By David Lega
This month’s new Mecca pact, the joint defence agreement between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, raises an obvious question: what does it mean for the Abraham Accords, and for the hope of one day bringing Saudi Arabia into them?
I have always believed in the promise of the Accords. Not just as agreements between Israel and individual Arab states, but as a larger idea: that nations are better off trading, talking and building together than fighting. Saudi normalisation with Israel was long the great prize still waiting. Today that looks harder than it did a month ago.
The wounds of October 7 are still wide open. Hamas murdered and abducted Israeli civilians and dragged the region into a war whose scars are everywhere today. Iran keeps arming proxies whose purpose is to ensure this region never knows peace, and at the Strait of Hormuz it has shown it will hold the world’s energy supply hostage to project that power far beyond its borders.
And Palestinian statehood remains unresolved. But if a lasting answer ever comes, it must be built by the region, on the region’s terms. Not designed in Europe and handed down according to how we think it should look. Israelis, Palestinians and their Arab neighbours are the ones who will live with whatever comes next.
None of this disappears because we wish it away. But here history offers perspective.
I spent five years in the European Parliament, and I have seen what European integration became. It did not begin in harmony. It began in ruins.
After the Second World War, former enemies began with something surprisingly practical: coal and steel. France, Germany and their neighbours tied their economies together so tightly that another war became not just unthinkable, but practically impossible. Almost no one standing in the ruins of 1945 could have imagined what we have today. And it did not happen because someone outside designed their future for them. Europeans built it themselves, because the alternative, another generation of war, was worse.
Perhaps the Abraham Accords are not the finish line, but the first brick. A Middle East where Israel, the Palestinians and their Arab neighbours build their future around trade, security and shared prosperity may sound unrealistic today. A united Europe sounded unrealistic once too.
The Mecca pact may be a setback. There will be others. But they do not tell us where the region will be in twenty or fifty years. Peace is rarely built in one dramatic moment. It starts with small, practical steps, tested and expanded over decades.
That is why, despite everything, I still believe in the promise of the Abraham Accords. Not because I underestimate how hard this is, but because history has shown what becomes possible when former enemies decide that building something together beats fighting over the past.
David Lega is Secretary General of the European Jewish Association (EJA).