The Abraham Accords, signed at the White House on September 15, 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first administration, represented a landmark achievement in U.S. Middle Eastern diplomacy. The agreements led to peace agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco soon thereafter. Israel also initiated a normalization process with Sudan, but this did not lead to the normalization of relations because of Sudan’s domestic turmoil.
The overarching goal of the accords was to defuse tensions in the Middle East by normalizing relations between Israel and several so-called moderate Arab states. In return, these nations would gain access to advanced technologies and fresh trade opportunities, motivated by a shared view of Iran as a strategic threat. The plan followed the “Peace to Prosperity” in the Middle East workshop organized in Bahrain in June 2019 by Trump’s son-in-law and then advisor Jared Kushner. Inspiration for the accords came from the idea that geoeconomics could defuse geopolitical tensions by providing financial and economic incentives to circumvent seemingly intractable conflicts.
From the United States’ perspective, the Abraham Accords served a dual purpose of solidifying the U.S. role as regional security guarantor while bypassing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By presenting itself as a patron and guarantor of these accords, Washington also sought to counterbalance China’s rising regional influence, particularly in advanced technologies. The Joe Biden administration endorsed and tried to carry over the accords, with Saudi Arabia emerging as the focus of its expanded normalization efforts. However, this process came to a standstill after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, prompting Israel to invade Gaza. Israel’s response, resulting in tens of thousands of civilian fatalities and massive destruction of the territory’s infrastructure, provoked regional and global condemnation. The Abraham Accords have largely survived the war, but their future will depend on broader dynamics in the region and beyond.
The Resilience of the Abraham Accords
As regional tensions rose during the Gaza conflict, Arab-Israeli contact resulting from the Abraham Accords was mainly confined to state-to-state relations and discrete business-to-business ties as societal-level contacts waned, if they were not reversed entirely. This was accompanied by a surge in popular opposition from Arab publics to Arab-Israeli normalization. Nevertheless, the original accords were largely preserved, primarily because of the strategic advantages they offered. The UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco all managed the fallout from the Gaza war in line with their perceived interests.
In the UAE’s case, for example, the October 7 attacks cooled a vigorous business-driven Emirati-Israeli rapprochement. After the accords were signed, the UAE and Israel moved quickly to establish diplomatic relations, removed visa requirements on each other’s citizens, and established direct flights, invigorating business ties and tourism, mostly from Israel to the UAE. They also concluded a free-trade agreement and a comprehensive economic partnership in 2022, showing a strong appetite for collaboration across various sectors, from technology to infrastructure, with the objective of increasing annual bilateral trade to $10 billion by 2027, against $2.5 billion in 2022.
Furthermore, India, Israel, the UAE, and the United States launched the so-called I2U2 partnership in September 2023, with advanced technologies and food security at is core. While the UAE publicly condemned Israeli actions in the Gaza war, it did not sever diplomatic relations. Emirati government-backed entities maintained engagement with their Israeli counterparts, but signature projects, such as the joint exploitation of Israel’s largest offshore natural gas field by Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC, BP, and Israel’s NewMed, were put on hold. Tourism and air travel also took a hit, with the number of arrivals by air from Israel to Dubai dropping sharply, before subsequently recovering. Conversely, the conflict led to the establishment of a new land route between the UAE and Israel, across Saudi Arabia and Jordan, allowing Israeli companies to bypass the Red Sea and avoid Ansar Allah’s attacks from Yemen against Israel-bound ships.
For its part, in 2022 Bahrain, which hosts the United States Fifth Fleet, finalized the first official security agreement between Israel and a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). However, Bahraini-Israeli trade represented a fraction of that between the UAE and Israel, with less than $20 million in total bilateral trade in 2021–2022. Following the outbreak of hostilities in Gaza, Israel’s ambassador left the country, but Manama has not indicated any intention of withdrawing from the Abraham Accords. It has highlighted the importance of security and defense ties in the relationship, which include intelligence training and drone sales from Israel to Bahrain.
Morocco’s normalization with Israel, in turn, has been closely linked to the issue of its sovereignty over the Western Sahara. In late 2020, the Trump administration recognized Moroccan claims to the territory, paving the way for Rabat to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. Morocco and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding on defense in 2021, leading to a series of arms deals encompassing advanced drones, air-defense systems, and intelligence satellites. Beyond mutual security interests, the two countries share cultural and historical bonds. The Moroccan authorities acknowledge the kingdom’s Judaic heritage, and a significant portion of Israel’s Jewish population is of Moroccan descent. While the Gaza war led to a decline in Israeli tourism to Morocco, other aspects of the relationship have been preserved. In the automotive sector, for instance, Israel has imported cars from Morocco to replace those from Türkiye. In addition, Moroccan academic institutions, including the flagship Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, have preserved cooperation agreements with Israeli counterparts.
