Bad Cousins
What are the Abraham Accords? There was a lot of hyperbole going around when they were signed in Washington DC in September 2020, and the dust hasn’t really settled since. What’s clear is that the promise of regional peace that the Accords were supposed to bring has not – to put it mildly – come to pass.
Rather the opposite, in fact. Everyone from Yahya Sinwar to Jordan Peterson seem to agree that it was the Abraham Accords, and particularly the threat that they would be extended to Saudi Arabia, that set off the Hamas attack of October 7th 2023. That attack led to Israel’s brutal destruction of Gaza, and though at this moment there’s a ceasefire – we pray it holds – the Middle East is very far from peace indeed, Donald Trump’s delusions notwithstanding.
Bad Cousins, a new podcast published by Kollo Media in partnership with the Diasporist, begins with a deceptively simple question: why are the Abraham Accords named after Abraham? Trying to answer it sends hosts Ben Schuman-Stoler and Matan Kaminer on a whirlwind tour of geopolitics, theology, pop culture, and anthropological theory. In conversation with scholars, activists and ordinary people in the region, they start by examining the paradoxical situation of a peace treaty that seems to lead only to war.
In the first episode, political scientist Dana El-Kurd talks about what the Abraham Accords actually are, and why they are such a disaster for the Palestinians and ordinary people throughout the Arab world. She makes the point that the Abraham Accords formalize shared interests across the region, interests which oppose the Palestinians’ demand for national independence and the desire of people throughout the region for democratic self-rule.
Bad Cousins is published by Kollo Media in partnership with the Diasporist.
Produced by Ben Schuman-Stoler, Matan Kaminer, and Guli Hashiloni.
Music and theme by Adam Maor.