The model's ambitions — that bilateral state-level deals could substitute for resolution of the Palestinian question — have met their structural limits.
The wave of normalisation agreements between Israel and Arab states that began in 2020 was heralded as a reordering of Middle Eastern politics. Security cooperation over Palestinian statehood, the pragmatic alignment of Gulf interests with Israeli capability, the construction of new coalitions around shared threat perception — these were real developments. They were not illusory.
But normalisation was always a more fragile architecture than its architects acknowledged. The domestic publics of the Gulf states did not share their governments' enthusiasm. Palestinian political exclusion was not a minor technical detail; it was the central unresolved question of regional order. And the Israeli political environment was moving in directions that made the premises of normalisation increasingly difficult to sustain.
The events of October 2023 and their aftermath exposed these structural limits with a severity that few anticipated. The regional coalitions constructed through normalisation did not dissolve — but they came under strain that tested their actual depth. Saudi normalisation, which had seemed plausible before October, retreated to a horizon that moves as you approach it.
The harder question is what the normalisation framework means in conditions of sustained conflict and contested legitimacy. Arab governments that have made their peace with Israel as a strategic reality face different domestic political calculations than they did in 2020. The populations they govern have not made the same accommodation.
There is no clean return to the pre-normalisation map. The strategic relationships built in those years have real content and will persist. But the model's ambitions — that bilateral state-level deals could substitute for, or indefinitely defer, resolution of the Palestinian question — have met their structural limits.
