Material Politics of Normalization
Summer/Fall 2025
MER’s Summer/Fall double issue, ‘The Material Politics of Normalization,’ reassesses the US-brokered Abraham Accords of 2020, which forged political, economic and security ties between Israel and four Arab states: the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. This issue comes together at a pivotal moment: amid the Global Sumud Flotilla’s worldwide campaign to break the siege of Gaza, the recognition of Palestinian statehood by a growing number of Western states—including Spain and Britain—and a tentative ceasefire between Israel and Hamas brokered by the Trump administration on October 9, 2025. It situates the Accords in this present, tracing how earlier models of normalization—with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994—have evolved into today’s multilayered partnerships. Far from establishing a diplomatic breakthrough on Palestine, the Accords unveiled a grimmer reality, in which Arab states have poured capital into Israel’s military-industrial and technology sectors, binding regional economies to the political and economic infrastructure of Palestinian dispossession. Taken together, our contributors reveal the multiple modes by which normalization reinforces regional hierarchies and dependence on Israeli and US power, while crafting a new grammar of inclusion and exclusion, prosperity and dispossession as the bedrock of state violence and regional alliances.