Middle East 101, Week XVIII

From the Abraham Accords to the 2021 Gaza War

Hi there! If you’re new—welcome, new readers, we’re glad to have you—today you’re receiving the Week 18 reading list for Middle East 101, a class I decided to teach for Cosmopolitan Globalist’s paid subscribers in the wake of October 7.

Whether or not you’ve followed the class from the beginning, today’s list should be interesting to you if you’re trying to understand the history and the context of the headlines in the news today.

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Some of you will be giving presentations on Sunday, and I noticed, the week before, that some of you had fallen a bit behind in the reading—which, given your customary diligence, means I assigned too much. So I suggest we take two weeks with the list below. (We can confirm this on Sunday.)

I’ve marked the priority items for this coming Sunday with a star. Please read as much of the reading as you comfortably can before Sunday, and save what you can’t to read for the following Sunday. (Do read it all by then, though: I wouldn’t assign it if I didn’t think you’d find it valuable.)

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Here are the individual declarations.

★ The Abraham Accords: Paradigm shift or Realpolitik?

★ Arun Kapil, Judith Levy, Piero Castellano and I had a debate about the significance of the Israel-Morocco deal here at the Cosmopolitan Globalist:

• Israel, Morocco, and the Western Sahara: What does this mean?

• Morocco and Israel: Counterpoint.

★ Abraham Accords Progress Report, 2021. (Don’t worry about memorizing everything: Just get a sense of what was achieved.)

★ The regional impact of the Abraham Accords.

★ Understanding the Trump Plan. For Sunday, just read the one-page explainer; for the following week, read the Executive Summary. Read the full study if you have time. Part One is a recap of the complete historical background. (If you’d like to revise what we’ve studied to date, this is a well-organized and well-conceived summary.)

Axis of Abraham: Arab-Israeli normalization could remake the Middle East.

Assessing the Abraham Accords, three years on. An Arab (and rather hostile) perspective.

Why the Abraham Accords are ceding ground to Arab-Iranian de-escalation.

How Gaza became Israel’s unsolvable problem. By Michael Oren, and like everything he writes, beautifully written. This is an excellent review of what we’ve been discussing for the past several weeks, so if you missed a class or if things have gone by too quickly, this should help.¹