GGeorge W. Bush stigmatized, on May 18 in Dallas, “One man’s totally unjustified decision to brutally invade Iraq…”before resuming: “I mean Ukraine. » This revealing and publicized slip has sparked a flood of comments, highlighting among other things the complacency that continues to prevail about the disastrous American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Shortly after the speech of the former president of the United States, the Iraqi Parliament unanimously passed a law criminalizing all forms of ” promotion “ of “Zionist Entity”as Israel was called in Saddam Hussein’s propaganda.
The snub remains scathing for the neoconservatives who pushed Mr. Bush into the Iraqi adventure, claiming that “the road to Jerusalem passes through Baghdad”. According to these ideologues, the fall of the Iraqi dictator was to mechanically trigger a process of democratization inside Iraq, itself leading to normalization with Israel, a dynamic that would then spread to the rest of the Arab countries.
A dictatorial normalization
Two decades later, Iraq is struggling to emerge from a cycle of civil wars, with constant challenges to the representativeness of its institutions. And the unanimous vote of the Iraqi deputies sanctions the now definitive failure of the neoconservatives, since, in the Arab Middle East, only authoritarian regimes have normalized their relations with Israel.
These regimes have also put forward such normalization to maintain the complacency of the United States towards their repressive excesses, while their population often remained sensitive to Palestinian suffering. The Egypt of ex-Marshal Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi probably has five times more political prisoners than that of Hosni Mubarak, who had himself inherited the peace concluded in 1979 by Anouar El-Sadat with Israel. The political openness granted by King Hussein of Jordan before the signing of peace with Israel in 1994 was therefore called into question and further restricted under the reign of his son Abdallah II.
The Abraham Accords, signed with Israel by four Arab states in 2020, are led by the United Arab Emirates, already at the initiative of a virulent counter-revolutionary campaign in the Arab world
The Abraham Accords, signed with Israel by four Arab states between September and December 2020, are led by the United Arab Emirates, already at the initiative of a virulent counter-revolutionary campaign in the Arab world. Bahrain is aligned with the position of Abu Dhabi, which had supported, from 2011, if necessary by arms, the stifling of constitutionalist agitation. In Sudan, it was the military hierarchy that imposed normalization with Israel on the civilian authorities which it has since overthrown in October 2021. Only Morocco stands in contrast to this dictatorial dynamic, for two reasons: on the one hand on the other hand, the importance and voluntarism of the community of Moroccan origin in Israel, which gives this normalization a human depth absent in the five previous agreements; on the other hand, the American counterpart of a recognition of the “Moroccanness” Western Sahara, a claim supported by a broad consensus in the Cherifian kingdom.
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