Why Did the Biden Administration Freeze the Abraham Accords’ Fund?
As Arab printing presses waited for the reward for signing normalization agreements with the occupied Israeli entity, the Administration of U.S. President Joe Biden shocked them by the freeze on the Abraham Fund, which is being spent on such normalization.
By freezing the fund, which was established in September 2020, the tongue of Arab Normalizers has become the same: "We are satisfied with them, and they are not satisfied with us."
The Hebrew newspaper Globes, revealed on July 7, 2021, that the Biden administration had frozen the Abraham Fund to support economic normalization, and that Israel’s new government was not enthusiastic about economic projects offered by the UAE.
Citing U.S. and Israeli sources, the newspaper said the Biden administration has frozen the fund's work, despite its support for normalization agreements, and is "less enthusiastic about allocating funds to it than its budget."
The decision was preceded by the Biden administration's ban on referring to the name "Abraham Accords" as Trump called them, according to the U.S. website Washington Free Beacon June 4, 2021.
Israel's new environment minister also called for the cancellation of an oil deal with the UAE on the grounds that it harmed the environment, angering Abu Dhabi, Israel today reported June 16, 2021.
These developments were a setback for Arab press regimes, as they looked to reap the benefits in the perception that Tel Aviv is the door to white house support.
Arab normalization is the most affected by this economic transition, having lost their people under widespread rejection of normalization, but it represents a major blow to the bets of Sudan and Morocco in particular, observers say.
Between Trump and Biden
Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner are tempted to push Arabs to establish relations with Israel, including the creation of a $3 billion Normalization Support Fund or Abraham Fund to support normalization initiatives.
After signing the IMF agreement in September 2020, it began operations quickly the following month in October 2020, and within three months it obtained hundreds of requests to finance various projects, some within Israel.
"More than 250 applications for the Fund from October 2020 to January 2021, from private and public companies in the UAE, Jordan, Bahrain and Egypt," according to the Times of Israel.
"The Abraham Fund established by the Trump administration may go bankrupt before it invests a penny," the paper said March 2, 2021.
The normalization fund, for which $3 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds have been allocated, is unclear less than five months after the signing of the normalization agreements, she said.
The election of Joe Biden as America's new president in January 2021 brought the Fund's activities to a halt shortly after he was sworn in.
Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, who was appointed by Trump to head the Fund, resigned on Biden's inauguration on January 20, 2021, and the new U.S. administration did not appoint a successor.
Most of the projects approved by the Fund in the areas of energy, financial technology, and others have not been operational.
The Biden administration announced that it supported the Abraham Agreements, but was less enthusiastic about allocating funds to the Fund than its budget, and informed the Israeli Foreign Ministry that the Fund's activities were being reassessed.
U.S. reports said that one of the reasons for the reassessment is the huge expenditures the Biden administration needs in the economic recovery from the Covid-19 crisis, Corona.
A U.S. source told The Globes: The White House is interested in strengthening and successfully promoting the Abraham Agreements and bringing in additional Arab printing presses, but the focus will be on the diplomatic rather than financial dimension, and freezing the fund itself indefinitely.
An Israeli source told the newspaper that the Americans informed Netanyahu’s government and then built that the fund's activities "are not on Biden's agenda."
For its part, Israel's private Channel 12 commented March 3, 2021, on the early freeze of the fund's work following Biden's victory: "The beautiful words of Washington and Abu Dhabi about investing billions of dollars in Israel are a dead letter."
"Do the Abraham Accords hold up despite Netanyahu's departure from power?" asked the Jerusalem Post on June 3, 2021. It's like she was reading Biden's subsequent decision to freeze the box.
UAE 10 Billion
In return, the UAE sought to revive normalization by announcing in March 2021 the creation of a $10 billion "Investment Fund in Israel."
The fund also failed to take off after former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the UAE was postponed, signing a joint declaration on it, and finally losing the prime ministership.
Israel hopes that the agreements signed by Foreign Minister Yair Lapid during his visit to the UAE on June 29, 2021, will provide a legal framework for Abu Dhabi government investments in Tel Aviv.
However, relations soured and businessmen angered two of the UAE's richest families by cancelling a meeting with Lapid during his visit to Abu Dhabi, Globes said.
Tension swelled, as the new Government of Israel backtracked on an agreement signed by Israel's EAPC with the UAE's Med Red Land Bridge to transport oil from the Gulf to Israel across the Mediterranean, a further blow to normalization.
Officially Forbidden
The Biden administration not only froze and abandoned the Abraham Fund, but decided to reject the designation of normalization agreements as the Abraham Agreements.
"The Biden administration no longer uses the term "Abraham Agreements," and the State Department has prevented its employees from referring to the agreements by that name," the Washington Free Beacon reported June 4, 2021.
The U.S. website viewed an email, which included deleting Abraham's name from a wide range of state department official contacts, and alerting the Biden administration to employees referring to Trump-era deals as "normalization agreements."
In response to press inquiries about why the name was ignored, the State Department said, "It's a name created by the Trump administration, preferably not used," referring to it as "associated with the former president, and the administration avoids the term and considers it ridiculous and ridiculous."
