Egypt signed its treaty in 1979. Jordan signed its treaty in 1994. Both ended wars, both remain formally in force, and both are, to this day, cold. Governments exchanged ambassadors; societies never exchanged much of anything. Surveys of Egyptian and Jordanian public opinion still show some of the widest anti-normalization sentiment in the region, decades after the ink dried.

The Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain, then Morocco and Sudan, were built differently — and the difference explains why they have taken root where the older treaties did not.

The Gulf states that signed were never at war with Israel. They carried no battlefield trauma, no lists of the dead, no generation raised to see the other side only through a gunsight. That absence of shared trauma is not incidental to the Accords’ success — it is the reason the connection flourishes today.

Lebanon has watched all of this from the outside, at a considerable cost. It remains technically at war with a state it has not fought directly in years, held in that position not by its own strategic interest but by the veto of an armed faction answering to Tehran rather than Beirut.

That arrangement has not protected Lebanon. It has impoverished it, isolated it from Gulf capital, and turned the south into a permanent front line for a fight most Lebanese never chose.

The question worth asking is not whether Lebanon could one day sign something resembling the Abraham Accords — that is a conversation for another day. The question worth asking now is simpler: what would it cost Lebanon to at least stop being demonized as a threat, and to stop demonizing its way out of every opportunity placed in front of it?

Because the Gulf states that signed the Accords did not simply make peace with Israel. They made a strategic bet on their own people’s future — on jobs, on investment, on a generation that would grow up trading and studying and building rather than inheriting someone else’s war.

Lebanon has been offered fragments of that same bet over the past two years: Emirati capital returning, travel restrictions lifted, a real prospect of becoming a regional investment hub if the state can get its house in order. None of that requires Lebanon to sign anything with Israel tomorrow. It requires something arguably harder: a Lebanese state willing to reclaim its own sovereignty from the faction that has spent decades selling Lebanese blood and Lebanese future for someone else’s regional ambitions.