CHANGE? Palestinian clans are looking to join Abraham Accords after Oct. 7.
It began with a sentence that sounded less like the opening of a diplomatic talk and more like the opening pitch at an accelerator demo-day. Economy Minister Nir Barkat – whose résumé lists two tech exits before it lists “mayor of Jerusalem” – stepped onto the Jerusalem Post Conference stage in New York and said he was tired of hearing that the West Bank was unsolvable.
If a product fails, he told the room, you either ship a better one or the market walks. His “product” was the Palestinian Authority; his better version was a Palestinian chapter of the Abraham Accords. “One day – hopefully soon – Arabs in Judea and Samaria will decide they’ve had enough of the PA and ask to join the accords,” he said.
“If they work with Israel, we’ll help them build Dubai. If they fight Israel, they’ll end up looking like Gaza.”
Phones came up like periscopes. The routine chatter about Saudi Arabia’s eventual normalization vanished. Barkat was talking about Rawabi, Abu Dis, perhaps even Jenin, not Riyadh or Jakarta.
In his model, clusters of West Bank towns would bypass Ramallah, plug directly into Israeli security and Gulf capital, and trade under commercial annexes adapted from the UAE-Israel playbook. No midnight shuttle diplomacy, no flags raised over Rose Garden lawns – just container IDs, escrow instructions and profit-and-loss sheets.
He refused to name which towns or clan elders were already whispering with him, citing the start-up rule that you “build outside the system and invite the system in only when the prototype runs.” But anyone who spends an afternoon in the industrial zones of Binyamin hears the same arithmetic Barkat hears: Gulf money is flowing everywhere except here; PA fees bleed local manufacturers; Israeli checkpoints, however resented, at least keep the road open.
LATER, BEHIND the scenes, Barkat showed me clear evidence – many local Palestinian leaders would consider signing the Abraham Accords.
Developing…
