Last week in Washington, the United States, Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain signed the “Abraham Accords,” described by many as peace agreements, by others as betrayal, by others as no big deal.

I describe it as a chimera, a tale “full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”

Columnist Bret Stephens wrote favorably of the accords in the New York Times that “the Trump administration has done more for regional peace than most of its predecessors” and that the [Abraham Accords] “is an alliance of moderates and modernizers. … Such an alliance is the only hope for a region being sucked into the maw of religious fanaticism, economic stagnation, environmental degradation and perpetual misrule.”

I disagree.

America is no longer the center of the universe, no longer the beacon on the hill. We don’t get to pick winners and losers as easily as we once did.

“The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai, the biggest factory in the world is in China, the largest oil refinery is in India, the largest investment fund in the world is in Abu Dhabi, the largest Ferris wheel in the world is in Singapore,” Fareed Zakaria noted in 2011.

I’ve been in that tallest building – I would never get on that Ferris wheel!

I’ve been in Dubai and Abu Dhabi – indeed, in all parts of the UAE – and Bahrain often, traveling there as early as 1969, two years before the UAE even existed.

When I first visited the Persian Gulf, the UAE was known as The Trucial States, a name the British government gave to seven shaikhdoms – Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Fujairah and Ras Al Khaimah – it had administered, in one form or another, since 1820.

The UAE is led by crown prince Mohammed Bin Zayed al-Nahayan (MBZ), who is suspected as having a role in campaign interference on behalf of Trump and who secretly visited Trump Tower in December 2016.

Today, Sunni-ruled UAE has about 1 million Emirati citizens – and 8 million “guest” workers – some generational, including Palestinians – with no political rights. It has a skyline of skyscrapers and no free-speech guarantees. It serves alcohol in international hotels and arrests people for embracing in public.

When a daughter of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikha Latifa, wanted freedom she tried to plot an escape. She almost pulled it off: UAE commandos were deployed to find her and return her to Baba.

Is that an “alliance of moderates and modernizers”?

MBZ has pursued, alongside Jamal Khashoggi’s killer MBS from neighboring Saudi Arabia – armed with American munitions – a brutal war in Yemen where millions of Yemenis have been killed and millions more driven to the brink of starvation.

Is that an “alliance of moderates and modernizers”?

When I first visited Bahrain, also in 1969, it was considered slightly more “cosmopolitan” than The Trucial States. Today Bahrain, a small country comprised of a cluster of small islands in the Persian Gulf, has a population of about 1.5 million, two-thirds of whom are Shiites. The monarchy’s security is bolstered by its close relationship with the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet – responsible for naval forces in the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and parts of the Indian Ocean – which is based in Bahrain.

Today, Bahrain’s Sunni minority – led by a King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, who has attended the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth – dominates a Shiite majority that is systematically discriminated against and deprived of basic human rights.

The government ruthlessly crushed the democracy movement of 2011 – assisted by Saudi Arabia and UAE forces – and Shaikh Ali Salman, the leader of the opposition majority Shiite political party, Wefaq, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for “thought crimes.”

“Bahrain’s human rights record worsened in 2019, as the government carried out executions, convicted critics for peaceful expression, and threatened social media activists,” Human Rights Watch reported in “World Report 2020.”

Is that a desirable “alliance of moderates and modernizers”?

Last week those monarchies – a.k.a. “moderates and modernizers” – became the first Arab states to recognize and normalize diplomatic relations with Israel since 1994, with Donald Trump taking the credit for brokering it.

He’s welcome to it.

Let Trump take credit for putting a public face on what’s been no secret: that the UAE and Bahrain, along with others like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have long had economic and security links with Israel.

Let Trump take credit for the sale of American-made F-35 stealth fighter jets to the UAE, which will be used against Yemenis and others. As Trump said, “They have the money and they would like to order quite a few F-35s. … One F-35 retails for roughly $100 million.”

I wonder if Abraham – patriarch of three Abrahamic Faiths – would approve?

Let Trump and Netanyahu take credit, too, for the ongoing oppression and occupation of over 5 million stateless and rights-less Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, where the Netanyahu government – itself mired in corruption and COVID-19 response mismanagement – is determined not only to keep Palestinians stateless but to fully annex their land and resources.

Let the president and his sycophants portray Trump as a peacemaker worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize – an award Trump still resents having been given to President Obama – but the Abraham Accords, agreeable for trade and tourism, are not the path to Middle East peace. They are not, as Andrea Mitchell commented, “ ‘the deal of the century’ that America was originally seeking.”

Netanyahu, who like Trump was eager for the deal to elevate his international bona fides, said of the accords: “You [Trump] have … proposed a realistic vision for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”

It is no such thing. Globally, the plight of the Palestinians will continue to draw sympathy, and their marginalization and frustration, I fear, will continue to fuel violence.

The accords made such a perfunctory nod toward the Palestinians – who have been deliberately marginalized by Trump, Netanyahu, Jared Kushner, and others who have fully embraced conservative Israeli positions – that they could only reject them out of hand. As in the Jerusalem embassy betrayal, the Palestinians were not even informed in advance.

The Abraham Accords are neither about peace nor normalization, nor are they an “alliance of moderates and modernizers.” They are about securing the perpetuation, privilege, and authority of monarchs and autocrats, either through the ballot box or the barrel of a gun.

For proponents of a stable Middle East – after the failure of proposed two-state solutions – only one choice remains: a one-nation Israeli-Palestinian solution that is bi-national, secular, and democratic.

Only then, when Palestinians have agency and sovereignty alongside everyone else, will an “alliance of moderates and modernizers” be possible.

(Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.)