Abraham Accords
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The Abraham Accords are the normalization agreements between Israel and a run of Arab states brokered under Donald Trump, and one of John Kiriakou's standing examples of dealmaking mistaken for peacemaking.

"A punch in the throat to the Palestinians"

Kiriakou grants the Accords were "a great victory for Israel and for the Gulf Arabs", and calls them "a punch in the throat to the Palestinians." When Trump promised in 2016 to fix the Israeli-Palestinian problem in a day, Kiriakou says, this is what he meant: encourage Bahrain, the Emirates, Sudan, Morocco, eventually the Saudis, to normalize with Israel, "and you just screw the Palestinians. And that's just not going to work, no matter how many times he tries." His summary judgment: "a terrible idea in the first place."

October 7

In Kiriakou's analysis, Hamas attacked in part because the world was moving away from the Palestinian cause, the Accords had passed, the Saudis were preparing to normalize, and the Palestinians had been thrown under the bus. "Hamas was right" about the abandonment. Netanyahu had put his legacy on the Accords, which "fell apart on October 7." The Saudis had watched a diplomatic agreement with Israel "slipping through their hands."

The revival project

Kiriakou reads Trump's second-term Middle East policy as an Accords-revival campaign: the "big overarching all-settling deal", bring in the Saudis eventually, declare victory, "and get your Nobel Peace Prize." His own prescription for Israel runs through the same door: declare Hamas destroyed, hand Gaza to the UN, then ask the Saudis to join the Accords and negotiate later. Even Israel's non-response to the strike on Qatar, he argues, was shaped by the Accords calculus, preserving Doha's potential membership while "all of the Arabs are looking at us."

Why they keep expanding

By late 2025 Kiriakou was reading the Accords' durability as evidence for an uncomfortable proposition he shares with critics of Israel and defenders alike: that much of the Arab world does not greatly care about the Palestinians, who function as "a useful tool of propaganda" rather than a constituency. Asked directly whether the Israelis are right about that, his answer was "I think so too", and he offers it as one of the reasons the Accords have been "so popular and so well received around the Middle East."

He notes that Kazakhstan joined in the week before the interview, "of all places", alongside Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Morocco and Sudan, and repeats that Saudi Arabia remains the object: "the crown jewel is going to be Saudi Arabia. And I think eventually Saudi Arabia joins as well, because the bottom line is it'll be good for the Saudi economy." He qualifies the Saudi position by pointing to the king's full title, not merely Malik but Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, which requires pristine Islamic credentials that, in his assessment, none of the family actually possess.

The crown jewel

John Kiriakou traces the accords to a 2016 campaign promise to end the Arab-Israeli dispute in twenty-four hours, which he reads as a plan to sideline the Palestinians and get Arab governments to open relations with Israel directly, an effort he judges largely successful, bringing in Morocco, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain alongside Egypt and Jordan.

Saudi Arabia is the prize still outstanding, and not merely because it is the largest and most populous state on the Arabian Peninsula: it is the land of the two holy mosques, "the very beating heart of Islam."

Kiriakou argues the accords work because Gulf governments no longer feel obliged to the Palestinians, a rupture he dates to the expulsion of the Palestinian professional class from the Gulf after Yasser Arafat backed Iraq in 1990. Lindsey Graham saw Saudi-Israeli normalisation as the defining prize of a broader post-war settlement, had worked the issue for years including with the Biden administration, and believed Iran's weakening created a rare opening.

"Why would you even call this a peace treaty?"

Kiriakou's objection to the framing is definitional. "I laughed when the Trump administration announced this so-called peace deal between Morocco and Israel, the UAE and Israel, Bahrain and Israel. These are countries that have never been at war with Israel. So why would you even call this a peace treaty when there was never a war?" What was actually agreed, on his account, was the opening of diplomatic relations and the creation of a trade relationship.

The claim rests on what he says he found from the start of his career: that the Gulf states did not regard Israel as their problem. On his first trip to Saudi Arabia in 1990, "nobody ever mentioned Israel to me, ever." The Saudis he dealt with were obsessed with Iran and, to a lesser extent, with Saddam Hussein; "their existential threat was the Iranians." The same held further afield in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

He reads the sequence under Trump as Israel collecting on that indifference, the embassy moved to Jerusalem, aid to the Palestinians cut off, the Emirates, Moroccans, Sudanese and Bahrainis brought in, and asks the consequent question: "why throw the Palestinians any bone at all when you're not being forced to by the United States?"

The claim that Saudi Arabia was close to signing

Of an Israeli official's account of the region after the Mecca Agreement, Kiriakou said most of it was true and one thing was not: the assertion that the Saudis had been on the verge of signing the Abraham Accords. "That is absolutely not true. The Saudis have never been on the verge of signing the Abraham Accords. The White House will tell you that they are and the Israeli media and government will tell you that they are. They're not."

He dates the consistency to 1977, when Jimmy Carter invited Saudi Arabia to Camp David to help negotiate the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt and the Saudis declined. The reason he gives is not diplomatic but religious, and turns on an office rather than a policy: Saudi Arabia is "not just your run-of-the-mill country", because the king's title "is not just king. It's king and custodian of the two holy mosques", a role carrying weight "not just in the Middle East but in every Muslim country in the world."

From that he draws a limit he states as absolute: "Opening relations with Israel and not getting a free and independent and secure Palestinian state in the deal is not going to happen ever... We will not sign the Abraham Accords until there's a Palestinian state. Period."

See also

- Donald Trump
- Nobel Peace Prize
- Benjamin Netanyahu
- Hamas
