Will a Saudi-Israel Normalization Deal Undermine Israeli-Palestinian Peace Efforts?
The Biden administration argues that a Saudi-Israel normalization deal would pave the way to settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the impact of the previous normalization deals under the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords paints a very different picture. In a new QI Brief, Professor Jeremy Pressman documents the impact of these normalization deals and concludes that a U.S.-brokered normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia would be counterproductive to Israeli-Palestinian peace.
To discuss the impact of the normalization deals on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, QI held a webinar with Jeremy Pressman, Professor of Political Science and the Director of Middle East Studies at the University of Connecticut, Rula Jebreal, Palestinian journalist and award-winning author, and Jon Hoffman, Research Fellow in Defense and Foreign Policy at the Cato Institute. Trita Parsi, Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute, moderated.
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Panelists
Jeremy Pressman
Jeremy Pressman is a Professor of Political Science and the Director of Middle East Studies at the University of Connecticut. His most recent book is The Sword is not Enough: Arabs, Israelis, and the Limits of Military Force (Manchester University Press, 2020). He is a former project associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 2019, Pressman was a Fulbright Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway.
Rula Jebreal
Rula Jebreal is a Palestinian journalist, foreign policy analyst, and award-winning author. Her first novel, Miral (2007), shared an autobiographical account of the founding of a Palestinian orphanage in 1948 and the experiences of three generations of women caught in the crossfire of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jebreal holds a degree from the University of Bologna and is a Board Member at the Centre for International Policy and the US Middle East Project. She was formerly an MSNBC commentator and is currently a Visiting Professor of Communications at the University of Miami.
Jon Hoffman
Jon Hoffman is a Research Fellow in Defense and Foreign Policy at the Cato Institute and an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at George Mason University. His upcoming book is Islam and Statecraft: Religious Soft Power in the Arab Gulf States (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). In 2021, Hoffman was included in the inaugural cohort of the “40 under 40” award by the Middle East Policy Council for making a significant impact on Middle East affairs and policy in Washington D.C.
Trita Parsi
Trita Parsi is the Executive Vice President at the Quincy Institute. He was the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order and was named by the Washingtonian Magazine as one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy in Washington D.C. in both 2021 and 2022. Parsi is an expert on U.S.-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign politics, and the geopolitics of the Middle East. He is the co-founder and former President of the National Iranian American Council. He received his PhD in foreign policy at Johns Hopkins’ School for Advanced International Studies.