electoral ambitions.
Rather, the most relevant issue is how the outcome of these peace agreements test the traditional strategic formulations of the two main strands of Zionism, i.e, left-wing labour and right-wing revisionism. Their different approach has as one of its main points of confrontation what is to be done to achieve recognition of Israel on the part of the Arab world. Likewise, it is significant to assess whether the course of history has irreversibly granted hegemony to revisionist Zionism in Israeli politics and the implications that such a hegemonic position can entail for the possibilities of Israel to obtain further recognition in the Arab world.
Unlike most countries, the main divide between “left-wing” and “right-wing” political parties is not their stance on economic policy or social issues, but their regard to the inherent significance and the strategic relevance of keeping control of the occupied – though not annexed- territories of Judea and Samaria, known internationally as the West Bank. Labour Zionism has traditionally been more open to renounce what Jews view as part of the traditional Land of Israel because its priority is to consolidate a State having a strong Jewish majority. Taking into account the territories of Judea and Samaria, the population of the whole territory comprising Israel and the occupied territories would currently be split in half between Jews and Arabs. In the same way, its view that being open about reaching a territorial compromise to accept the establishment of a Palestinian State on the West Bank, while remaining strong in defending the country until such possibility can materialize, would pave the way to a future peace agreement with the Palestinian Arabs and obtain ulterior recognition from other Arab countries.
On the other hand, revisionist Zionism -mainly represented in contemporary Israeli politics by the Likud party of Prime Minister Netanyahu- has historically considered that keeping control of the West Bank is an important end in itself because of the relevance that revisionism attaches to the entire traditional Land of Israel as a basis for Jewish national identity. Moreover, revisionism has always tended to reject that showing willingness to reach compromise with the Arabs can entail more possibilities of achieving recognition by the Palestinian Arabs and the rest of the Arab World. On the contrary, such a strategy would only further complicate the likeliness of this scenario according to a revisionist standpoint.
Already in 1923, twenty-five years before the establishment of the State of Israel, the founder and main theorist of revisionist Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, started to define the grounds on which the revisionists would define their strategy towards attaining an eventual recognition of a Jewish State in an essay entitled “The Iron Wall”. Jabotinsky stated that there has not been a single people in human history that has ever accepted the settlement of another people in the land it deems to be of its own, such an instinct being deeply entrenched in human nature. To this effect, Jabotinsky considered that there was no mode to present the Zionist enterprise to the Arabs in a manner that could be acceptable to them. The Palestinian Arabs would naturally reject becoming a minority in a Jewish-ruled State, even if granted all civil and political rights; as for the rest of the Arab world, the then-emerging Arab national movement regarded Palestine as an integral part of the land belonging to the Arab nation. Therefore, there was no political offer the Jews could make to change the Arab view on the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine.
Consequently, Jabotinsky asserted that once established, the Jewish State should offer a strong military response to all the attacks that its Arab neighbors would inflict on it. Jabotinsky believed that only after a period of continuous Arab attacks and the consequent persistent military resistance, the Arabs would realize that getting rid of the Jewish State was impossible. Only at this point would it be plausible to start negotiations with the Arabs, for they would have lost any hope of taking the land back. As long as the Arabs kept having the slightest hope of taking over Palestine for themselves, natural instinct would push them to hold a hostile strategy towards the Jewish State. Therefore, Jabotinsky concluded that a viable negotiation with the Arabs could only start after having made them lose all faith in the possibility of incorporating the traditional Land of Israel into the Arab nation, thus painfully accepting that recognizing the Jewish State was an unavoidable outcome.
Contemporary revisionists have stuck to the positions held by Jabotinsky about the possibility of obtaining recognition of the State of Israel from both the Arab Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world. In this regard, revisionism deemed the labour strategy flawed insofar as Arab Palestinians consider all of Palestine, including the territory that currently makes up the internationally recognized territory of Israel, to be a land of its own that has been illegitimately taken away from them. Consequently, showing a willingness to reach a compromise on a land partition would not only make the existence of Israel more acceptable to the Arab Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world. Such a stance would not inflict enough despair on the Arab side concerning the possibility of taking all of the Palestinian lands back and would only inflate its hopes of destroying Israel, thus making the chance of reaching peace agreements with the Arabs less likely.