Beyond the signatories of the Abraham Accords, it is difficult to ignore Saudi Arabia, which had initiated a rapprochement with Israel in the period before the Gaza conflict. The kingdom first hinted at normalization with Israel in 2002, when then crown prince Abdullah launched the Arab Peace Initiative, offering full ties in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab territories. Upon becoming de facto Saudi leader in 2016, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman also offered gestures of goodwill, among them opening Saudi airspace to Israeli commercial flights. Concurrently, he sought to attract foreign investors to Saudi Arabia as part of his Vision 2030 agenda, which includes ambitious megaprojects, such as NEOM, for which Israel’s cutting-edge capabilities in artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, and agricultural technology are deemed attractive. While Crown Prince Mohammed had hinted at progress in bilateral talks prior to October 2023, the Hamas attacks and Israeli reaction disrupted the process, forcing the Saudis to adopt a more critical approach and demand a quid pro quo between normalization and Israel’s commitment to Palestinian statehood.
Taken together, these experiences reveal the varying degrees to which Arab states that normalized relations with Israel have been tested by the Gaza conflict. None of the signatories have formally walked away from the accords, illustrating the prevalence of long-term strategic objectives over immediate political headwinds. However, the political cost of normalization increased once the war began, as Arab public opinion is strongly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, seeing it as an Arab, not just a Palestinian, concern.
A Shifting Environment for the Abraham Accords
The participation of some Arab countries in countering Iranian attacks against Israel during the most acute phase of the Gaza war led Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call for a security-focused “Abraham Alliance“ to support the Abraham Accords. However, this defensive vision, portraying Iran as the main regional foe of Israel and the Arab states, has been eroded by shifting geopolitical realities regionally and globally. Moreover, the accords’ long-term viability could hinge on their ability to address the security concerns of all regional powers, including Iran.
Changing Realities in the Middle East
The normalization of relations between the GCC nations and Iran, following a groundbreaking Saudi-Iranian deal brokered by China in 2023 and subsequent détente, reduced the imperative for geopolitical hedging against Iran and the “security umbrella” rationale underlying the Abraham Accords. Ironically, since October 2023, Israel’s heavy blows against Hamas in Gaza, its weakening of Hezbollah’s hold on Lebanon, and the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria exposed Iranian vulnerabilities, which pushed Tehran to adopt a more cooperative stance with its Arab neighbors.
Facing adversity, the Iranians presented their own framework for regional cooperation. They have called this Mwada (Muslim West Asian Dialogue Association), a sort of counterproposal to the Abraham Accords. As articulated by Iran’s former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Mwada encourages collaboration among all Muslim nations—Shiite and Sunni alike—in pursuit of regional security and prosperity. The scheme notably includes Türkiye, a historical rival of Iran, but excludes Israel on religious grounds, marking a clear divergence with an “Abrahamic” model.
The only way to reconcile these seemingly antagonistic approaches would be through a U.S.-Iranian agreement. Since returning to power in January 2025, Trump has emphasized his preference for such a deal rather than “bombing the hell out of [Iran].” Therefore, current U.S. sanctions against Tehran in the context of a revitalized “maximum pressure” campaign could be interpreted as an effort to force it back to the negotiation table. A successful diplomatic outcome could eat away at one of the main motivations behind the Abraham Accords and revive the Palestinian question as a central regional concern that needs to be addressed before the accords can be expanded to other countries. If negotiations fail, Arab states might be more inclined to pursue deescalation and economic integration with Iran, while ramping up their own military programs, especially if the United States is unwilling to provide them with solid security guarantees. In both cases, the geopolitical momentum that followed the accords in 2020 looks lost for now.
Finally, Türkiye shall also be included in any discussion about the future of regional security. A NATO member with decades-long ties with Israel, Ankara suspended its trade relations with the Israelis due to the worsening Gaza war in May 2024. Domestically, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s self-proclaimed role as champion of the Palestinian cause has contributed to the country’s soft power and promoted its regional interests. Erdoğan has also engaged in a reconciliation process with the GCC states, especially with Saudi Arabia, following a decade of mistrust and rocky relations in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings of 2010–2011.
At a time when the Israeli-Turkish relationship looks more strained than ever, Türkiye has proposed its own regional geoeconomic framework, connecting Asia with Europe through Iraq’s Development Road project, which aims to create a trade corridor from the projected Faw Port to Türkiye’s border. This connectivity project has been presented by Ankara as a compelling alternative to the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor. The Assad regime’s downfall in Syria, orchestrated by Türkiye-backed rebels, gives Ankara even greater leverage in shaping the geopolitical and geoeconomic future of the Middle East.
