Kushner laments Biden failure to bring more countries into the Abraham Accords

By Jacob Magid

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12 September 2022, 9:46 pm

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Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief

Former White House senior adviser Jared Kushner speaks at a Washington event marking the two-year anniversary of the signing of the Abraham Accords on September 12, 2022. (Screen capture/YouTube, used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

Former White House senior adviser Jared Kushner laments the Biden administration’s failure to coax additional countries to join the Abraham Accords that he helped negotiate in 2020.

“I think the biggest disappointment so far is that more countries haven’t been brought into it,” Kushner says at a Washington event marking the two-year anniversary of the agreements hosted by his Abraham Accords Peace Institute and the pro-Trump American First Policy Institute.

Kushner then reveals that before he left office, “I think that we had about six active discussions going on” with other prospective Abraham Accords countries. The US had negotiated normalization deals between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco at that point. US officials told The Times of Israel in January 2021 that the Trump administration had been closing in on agreements with Mauritania and Indonesia to be the next Muslim countries to normalize relations with Israel, but ran out of time before the Republican president’s term ended.

“I think that there’s a lot more to build on. But I do hope that the current administration will focus on that and work to do that because once the whole Arab Israeli conflict is over, I think that you will have an era of prosperity and peacefulness in that region that will endure for a very, very long time,” Kushner says.

Biden officials have embraced the Trump initiative, but have also expressed discomfort with some of the methods used by the previous administration to negotiate the accords, namely the sale of F-35 fighter jets to the UAE and the recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara region.

Still, they have worked to strengthen the existing normalization agreements, hosting multilateral forums with Abraham Accords members and expanding them to include US allies as well. Biden has also managed to convince Saudi Arabia to open its airspace to more flights to and from Israel, in a step Washington and Jerusalem hope will bring Riyadh closer to normalizing ties with the Jewish state. Saudi Arabia has rejected the notion that the move is a precursor to normalization though.