For instance, the rejection of the final offer made by the Labour Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000 to culminate the Oslo Peace Accords with the Palestinian National Authority and the second intifada that ensued the collapse of that peace process, in which a wave of Palestinian attacks killed over one thousand of civilian Israelis until 2005, can be seen from a revisionist standpoint as the natural outcome of the labour strategy to attain recognition of Israel from the Arabs. Indeed, the wake of the Second Intifada entailed a critical drop of confidence for attaining a peace agreement with Palestinian Arabs and other Arab states among the Israeli public at the beginning of the 2000s decade. This fact inflicted a first heavy blow on labour Zionism, whose main political actor, the Labour Party, has never regained government after Ehud Barak lost the 2001 election to Likud’s candidate Ariel Sharon. Besides, the party has not stopped losing ground ever since, to the point that in the last election it could only obtain two representatives out of one hundred and twenty-five members in the Israeli Parliament by taking part in an electoral coalition.
Of course, labour stance on the strategy to obtain recognition from the Arabs is not the only factor that has contributed to the decline of the once all-powerful establishment party in Israel, which led the government uninterruptedly for almost the first thirty years of the State. Nevertheless, what is to be considered for the matter that is relevant to this article is whether the Abraham accords might be the final nail in the coffin for labour Zionism. The recognition by the gulf states is of prime geopolitical importance, and the recognition by Sudan has a special historical significance. All in all, revisionism might have been proven right by most Israelis. This should not be mistaken with short-term implications for the electoral possibilities of current Prime Minister Netanyahu in the upcoming March election, for the revisionist ideology is not exclusively represented by Likud -on the contrary, the recent split of the Likud party led by Mr. Gideon Sa’ar poses an unprecedented threat to Mr. Netanyahu’s position from within the core revisionist camp.
Aside from the possible irreversible decline of labour Zionism in favor of revisionist Zionism, it is necessary to assess whether the Abraham Accords can enable Israel to obtain further peace agreements. The regional cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran has created a favorable context, given that this dynamic has entailed that Israel and the Saudi-aligned Arab States share a common enemy. Such a situation certainly paves the way for the Saudis to recognize the State of Israel in the future. But this very same geopolitical scenario also plays against mid-term prospects of Israel formalizing relations with the Arab States that are placed under strong Iranian influence, such as Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.
Last, the Abraham Accords do not cast a plausible prospect to attain a peace agreement with Arab Palestinians in the short or middle term. The Palestinian National Authority and Hamas condemned the signing of these peace agreements and consider the attitude of the signatory Arab States as a betrayal to the Palestinian cause. Revisionist Zionism could maintain that Palestinian Arabs will always be the last to lose hope about putting an end to the existence of Israel and could state that when most of the Arab world has recognized Israel, they will acquiesce to signing a peace agreement in the long term. The main problem for revisionist Zionism in this regard, though, is not its strategic postulates but its ideological objectives. Can revisionist Zionism picture a peace deal with the Palestinian Arabs in the long term when the revisionist ideology asserts that control of all of the traditional Land of Israel, including the West Bank, is a non-renounceable end?
The progressive drop of claims of revisionist Zionism over the territory of the current Kingdom of Jordan and the extremely divisive unilateral disengagement from Gaza carried out by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005 may suggest that in the end revisionism could accept land partition and a two-state solution. However, the historical significance that Judea and Samaria have for the Jewish people, along with their critical military strategic value, make such a possibility less easy to accept for revisionism. The open hostility deployed by revisionist Zionism in alliance with the national-religious camp during the Oslo peace process, which led to the assassination of Labour Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a far-right extremist, certainly instills a rather pessimistic outlook.
If a consolidated revisionist ideological hegemony prevents Israel from giving in territories in the West Bank to an eventual Palestinian State in exchange for a hypothetical agreement that includes security guarantees and recognition of Israel from the Palestinian Arabs and the other Arab States, the current status quo established by the non-concluded Oslo Accords would prevail and annexations of West Bank territories could be envisaged. Such a scenario could prove dangerous for Israel in the long term, for the balance between the Jewish and democratic character of the State could be sacrificed in favor of territorial plenitude. Whether this is a prize worth paying is a dilemma revisionist Zionism will have to deal with.
