In January 1919, Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel, signed an agreement with Emir Faisal, who would rule Syria and Iraq. Signed on the eve of the Paris Peace Con­fer­ence at which the victors of World War I would determine how to admin­is­ter the former colonies of the Ottoman Empire, the Weizmann-Faisal Agreement pledged Arab support for the res­tor­a­tion of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

As he signed the agreement, Faisal added a hand-written note making his support for a Jewish state con­di­tion­al on the Arabs receiving the new states they had demanded across the region.

Faisal’s agreement with Weizmann remains sig­ni­fic­ant for a number of reasons.

First, it is a crucial recog­ni­tion by an Arab leader of the right of the Jewish people to an inde­pend­ent state in what had become Palestine. Faisal’s father, the Sharif of Mecca, had earlier referred to the Jews as the “original sons” of the land, claiming that their return would “mater­i­ally and spir­itu­ally” aid their “Arab brethren.”

Second, it showed that Arab leaders were happy to concede Palestine if their greater ter­rit­ori­al aspir­a­tions were met.

Third, and perhaps most sig­ni­fic­antly, the Weizmann-Faisal Agreement, and more precisely, Faisal’s hand-written after­thought, bound up the future of a Jewish state in Palestine in broader regional affairs. Whereas the original agreement dealt with Palestine as a discrete issue, the amendment expli­citly connected the question of Palestine to what tran­spired elsewhere in the region.

This, in turn, enabled Palestini­an-Arab leaders to frame the conflict with Israel not as a ter­rit­ori­al dispute between rival claimants, but as a matter of pan-Arab pride and Islamic duty. This inter­na­tion­al­ized the conflict, resulting in an Arab boycott of companies that traded with Israel, three invasions of the Jewish state and the har­ness­ing of col­lect­ive Arab influence to seek Israel’s inter­na­tion­al isolation in mul­tina­tion­al forums and civil society.

But while Israel emerged stronger through these travails, making it an increas­ingly desirable partner for peace and economic cooper­a­tion, the Arab world suffered in the name of Palestini­an lib­er­a­tion and remained mired in sec­tari­an­ism and stag­na­tion.

Yet the idea that the Arab world would be at war with Israel until the Palestini­ans were satisfied, and that no separate peace agree­ments were possible, became so entrenched that to challenge it elicited immediate scorn from the foreign policy estab­lish­ment.

Address­ing the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Sub­com­mit­tee on the Middle East, North Africa and Inter­na­tion­al Terrorism, Mara Rudman, a foreign policy advisor in the Clinton and Obama admin­is­tra­tions, dismissed the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s approach to regional peace­mak­ing as “a textbook on how to fail on Middle East peace,” asserting that “the conflict between Palestini­ans and Israelis must be resolved to fully realize the cooper­a­tion possible between Israel and Arab states.”

President Obama’s former secretary of state, John Kerry, was even more explicit and cocksure that a wider Arab-Israeli peace was irre­voc­ably bound up in the Israeli-Palestini­an issue. He told the Saban Forum in 2016:

“There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you. I’ve heard several prominent politi­cians in Israel sometimes saying, well, the Arab world is in a different place now, we just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world and we’ll deal with the Palestini­ans. No, no, no and no. There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestini­an process and Palestini­an peace. Everybody needs to under­stand that. That is a hard reality.”

Kerry had hoped to reinforce a situation that he per­son­ally favored through the sheer boldness of his asser­tions. The pos­sib­il­ity that the Arab world might be fatigued with the Palestini­an issue, and might seek to pri­or­it­ize its own economic and security interests, was not one Kerry was willing to entertain. To do so would upend con­ven­tion­al wisdom in the Wash­ing­ton and European foreign policy estab­lish­ments, which placed the Palestini­an issue not only at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but, for decades, con­sidered it to be a leading source of broader Islamic rad­ic­al­iz­a­tion through­out the world. In November 2015, after the ISIS terror attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström even went so far as to attribute the attack to the plight of the Palestini­ans — which, she asserted, compels Muslim sym­path­izers to “resort to violence.”

Sudan’s most recent announce­ment of nor­mal­iz­a­tion with Israel is perhaps the most sig­ni­fic­ant blow to the “Kerry Doctrine” of Israeli-Palestini­an peace­mak­ing: dangling the carrot of Arab nor­mal­iz­a­tion, while prodding Israel with hostile actions like the passage of UN Security Council Res­ol­u­tion 2334, and urging further uni­lat­er­al con­ces­sions to the Palestini­ans in the hope of coaxing them back to the table.

Sudan has been a recent hostile par­ti­cipant in the conflict, as a partner in Iranian weapons smuggling oper­a­tions into Gaza. Sudan is also replete with symbolism. It was in Khartoum in 1967 that the Arab League infam­ously adopted the gold standard of anti-nor­mal­iz­a­tion, at the behest of the Palestini­ans: the “Three No’s” of no peace with Israel, no recog­ni­tion of Israel and no nego­ti­ations with Israel.

A senior Sudanese official captured the irrit­a­tion and fatigue felt in capitals across the region, stemming from making economic progress and regional harmony sub­or­din­ate to the Palestini­an agenda. “The Palestini­ans are angry,” the official charged, “when any Palestini­an refugee camp in Lebanon is in better shape than Sudan? The days when the Palestini­an problem was dumped on Sudan are over. We are working for the future of Sudan and our children and grand­chil­dren.”

The signing of the Abraham Accords and the reframing of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a localized dispute between Israelis and Palestini­ans has shattered a policy paralysis and a cycle of failed mediation and nego­ti­ations that has lasted for a century. Faisal’s note had unwit­tingly bound the world into a hopeless paradigm that inflated the Palestini­an issue by appending it to the fate of the Middle East as a whole. Now new Jewish-Arab agree­ments have finally corrected Faisal’s folly, detaching the Palestini­an issue from wider regional interests and returning to the peace and cooper­a­tion that Faisal and Weizmann had ori­gin­ally intended.

Alex Ryvchin the author of “Zionism – The Concise History” and is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry.