In the wake of the #UAE & #Bahrain peace deals w/ #Israel, there has been a boomlet of criticism of "peace processors" for getting Arab-Israel politics wrong for decades by overemphasizing the Palestinian issue and inflating its power to hold Arab capitals hostage. 1/13

As someone who has long railed against "linkage" - the misguided idea that all #MidEast politics connects to #Palestine - I have some sympathy for this critique. It's an objective truth that people from Marrakesh to Muscat do not wake each day w/"Palestine" on their minds. 2/13

It's also reasonable to critique past Admins for taking #ArabPeaceInitiative's offer of "full-peace-only-after-full-withdrawal" at face value, for not using it as a basis for Arab-Israel negotiations or for not pursuing incremental progress on normalization w/Arab states. 3/13

And it is also correct to critique a US policy that seemed to continually reward Palestinian obstinance with generous aid and more generous terms for peacemaking, skewing the rational incentives and disincentives for a negotiating breakthrough. 4/13

BUT some of these critiques go too far. First, for much of the #Oslo period, Washington was pursuing policies hand-in-glove w/ #Israel. Oslo was an Israeli - not an American - creation and USG should be applauded, not faulted, for doing its best to help Israel make it work. 5/13

Remember: all Israeli governments since 1993, including #Likud-led govs, have worked within the Oslo framework because it provides a not unsatisfactory way to manage a very difficult challenge. If it was so problematic, they would have chucked it long ago - but they didn't. 6/13

So, for much of the last quarter century, if you didn't like US policy on Arab-Israel peacemaking, there's a good chance you didn't like Israel's own policy because a lot (though certainly not all) of US effort went into making Israeli efforts succeed. 7/13

Second, let's not so quickly re-write the history of what just happened with the #UAE, which was the real trailblazer here. After several years of incremental and increasingly public steps toward normalization with Israel - including very public engagement with #Jews - 8/13

the #Emirati leadership decided to make a strategic shift by capitalizing on a tactical opportunity: @Netanyahu's eagerness to find an alternative to a politically fraught annexation gambit. In so doing, the Emirates both provided a diplomatic success to the #Trump admin and 9/13

acquired a measure of political risk insurance in event of a @JoeBiden victory. While @WhiteHouse was wise enough to pick up the ball and run with it, the breakthrough was not of its own making. @Netanyahu gets credit for investing so much energy in quietly building Israeli 10/13

ties with Arab, African, Asian and other states during his premiership but the key to this breakthrough was with the leader who coyly passed up the chance for a personal embrace by Trump - #MBZ. 11/13

Through it all, recall that the Admin has been focused on 2 major Mideast initiatives - maximum pressure on #Iran & Isr-Pal "deal of the century." Other than vague talk about non-belligerency accords, normalization deals w/Arab states were not a top priority (until now). 12/13

Bottom line - certain critiques have merit, others don't. The region's politics is far more gray than the black-and-white some are suggesting. We Americans have made enough real errors over the years that we don't have to manufacture straw men to add to the list. 13/13