Honeymoon over: Abraham Accords tested as antisemitism resurges in Gulf - analysis

The murder of Chabad emissary Rabbi Zvi Kogan in the United Arab Emirates represents the culmination of fears that have often crept up over the years regarding the targeting of Jews abroad by various enemies. 

Authorities identified the body of Kogan, according to reports on November 24. “The Israeli mission in Abu Dhabi has been in contact with the family since the beginning of the incident and continues to support them during this difficult time,” the announcement declared. “His family in Israel has also been informed.”

Abraham Accords

This incident will have a number of impacts. First of all, it is already impacting the Gulf. Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords in 2020. It has now been four years since the first momentous flights began. At the time, there were high hopes, and relations grew quickly. They grew in many ways, from tourism to business and also for the Jewish community in the Gulf.

The growth came so rapidly, after many years in which the community kept a low profile, that many wondered if it was too good to be true. Indeed, the very public profile of the Jewish community in 2020-2021 was a honeymoon period. Conflict in May 2021 in Gaza and then the October 7 attacks and other tensions in the region meant that there was a sense that the happy times of 2020-2021 were being put on ice, at least temporarily.

Over the last four years there has been a lot of talk about extending the Accords to include Saudi Arabia. The election of Donald Trump this month is expected to put more wind in the sails of a possible deal.

However, Israel’s enemies have shown that they are willing to burn down the region in order to prevent normalization. Iran, Hamas and other countries have opposed the Abraham Accords. For instance, Turkey threatened to break relations with the UAE in 2020 if the UAE normalized ties with Israel. Ankara is one of the most hostile countries to Israel in the world today.

Hamas was hosted in Doha and may now be hosted in Ankara. Doha is also hostile to Israel and did not join the Accords.

Opposition to the Abraham Accords doesn’t necessarily lead to attacks on Jews, however. In the wake of the October 7 attack there have been rising attacks on Jews around the world. These attacks are often fueled by Iran, Hamas, and groups that are linked to them.

Some of the groups may pose as progressives in the West, but their overall milieu is one that is linked to Hamas and Iran. For instance, a recent anti-Israel protest in Canada included images of a nazi salute and a woman calling for the “final solution.” In addition a Jewish man on his way to synagogue was shot in Chicago in a hate crime in October.

We have come to understand since October 7 is to recognize that there is a global effort to fan the flames of antisemitism. This is connected to numerous sources and influences.

There are online social media personalities who have built up followings and used the Gaza war to spread hate against Jews. There are voices linked to Qatar and Moscow. Students activists on college campuses in the West rip down posters of the hostages.

Much of this global attack on Jews was visible in 2021 during the brief 10-day conflict with Hamas. During that war, which was likely a dry-run for the October 7 attack, mobs were unleashed in the West to harass Jews and threaten to rape Jewish women.

The UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) quietly dropped charges against two of the men who participated in a convoy of cars that drove around Blackburn in northern England shouting antisemitic slogans and threatening to rape women. Jews have understood over the last few years that when it comes to the West’s enforcement of “hate crimes,” Jews are usually the one group that doesn’t get protections.

In many cases the community has to work harder to get basic justice when Jews are targeted. Jews are more likely to be targeted with violent hate crimes than other minority group in most Western countries.In the Middle East, Jews have always felt threatened over the last decades. The pervasiveness of antisemitism in most of the countries in the region is clear. In many countries, whenever there is an “enemy” or a “conspiracy” that is told, it is Jews who are said to be behind it.

For instance, former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak was recorded saying that the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt would mean “Qatar will bring American Jews” to Egypt, and he alluded to a conspiracy that “Jews” are behind Ethiopia’s Nile Valley dam. During the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi some posters depicted him with a Star of David, insinuating he was either secretly Jewish or a “Zionist.”

Sometimes the antisemitism and anti-Israel views, which are entwined, are more subtle. When the Kurdistan region sought a referendum for independence in 2017, both Iran and Turkey spread rumors that Kurdistan would be a second Israel.

Peace between Egypt in the 1980s and Jordan in the 1990s did not bring tolerance for either Israel or Jews in the region. Anyone who has traveled in the region has run into the pervasive anti-Jewish, anti-Israel views that are meshed together. In some cases, Western media has sought to cover this up, for instance translating curses against “Jews” or “Yahud” as being against Israel.

This is the method used to cover up the street-level populist hatred of Jews that has been cultivated in the Middle East for decades, and pretend that many people merely dislike “Israelis” or “Zionists.” The fact is that many people in the region have been raised to hate Jews. For them, Israel is “the Jew” and killing or hating Jews and killing Israelis is generally synonymous. This is the reason most anti-Israel social media accounts in the region will refer to the killing of Israelis in all areas of Israel as “settlers.”

The goal is to “other” all Israelis. It doesn’t matter if Israelis live in Tel Aviv or Efrat, for many of the anti-Israel voices they are “settlers” and “Jews” and attacking or killing them is justified as “resistance.”

After the Abraham Accords many of us who believed in peace wanted to hope that this trend might shift. It might be possible that the decision by authorities in the region to educate people to be anti-Israeli and antisemitic might shift if the countries in the region saw that this was not a profitable trend in their interest.

Many regimes used antisemitism and “anti-Zionism” to stay in power. Therefore, if they saw the fruits of peace from the Accords, perhaps they would shift to see coexistence as in their interests.

The struggle for the Accords was that while they got off to a great start in the UAE and Bahrain, and to some extent in Morocco; the enemies of the Accords were powerful lobbies such as Iran, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. In early 2021 when the Biden administration was coming into power, far-right media in Turkey published an article detailing all the Jews in the administration, as if to promote a kind of Elders of Zion take on American politics, wrapped in Turkish-Islamist conspiracies.

Targets in the UAE

This brings us back to the apparent targeting and murder of Kogan in the UAE. The initial statement by authorities referred to a “missing Moldovan citizen.” The concern with saying that Kogan was Israeli or a rabbi is clear in these initial reactions. Now many questions will be raised about how he was killed and whether the perpetrators escaped and if so, how.

What is clear is that this killing will likely change many things. It is one of many threats to Jews in the region as well as Iranian-backed plots. These plots have spanned the region from Azerbaijan to Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus.

In addition, an Israeli-Russian Princeton University researcher named Elizabeth Tsurkov was kidnapped in Iraq in 2023. This should have set off alarm bells at the time. After October 7, her kidnapping has been underreported because of the sheer volume of attacks on October 7 and the kidnapping of 250 people to Gaza, 101 of whom are still held there.