Episode 9: Did Biden derail Saudi normalization? Breaking down the Abraham Accords with ex-NSC expert Shiri Fein

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Abraham Accords have the potential to transform the Middle East. The very fact that they survived the Gaza war proves their resilience. Indeed, trade between Israel and its Abraham Accords partners has risen dramatically and stayed high through the war.And now the “kit” of dozens of agreements drafted between Israel and the UAE, from the overarching peace agreement to treaties on cellphone network interoperability and double taxation, stands ready to be copied over to a Israeli-Saudi peace.But will the Saudi normalization go forward? What would it take? Does it depend on what happens in Gaza, and can this Israeli government deliver the conditions in Gaza that would facilitate such a peace?I posed these questions to Shiri Fein Grossman, the former head of regional affairs at the Israeli National Security Council who was one of the key coordinators and planners of the Abraham Accords. Shiri now serves as CEO of the Israel-Africa Relations Institute.This episode was sponsored by a donor who chose to remain anonymous. At her request we will continue the tradition of remembering someone we lost on Oct 7. Today we remember Roi Moshe, 36, a firefighter from Ashkelon, who was killed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 while trying to return home from a night shift at the Be’er Sheva station.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠ www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠ If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠.A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everybody. Welcome to episode eight of Ask Haviv Anything.
0:10.2	I have the distinct honor and privilege today of sitting down with Shirifain Grossman,
0:15.4	a friend, but more than a friend of mine for the purposes of this podcast,
0:20.2	she happens to also have led
0:21.6	regional affairs as head of regional affairs at the National Security Council of Israel
0:25.9	during a fairly slightly vaguely interesting period in which Israel suddenly was able to sign
0:33.6	peace treaties and normalization agreements with Arab countries that had previously
0:38.1	officially been enemies.
0:41.0	And so I'm going to ask her, you know, we hear a lot about the Abraham Accords.
0:44.8	We hear about the Emirates and Bahrain and Morocco and Sudan, and we have high hopes for
0:51.2	the Saudis.
0:52.3	And they're generally peace agreements with Jordan and Egypt,
0:56.6	and Shiri luckily knows about Syria and many other parts of the region,
1:01.6	and was instrumental, deep in the bowels of Israeli policy planning, a coordination.
1:08.1	Most of the coordination in putting together the Abraham Accords from the Israeli side
1:12.2	was actually handled by the National Security Council and Shalia was in the center, the nexus
1:19.9	of all of that planning. And so we're going to today dive into, this is history, but history
1:25.6	that happened about 90 seconds ago. We're going to dive into
1:29.2	what the Abraham Accords means, how it came about, what it took to put it together on the
1:35.4	substantive policy side, and what it all means for the region. And of course, I'm going to
1:40.9	obviously ask about Israeli strategy, Israeli strategy in Gaza going forward the day after,
1:46.2	and the prospects for Saudi normalization in the coming year, two, three.
	...

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