The Abraham Accords:
Remaking the Middle East
On September 15, 2020, on the sun-drenched South Lawn of the White House, three men signed their names to documents that broke with seven decades of received wisdom about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, the UAE's Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and Bahrain's Abdullatif Al Zayani affixed their signatures to what the Trump administration formally named the Abraham Accords — normalization agreements that, for the first time since Jordan in 1994 and Egypt in 1979, brought Arab states into full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Morocco and Sudan followed by December 2020, and Kazakhstan formally acceded to the framework in November 2025, making it the only non-Arab member and signaling the accords' ambition to become something far larger than a regional arrangement between neighboring states.
To understand why these agreements were possible in 2020, when they had seemed impossible for so long, requires tracing a generation of quiet strategic convergence. The Arab Spring of 2010–12 had convulsed the region, toppling governments and empowering Islamist movements that both Israel and the Gulf monarchies found threatening. Iran's nuclear program advanced relentlessly through the decade, and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), though welcomed by Western capitals, was viewed with deep suspicion in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Jerusalem as a document that legitimized Tehran's regional ambitions rather than containing them. What emerged, almost invisibly, was a de facto strategic community of interest between Israel and the Sunni Gulf states, united less by shared values than by a shared adversary. The accords were, in the language of balance-of-threat theory developed by international relations scholar Stephen Walt, a logical response to the aggregated capabilities, geographic proximity, and offensive intentions of Iran.
The Trump administration's role as broker was indispensable but not sufficient on its own. Senior adviser Jared Kushner, working alongside envoys Avi Berkowitz and Brian Hook, constructed a diplomatic architecture that offered each signatory a bespoke set of incentives. For the UAE, the reward was an American agreement to supply F-35 fighter jets and MQ-9 Reaper drones — advanced weapons systems that Washington had previously withheld because of Israel's right to maintain qualitative military edge. For Morocco, the United States delivered something Rabat had sought for decades: formal American recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara. For Sudan, a starved and sanctioned economy under a transitional government, the deal offered removal from the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list, unlocking the prospect of debt relief and international investment. Each bargain was, in essence, a bilateral transaction between Washington and an Arab capital, with Israel's normalization serving as the visible common denominator.
The economic architecture of the accords moved with remarkable speed. Israel and the UAE signed a comprehensive free trade agreement that entered into force on April 1, 2023 — one of the fastest bilateral trade deals in history, negotiated in under eighteen months. According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, bilateral trade between the two countries surged from roughly $200 million in 2020 to over $3 billion by 2024. Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund Mubadala invested up to $20 million in six Israeli venture capital companies as part of a defense-tech exchange program. Elbit Systems, Israel's largest private defense contractor, was awarded a $53 million contract to supply defense systems to the UAE Air Force and subsequently established a subsidiary in Abu Dhabi — a commercial beachhead that would have been unthinkable three years earlier. By Q4 of 2025, reports emerged of a $2.3 billion contract for Elbit to provide strategic air defense solutions to the UAE, the single largest defense deal between the two countries to date. Cross-border private technology funding, measured by StartUp Nation Central, stood at $186 million in 2025 — a 431 percent increase year-on-year, recovering to levels last seen at the 2021 peak of $219 million.
The strategic-military transformation was perhaps more consequential than the economic one. In a decision that barely registered in Western media at the time but was immediately understood in military capitals across the region, the Trump administration in 2021 transferred Israel from the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) to Central Command (CENTCOM), the unified combatant command responsible for the Middle East. This was not an administrative reshuffling. It meant that Israeli military officers would now sit in the same planning sessions as their counterparts from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, and Egypt — states that had for decades refused to share the same operational frameworks as the Jewish state. It institutionalized, under American auspices, the intelligence-sharing and joint-exercise relationships that had previously existed only in shadow form. When Iran launched more than 300 drones and ballistic missiles at Israeli territory in April 2024, the remarkable multinational interception effort — involving Israeli, American, British, French, and Jordanian assets — was a live demonstration of what the CENTCOM integration had made possible.
