A recent report claims the Biden administration has instructed its State Department to refrain from using the term “Abraham Accords.” Other reports indicate that the current administration is doing substantially more than that; taking actions that endanger peace in the region in order to empower Iran.

REPORT: Refrain from using the name “Abraham Accords”

The Washington Free Beacon reported on Friday that they had reviewed two internal instructing State Department employees to refer to the “Abraham Accords” as “normalization agreements.”

The Free Beacon report cited an internal source “with direct knowledge of the Biden administration’s internal decision-making process” as saying that the term “Abraham Accords” was erased from pre-existing documents, statements, and official communications, and replaced with the term “normalization agreements.” 

When approached by the Free Beacon, a State Department spokesman stated that “this administration is not focused on what these agreements are called but what they mean.”

Rumors and tense exchanges 

The report in the Free Beacon came in the wake of earlier rumors that such a policy existed. These rumors became more prevalent after a peculiar exchange between Associated Press diplomatic correspondent Matthew Lee and State Department spokesman Ned Price. Lee confronted Price about the rumor and Price seemed to confirm the rumor by insisting on referring to the Abraham Accords as “normalization agreements.

This awkward exchange between @APDiploWriter and @StateDeptSpox about the ever-elusive name of the peace deals between Israel and its Arab neighbors is—dare I say—Price-less. It’s also instructive about the Biden Administration’s regressive approach to the Middle East. pic.twitter.com/OwwSoEqRU8

— Len Khodorkovsky (@MessageFromLen) April 1, 2021

Only after several pressing questions did Price refer to the agreements by their proper name.

In a similar vein, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated in a press conference about the recent Israel-Gaza conflict that the Trump administration did not do “anything constructive” to promote peace in the region.

Her statement is astounding as the Abraham Accords, brokered by the Trump administration, are considered one of the biggest historic breakthroughs in Arab-Israeli relations. 

Victoria Coates, a former senior official on the Trump White House’s National Security Council who played a central role in paving the way for the Abraham Accords to be signed, told the Free Beacon that the State Department’s behavior is “unfortunate and insidious.”

“The Biden administration’s attempt to diminish and marginalize the Abraham Accords by referring to them as ‘normalization deals’ is both unfortunate and insidious,” Coates aid. “It’s a shame to try to undermine such a monumental, historic achievement because it was reached by the previous administration. But the term ‘normalization’ is even worse—as they are well aware, the term carries a regional stigma, particularly with the Palestinians, of being a sell-out. The Abraham Accords are so much more and should be given the same bipartisan support as the peace treaties between Israel, Jordan, and Egypt reached by Democrat administrations.”

Sabotaging peace

It may be that the Biden administration is not only rejecting the terminology of peace in the region but is also working to undo the advances made by the Abraham Accords. This seemed to be the motive behind Biden “placing a hold” on the $23 billion sale of F-35s to the United Arab Emirates when he first entered office. The F-35 deal was considered a large part of the Abraham Accords though it appears not to have been a deal-breaker.

The move ran counter to an explicit statement Biden released when the Abraham Accords were announced in September 2020. Biden claimed to support the accords, promising to “build on these steps, challenge other nations to keep pace, and work to leverage these growing ties into progress toward a two-state solution and a more stable, peaceful region.”

An article in Tablet published in March suggested that the Biden administration had pressured the United Arab Emirates into canceling their attendance at an Abraham Accords summit in Abu Dhabi. The Biden administration was trying to derail any hopes Prime Minister Netanyahu had of forming a coalition. 

It should be noted that both Biden and former President Obama have a history of interfering with Israeli elections and using the State Department as a tool to depose Netanyahu.

But the larger strategy, according to the Tablet article, is to dismantle the Abraham Accords in order to realign the US with Iran and strengthen the Islamic regime.

“The alliance between Israel and the Gulf states is an impediment to the dream of a reempowered, nuclear-armed Iran backed by the United States, which was Obama’s main foreign policy aim—and an affront to peace processors convinced of their own never-ending importance,” jopournalist Lee Smith wrote in Tablet. “The Biden administration apparently aims to sink the accords by penalizing Israel and its peace partners for getting too close, and returning the Palestinians to center stage—in order to prepare the ground for reentering the Iran deal.