Peace in the Middle East has arrived quietly, in rooms far from the noise that surrounds it, and it has always depended on people deciding to move before it was safe to do so. Six years since the Abraham Accords were signed on the South Lawn of the White House, it is worth remembering that they did not emerge from nothing. They were the third act in a story that began decades earlier, when two Arab leaders risked everything for a future their own people were not yet ready to imagine.
In March 1979, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin signed a peace treaty that ended three decades of war. Sadat had already broken the taboo two years before, flying to Jerusalem and addressing the Knesset, an act so unthinkable at the time that it cost him his life in 1981. The treaty gave Israel peace with its largest neighbor and gave Egypt back the Sinai. It also cost Egypt its seat at the Arab League for a decade, a reminder of how steep the price of being early can be. This was not a warm peace. It was correct, distant, sustained by mutual interest more than affection. But it held, through wars and uprisings and the entire turbulence of the region, and it holds still.
Fifteen years later, Jordan followed. King Hussein and Yitzhak Rabin signed the Israel-Jordan peace treaty in 1994, a year after Oslo had raised hopes of something broader. Jordan’s peace was born of geography and necessity as much as vision, two countries sharing a border, a river, and an urgent need to manage water and security together. Like Egypt’s, it was mostly official rather than popular. Jordanian public opinion stayed skeptical for years. Yet the treaty endured, quietly enabling cooperation that both countries came to depend on, even when they preferred not to discuss it too loudly.
These two treaties mattered less for their warmth than for their precedent. They proved Arab states could make peace with Israel and survive it, and that interest could, over time, outlast ideology. For a quarter century, though, they remained exceptions. No other government followed.
Then, in September 2020, the exception became a pattern. The UAE and Bahrain signed normalization agreements, followed within months by Morocco and Sudan. Unlike the earlier treaties, these were not the product of war. They were signed in relative calm, driven by shared concern over Iran, economic ambition, and a generational shift in how Gulf leaders saw their region’s future. They also broke with old assumptions by setting aside the requirement that Israeli-Palestinian peace come first. Trade, flights, and tourism followed faster than they ever had with Egypt or Jordan. In November 2025, Kazakhstan formally joined the framework, a sign the logic could travel well beyond the Arab world.
Six years in, the picture is neither triumphant nor tragic. No signatory has withdrawn, even through the trauma of October 7 and the war that followed, which is itself remarkable. But momentum has slowed. New deals are fewer. Public opinion across signatory states remains far ahead of official policy in its wariness, echoing the coldness that once defined peace with Egypt and Jordan. Saudi Arabia, the accords’ most consequential possible member, continues to weigh the price of joining against the cost of standing apart.
It is tempting to read that hesitation as the end of the story. History argues otherwise. Sadat did not wait for the Arab world’s blessing before flying to Jerusalem. Hussein signed knowing most of his own people opposed it. The leaders on the South Lawn in 2020 acted while conventional wisdom still insisted normalization without a Palestinian settlement was impossible. In every case, the treaty came first and the reconciliation of hearts and minds came slowly after, sometimes taking a generation, sometimes still unfinished. What moved history forward was never consensus. It was one leader, or a small handful, willing to act ahead of their own public and absorb the cost of being early.
That is the thesis worth carrying into the seventh year: the region has never lacked capable people who understand what open borders and integrated economies could mean for their citizens. What it has occasionally lacked is someone willing to spend political capital on a future that is not yet popular. Twice before, such a person appeared when the moment seemed least likely to produce one. There is no reason to believe the well has run dry. Somewhere today, quite possibly in a capital not yet on anyone’s shortlist, sits a leader weighing the same choice Sadat and Hussein once weighed, the same choice the Emirati and Bahraini leadership made in 2020. History does not run on schedules, but it runs on courage, and courage has a way of arriving when it is least expected and most needed. The descendants of Abraham have three precedents now. The fourth is only waiting for someone brave enough to write it.