"The Palestinian issue — previously considered a prerequisite for any agreement with Arab states — was pushed aside, while strategic-security, economic, and geopolitical interests served as the central catalysts for the Abraham Accords."
Morocco's participation in the accords opened a North African dimension that extended the normalization framework well beyond the Gulf. Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz signed a joint security agreement with his Moroccan counterpart in November 2021 — the first openly declared bilateral defense pact between Israel and any Arab state. What followed was a rapid militarization of the relationship: Morocco's arms and military equipment purchases from Israel have, by 2025, totaled approximately $2 billion, representing roughly 11 percent of Morocco's total defense imports according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) data. Israel provided Morocco with access to the Pegasus spyware system developed by NSO Group, a transaction that generated significant controversy in Europe given evidence of its use against journalists and dissidents. Sudan's path was more turbulent. The transitional government that signed the normalization agreement in October 2020 was subsequently swept aside by a military coup in 2021, and the country plunged into civil war in 2023, effectively suspending any prospect of formal diplomatic implementation. Yet even Sudan's nominal accession illustrated the accords' ambition to reshape the entire arc of Arab politics from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf.
For Israel, the strategic gains were transformative across multiple dimensions. Diplomatically, the accords broke the Arab consensus that normalization required Palestinian statehood first — a consensus enshrined in the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which had offered Israel full normalization with all Arab League members in exchange for withdrawal to 1967 borders and a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. The accords demonstrated that wealthy, powerful Arab states were prepared to separate their strategic interests from the Palestinian cause, fundamentally altering the diplomatic leverage that Palestinian negotiators had long relied upon. For Israeli tourism, the change was immediate: direct flights between Tel Aviv and Dubai began within weeks of the signing, and Israeli tourists flooded Dubai's hotels and beaches, creating a visible people-to-people layer beneath the governmental architecture. Economically, access to Gulf sovereign wealth, Emirati logistics infrastructure, and Moroccan proximity to European markets opened corridors that Israeli exporters, particularly in agriculture, technology, and pharmaceuticals, had long sought. In the cybersecurity and artificial intelligence sectors, Israeli startups gained access to Gulf capital and testbeds that accelerated commercialization cycles.
For the United States, the accords delivered several interlocking benefits simultaneously. They demonstrated that American diplomatic capital, deployed strategically rather than through the traditional Israeli-Palestinian track, could produce tangible results in the region. They reinforced American credibility among Sunni Arab partners at a moment when the Obama-era pivot to Asia and the JCPOA had created doubts about Washington's commitment to Gulf security. And they offered, as a Middle East Institute analysis observed, a regional counterbalance to China's Belt and Road Initiative, reinforcing American economic influence and offering Arab partners an alternative to Beijing-driven infrastructure and investment strategies. The accords also advanced the concept of an integrated regional air defense architecture — a concept that became operationally relevant during the April 2024 Iranian missile barrage and that American planners had been quietly promoting for years as a cost-effective way to contain Iran without direct American military engagement.
Critics from DAWN and other advocacy organizations argue that by decoupling Arab-Israeli rapprochement from the Palestine question, the accords have neither curbed Israel's settlement enterprise in the West Bank nor deterred military offensives in Gaza. Regional analyst Khaled Elgindy describes this as the "fallacy of the Abraham Accords peace paradigm" — the proposition that bilateral normalization between governments can substitute for a resolution of the underlying conflict that has defined the region for over seventy years.