She also added that Biden's team believes that the recent war between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) was a moment of "defecation of the Abraham Accords" !!.
Cancelling Agreements
In October 2020, The Israeli state pipeline company EAPC and UAE-based MED-RED Land Bridge Ltd signed a memorandum of understanding to transport oil from the Gulf to Europe via the Israeli line.
Israel's new environment minister Tamar Zandberg's demand to cancel the agreement shocked UAE printing press, Haaretz reported June 16, 2021.
The minister, who belongs to the left-wing Meretz party, called for the immediate cancellation of the agreement signed between the Ashkelon-Eilat oil pipeline company with the UAE to transport oil through Israel around the world.
Haaretz quoted an unnamed UAE official as saying that Tel Aviv had informed Abu Dhabi that the cancellation of the agreement would damage relations.
The project, which Hamas bombed in the Gaza war in May 2021, has already raised Egyptian concerns about its impact on the Suez Canal, the main artery for transporting oil around the world, observers say.
"It will reduce the number of oil transport ships passing through the canal by 16 percent," Said Osama Rabie, head of the Suez Canal Authority, in a television interview.
During his recent visit to Abu Dhabi, the Israeli Foreign Minister told the Globes that he was "studying the subject of the agreement."
"We don't want to harm the environment in Israel, and we will consider the opinion of the Supreme Court of Justice in this case," he said.
Military Weakening
The Hebrew newspaper Makour Rishon referred to another damage to normalization processes, which it called "the weakening of the Abraham Agreements by the U.S. administration."
"Further weakening the agreements is America's military withdrawal from the Gulf region and the Middle East," she said June 20, 2021.
"The reduction of U.S. military forces in the Middle East, including air defenses in Saudi Arabia, which is facing the Houthi problem in Yemen, harms normalization," wrote former researcher and security official Doron Mitsa.
"Trump has been interested in creating a new strategic balance in the Middle East that relies on an (Israeli-Gulf) coalition with the Abraham Accords, and advanced arms deals for coalition countries to build an iron wall for their camp," he said.
He criticized the Biden administration's handling of it differently, seeking a quick exit from the region, and agreeing with Iran that would allow it to be transformed into a regional superpower and weaken normalization states.
This was seen as undermining "the Abraham Agreements and weakening the (Israeli-Gulf) iron wall for normalization against Iran."
This forced the Gulf states to flirt with Iran, he said, after they realized the change in U.S. orientation.
Losses of Normalizers
The UAE is the biggest economic and political loser from the Abraham Fund freeze and the slowdown in normalization, because it lost agreements that would have generated significant income, and Egypt lost when it entered into a competition with Israel against the Suez Canal.
America is about to lose in the face of news that its F-35 sales agreement has been cancelled, and Tel Aviv has lost itself due to the latter's retreat from the oil deal.
In the Tamara field, 22 percent of which was purchased by “Mubadala” Petroleum on April 26, 2021 (owned by Israel's “Delek”) for $1.1 billion, was temporarily suspended when Gaza’s resistance was targeted by drones.
Israel's losses, and consequently the UAE, from the field's suspension amounted to $6 million a day, according to an energy researcher for Al Jazeera.
Morocco and Sudan were lured by Trump with projects funded by the Abraham Fund in exchange for normalization with Israel, which in turn lost their doors because the fund closed its doors without spending a dollar to invest in them.
That is why voices opposed to normalization in Sudan have begun urging the authorities to withdraw from the agreement.
This prompted Israel to ask the White House to host a ceremony promoting normalization of relations between Sudan and Israel, Axios reported March 11, 2021.
Further speculation of a halt to normalization, a Mossad delegation met with Deputy Chairman of the Sovereign Council Mohammed Hamdan Daqlo "Hamidati", competing with the council's president Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, according to the U.S. website Axios June 24, 2021.
Overall, Sudan benefited from improved relations with America and Israel in obtaining relief on June 30, 2021 from $1.4 billion in debt to the International Monetary Fund and a $2.47 billion loan.
According to a study by the Brookings Institution, December 14, 2020, Morocco benefited from the Abraham Naturalist Agreements in obtaining U.S. recognition of Morocco's sovereignty over disputed Western Sahara territory.
But Morocco was waiting for a $1 billion deal to buy U.S. weapons that Trump told Congress after the signing of the Normalization Agreement on December 10, 2020, that failed to materialize.
Rabat has been waiting for economic deals and investments, along with the military, in Morocco, totalling about $4 billion.
But the Biden administration has halted all arms deals trump has made or promised, including the Moroccan arms deal. Trump's recognition of Sahara itself is "another headache for the Biden team," CNN reported December 12, 2020.
But Morocco breathed a sigh of relief when U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told it that the Biden administration had not overturned Trump's decision to recognize Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara.
What drew attention was that Blinken informed Morocco to retain the recognition "at least for the time being," according to the U.S. website Axios April 30, 2021, which means that the recognition is not final.
Now all Trump's promises about the Normalization Support Fund or the Abraham Fund have dried up as funds for the region, and the press states stand bewildered and find no justification for their people where the economic returns and benefits have not been realized.
