Six years ago this month, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords on the White House lawn, later followed by Morocco and Sudan. The deal broke the Arab League’s decadeslong policy, in place since 1967, of “no peace, no negotiation, no recognition” with Israel, proving that governments could choose acceptance over isolation.
As an Ismaili Muslim who has advocated Muslim-Jewish coexistence and normalization with Israel, and who has been criticized for it frequently, I’ve spent the years since wondering what that diplomatic choice actually built.
The honest answer is complicated.
The past six years have delivered more steps back than forward: Oct. 7, 2023, the war in Gaza, the escalation with Hezbollah, and a direct conflict with Iran. Together, they make the gains that came out of the Abraham Accords feel fragile. Normalization, it turned out, was never a switch that stays on once flipped. It has to be defended and rebuilt with every new crisis.
That raises an uncomfortable question. Can governments carry the full weight of normalization alone, or does lasting peace depend as much on ordinary people choosing to build it themselves?
I’ve seen firsthand what gets in the way of answering that question.
When anti-Israel protesters tried to shut down my graduation at McGill this summer, it felt less about opposing the war in Gaza and more about whether someone with my views belonged in the room. That same absolutism drives the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel, which presents itself as a campaign for Palestinian rights but actually calls for cutting the research and business ties that connect Israelis and Palestinians. On campus, the movement treats dissent as morally suspect, not merely a differing opinion.
But I’ve also seen what happens when people actually try.
This June, I took part in the Tel Aviv Institute’s New Middle East Laboratory in London, a multiday program built on the premise that people with roots in the region’s most divided communities can sit in a room together and actually talk. The participants weren’t diplomats or politicians. They were everyday Muslims, Christians, Jews, Iranians, Assyrians, Copts, Druze, and Somalilanders.
We didn’t agree on everything.
We argued about Israel, Iran, religion, whose history gets remembered and whose gets sidelined. But we also ate and laughed together, while asking real questions and listening to the answers. Nobody left having changed their politics wholesale. What did change was smaller, and more lasting — we stopped seeing each other as caricatures we’d inherited. Had that room run on BDS logic, it would never have gotten off the ground.
Not everyone can attend a program like the New Middle East Lab. But its model of connection over exclusion and curiosity over condemnation requires neither a plane ticket to London nor government sanction. It can be practiced anywhere, from campuses to family group chats to dinner tables. Governments still play a limited role. They can sign documents and convene summits. What they can’t do is make ordinary people curious enough about each other to have hard conversations.
This might sound idealistic. But idealism isn’t a word you’d use for something that already happened. The lab ran, disagreements happened, and nobody walked out. If anything, the more violent the region gets, the stronger the case for doing more of this, not less. That’s because wars end at negotiating tables staffed by leaders who have been shaped by whether their societies believed peace was possible.
The old “three no’s” were a closed door. The Abraham Accords forced it open. But opening a door isn’t the same as walking through it, and that part is still ours to do. Normalization doesn’t require unanimity. It requires the same give-and-take between neighbors that the Accords required between dignitaries. It requires treating someone else’s lived experience as real.
ROBERT KRAFT DREW A LINE IN A WEEK. JOSH SHAPIRO HAS HAD A YEAR
Six years later, the real test is not whether more countries sign on, but whether enough of us still believe it’s worth sitting down with people on the other side of the argument.
The New Middle East Lab is proof that some of us do. The question now is who else will join in?
Raihaana Adira is a Canadian Muslim who advocates Muslim-Jewish dialogue and coexistence. Drawing on her experience as a Muslim Zionist, she writes about the Middle East, antisemitism, and the importance of education in countering extremism.