The most fundamental critique of the Abraham Accords — and the one that has gained sharpest salience since October 7, 2023 — is that they deliberately bypassed the Palestinian question rather than resolving it. For decades, the Arab League's collective position held that normalization with Israel was conditional on Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state. The accords shattered that consensus by demonstrating that individual Arab governments, when offered sufficient security guarantees and economic incentives, would subordinate the Palestinian cause to their own strategic calculations. The Palestinian Authority, predictably, condemned the agreements as a "betrayal," and President Mahmoud Abbas recalled the Palestinian ambassador to the UAE. Hamas described the accords as providing Israel with political cover to continue its occupation. What gave these criticisms resonance beyond Palestinian circles was the empirical record: between the signing of the accords in September 2020 and Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack, Israel approved tens of thousands of new settlement units in the West Bank and conducted multiple military operations in Gaza, none of which generated meaningful pressure from the new normalization partners.
The Hamas attack and Israel's subsequent military campaign in Gaza tested the accords with a severity that no one had anticipated in 2020. Arab public opinion across the signatory states swung sharply against Israel — polling across the Arab world showed unprecedented levels of sympathy for Gaza and hostility toward normalization. Yet the institutional frameworks survived. Trade between Israel and the UAE in the first seven months of 2024 stood at $1.92 billion — four percent higher than the same period in 2023. Defense cooperation accelerated: the UAE allowed Israeli companies to participate in its international arms exhibition in February 2025 despite the ongoing Gaza war. Morocco continued military equipment purchases. Bahrain maintained diplomatic ties. As the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies concluded in its five-year assessment, "the accords have proven unexpectedly resilient in the face of the war in the Gaza Strip, particularly given the negative public opinion toward Israel in Arab states."
This resilience reflects the structural logic that created the accords in the first place. The UAE's leadership, particularly Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, made a calculated judgment that strategic partnership with Israel served Emirati interests regardless of Gaza. But resilience has its limits. In September 2025, the UAE issued its sharpest condemnation of Israel since the war began, warning that Israeli annexation of the West Bank would represent a "red line" threatening the accords themselves. Emirati officials explicitly framed normalization as "a way to enable continued support for the Palestinian people and their legitimate aspiration for an independent state" — signaling that the accords' survival, however robust in the short term, is not unconditional. Saudi Arabia has been even more explicit: Riyadh has repeatedly stated that normalization is conditional on a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood, with East Jerusalem as its capital. That condition has hardened, not softened, since October 7.
The energy dimension of the accords has received less attention than the defense and trade relationships, but it may prove the most durable. Israel's emergence as a significant natural gas producer through the Leviathan and Tamar offshore fields created an immediate alignment of interest with energy-hungry neighbors and European markets desperate to reduce dependence on Russian gas following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. A $36 billion natural gas agreement between Israel, Egypt, and the European Union was approved in 2025, with Gulf states involved in the financing and transit architecture. The UAE's position as a global energy hub and logistics center complements Israel's production capacity and European Union's import demand in ways that generate hard economic interests resistant to political disruption. This energy partnership represents a form of structural interdependence that goes beyond the preferences of any single government — precisely the kind of institutional lock-in that liberal international relations theory identifies as stabilizing for interstate peace.
The impact of the accords on interfaith dialogue and cultural exchange has been genuine, if unevenly distributed. The opening of direct air routes, the establishment of Israeli embassies in Abu Dhabi and Manama, and the introduction of kosher food certification in UAE hotels created practical infrastructure for Jewish-Muslim interaction at a scale that had never previously existed in the Gulf. The Expo 2020 Dubai featured an Israeli pavilion alongside Arab states for the first time, attracting over 1.3 million visitors. However, these connections have remained concentrated among elites, business travelers, and governments. Mass-level public opinion in signatory states has not followed the trajectory of governmental normalization — a gap that represents a significant long-term vulnerability for the agreements. Normalization that exists primarily in ministerial offices and corporate boardrooms, without corresponding popular legitimacy, is structurally fragile in ways that government-level resilience statistics cannot fully capture.
