THE ACCORDS BEFORE ABRAHAM’S

Abstract

By September 2020 the world was surprised with the White House's announcement regarding the normalization treaties between Israel and two Gulf Monarchies, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. It is imperative, nonetheless, to not consider the Abraham Accords as a normalization moment isolated from the framework of the relations between Israel and the Arab and Muslim states. It is important to remember the past peace treaties with Israel, namely the 1979 Peace Treaty with Egypt and the 1994 Peace Treaty with Jordan. Given that these agreements already existed, the innovation of the Abraham Accords in terms of international and regional relations is questionable. Therefore, the research question that will guide this paper is as follows: How is the 2020 Abraham Accords considered innovative as compared to the Peace Treaties celebrated between Israel and Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in 1994? The main goal of this investigative work is to understand the differences between the Abraham Accords and the cited Peace Treaties at the sociohistorical level and the impact on International Relations according to the Theory of the Balance of Threat and the Theory of the Alliance, both by Stephen Walt. The main argument of this paper is that it is understood that the Abraham Accords are of a different nature from the 1979 Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel and from the 1994 Peace Treaty between Israel and Jordan as the sociohistorical, geopolitical and geostrategic contexts were essentially distinct, as it is perceived by applying the Theory of the Balance of Threat and the Theory of the Alliance, both by Stephen Walt. Therefore, the impact on the regional and international relations of each treaty was distinctively different. To achieve these goals this study will follow this methodology: firstly, it is considered a positivist study. Also, since there will be a validation of the theoretical frameworks used, this study is deductive. It will agglomerate in itself two types of investigations, descriptive and explicative. It is mainly a comparative study, as the 1979 and 1994 Peace Treaties with Israel will be compared with the Abraham Accords. This study will also use the processual and diachronic historical method to analyze the before and after of both Peace Treaties and the Accords. All data will be submitted through discourse analysis. One of the main conclusions of this article is that both the 1979 and the 1994 Peace Treaties were celebrated after having lost the war against Israel, which brought on the need for peace with the Jewish state in order to recover financially. Therefore, these Peace Treaties were seen as an alliance, specifically, a positive balancing with Israel. On the other hand, the Abraham Accords did not happen in the context of war, as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain never fought Israel, but in the context of perceiving a common threat, Iran. Consequently, they allied with Israel on a positive both hard and soft balancing alliance.