The accords' relationship with great power competition adds a further layer of strategic complexity. China's brokering of the Iran-Saudi Arabia rapprochement in March 2023 was widely interpreted as Beijing's most significant Middle East diplomatic intervention in decades, and it underscored that American influence in the region is contested rather than hegemonic. The Abraham Accords framework, built on American security guarantees and American diplomatic brokerage, is implicitly a bet on American reliability. But the Gulf states have proved adept at hedging: the UAE simultaneously deepened its trade relationship with China — which accounts for a larger share of Emirati commerce than the United States — while maintaining its normalization with Israel. Saudi Arabia's simultaneous conversations with Washington about a security pact and with Beijing about economic cooperation illustrates the multi-alignment strategy that Gulf monarchies have consciously adopted. This hedging behavior means that the accords, however beneficial to American interests in the aggregate, cannot be assumed to lock Middle Eastern partners into an exclusively American orbit.
"The accords' survival, however robust in the short term, is not unconditional. A gradual restoration of ties — and even expansion to Saudi Arabia — remains possible, but depends on the timing and outcome of the Gaza war."
The question of Saudi Arabia remains the central unresolved drama in the Abraham Accords story. As the custodian of Islam's two holiest sites, the Arab world's largest economy, and the most symbolically significant state in Sunni Islam, Saudi recognition of Israel would represent a geopolitical transformation orders of magnitude larger than the UAE deal. The Biden administration had advanced Saudi-Israeli normalization talks through 2022 and 2023, with reports in September 2023 suggesting a deal was weeks away. October 7 terminated those conversations. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has since repeatedly reaffirmed that normalization is conditional on Palestinian statehood. President Trump, returning to office in January 2025, immediately resumed pursuit of a comprehensive deal and by May 2026 was publicly linking Abraham Accords expansion to an Iran nuclear agreement — a linkage that introduces enormous additional variables into an already complex negotiation. Carnegie Endowment analysts have warned that even a successful Iran deal could paradoxically undermine the accords by removing the shared threat perception that drove Gulf states toward normalization in the first place.
What emerges from a full analytical accounting of the Abraham Accords is a picture of genuine but bounded transformation. They have demonstrably altered the diplomatic landscape of the Middle East, established institutional frameworks for economic and defense cooperation that have proved more resilient than critics predicted, and created a new paradigm — however contested — for Arab-Israeli relations that does not route through Palestinian consent. They have generated real trade flows, real technology investment, real military interoperability, and real energy partnerships. At the same time, they have not resolved, and in some respects have deepened, the underlying conflict that has defined the region's politics since 1948. The October 7 attack and the Gaza war demonstrated with devastating force that bypassing the Palestinian question does not make it disappear — it defers and potentially intensifies it. The UAE's red-line warning over West Bank annexation, Saudi Arabia's insistence on Palestinian statehood, and the profound damage done to Arab public opinion by the Gaza campaign all suggest that the accords' long-term consolidation depends not merely on sustaining existing bilateral ties but on achieving some meaningful progress toward Palestinian political rights.
Viewed through the lens of international relations theory, the Abraham Accords represent a hybrid of realist and liberal logics. The realist core is unmistakable: threat balancing against Iran, security guarantees from Washington, strategic calculations by authoritarian governments unconstrained by public opinion. But the liberal institutional framework — the free trade agreement, the CENTCOM integration, the investment partnerships, the direct air routes — creates interdependencies that generate their own momentum and that liberal theory predicts will prove stabilizing over time. The most likely future for the accords is not complete collapse nor frictionless consolidation but a sustained and contested middle ground: economically and militarily resilient, diplomatically stressed, politically dependent on outcomes in Gaza and on the Saudi question that neither Washington nor Jerusalem fully controls. The Abraham Accords have, in five years, redrawn the map of Arab-Israeli relations in ways that are real and lasting. Whether they redraw it in ways that are also just — or merely efficient — remains the question that history has not yet answered.
Sources and further reading: U.S. State Department — The Abraham Accords · INSS Five-Year Assessment · Middle East Institute Backgrounder · Carnegie Endowment — After Gaza · Heritage Foundation Q3 2025 Report · UK House of Commons Library · DAWN — Peace Without Palestinians · Abraham Accords Statistics 2026
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