The Middle East in a Multipolar World
Beyond the shifting regional landscape, the Middle East has also been part of the global shift toward multipolarity, which has accelerated with the U.S.-Chinese rivalry and the formation of competing, and sometimes overlapping, geopolitical and geoeconomic blocs. These include the Western bloc organized around the G7 countries and alternative groupings such as BRICS+, which includes Iran, Egypt, and the UAE from the Middle East, as well as OPEC+, which includes all GCC countries, alongside Russia, Iran, Iraq, and several African and Latin American oil producers. Such developments, in turn, mean there is less impetus to join U.S.-sponsored frameworks such as the Abraham Accords.
The BRICS+ countries have been exploring alternatives to the Western-led global financial system, in a move spearheaded by China and Russia. Both have criticized Washington’s repeated weaponization of the U.S. dollar, especially in the context of the Ukraine conflict. While the prospect of a BRICS+ reserve currency remains far-fetched, such a project echoes China’s more pragmatic promotion of the yuan as the currency of choice for pricing, invoicing, and settling crude oil purchases. Since the creation of the Shanghai Futures Exchange and the listing in yuan of the first crude oil contract in 2018, this has become a reality. For major Middle Eastern producers, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, this could translate into the stealth diversification of their foreign reserves away from the U.S. dollar, which in turn creates the need to recycle their petro-yuan assets mostly into Chinese and China-sponsored Belt and Road projects, as well as through trade and investments aligned with BRICS+. De-dollarization has been facilitated by the development of digital currencies—whether government-sponsored, such as national and cross-border Central Bank Digital Currencies, or privately owned, such as the so-called “stablecoins.” The UAE has developed one of the most advanced regulatory frameworks for supporting the development of both forms of crypto-currencies and has already launched pilot projects such as mBridge and the AED coin.
The global energy transition and decarbonization is also a key dimension of this shifting global landscape, with potentially profound geoeconomic implications for the Middle East. China has become dominant in critical industrial supply chains related to the “green economy.” State-backed companies operating in a spectrum of industries, ranging from renewable power to sustainable mobility, have been steadily developing their footprint in the Middle East. They have been willing and able to build and co-finance decarbonization megaprojects across the GCC countries, and transfer the technologies related to these projects to their Middle Eastern partners. This contrasts with an erratic climate policy in the United States, with the Trump administration orchestrating a spectacular U-turn from the Biden administration’s commitment to decarbonization.
China is also a key player in the global digital transition, with Chinese tech behemoths such as Huawei, Tencent, ByteDance, and Ali Baba extending their reach overseas. From semiconductors to cloud computing, advanced robotics and AI, China is now capable of proposing an alternative to the West’s most advanced technologies. The Middle East and North Africa have become fertile ground for deploying these technologies, as the region’s nations have been engaged in multipronged economic transformations and state-led technological catch-up. Beijing has been encouraging its tech companies to engage with regional governments and sovereign wealth funds by adapting to local realities and facilitating technology transfers, especially to the GCC states, as part of the Digital Silk Road initiative. Alternatively, Israel’s once booming partnership with China has abated due to the combined effect of the Gaza war—with China sharply criticizing Israel’s conduct—and increasing U.S. pressure on the Israeli government and its indigenous tech ecosystem, which is heavily integrated with Silicon Valley, to lessen Israel’s technological cooperation with China.
Across different geoeconomic sectors, therefore, from conventional industries to emerging financial, environmental, and digital technologies and their trade and production networks, geoeconomic frameworks such as the one implicitly underlying the Abraham Accords are becoming less attractive. From a policy perspective, the shift toward economic and geopolitical multipolarity has been accentuated by Trump’s purported isolationism and preference for a world organized according to spheres of influence.
In this context, it seems rational for regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE to adopt multiple alignments as a long-term hedge against the gradually fading “unipolar moment,” while preserving strong ties with the West, especially the United States. For the UAE, the pivot to Asia, particularly China, is not a zero-sum game, as the Emiratis remain deeply committed to their security partnership with Washington and have ramped up their total U.S. investments to $1 trillion, with a focus on advanced technology, through flagship investment vehicles such as ADQ and MGX. In Saudi Arabia’s case, the kingdom’s discontent with the Biden administration’s hesitancy to provide it with sweeping security guarantees motivated it to explore alternative partnerships, among them strengthening its ties with China and Russia. It should be remembered that Saudi Arabia has effectively co-led OPEC+ with Russia, playing a critical role in steering this coordination mechanism between OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers since its creation in November 2016. More recently, Saudi Arabia has been granted the status of “dialogue partner” by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Finally, even though Saudi Arabia has abstained from formally joining the BRICS+ grouping, after being invited by the core BRICS countries at the Johannesburg Summit of August 2023, it has also refrained from making any definitive statements on this invitation. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia has remained committed to its longstanding partnership with the United States, exploiting Trump’s preference for transactional diplomacy. For example, it has leveraged its good relations with Russia and Ukraine to host several rounds of U.S.-backed peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv.
Conclusion: The Gaza Indicator
Donald Trump has revived the idea of expanding the Abraham Accords. The centerpiece of this new drive would be the expansion of the accords to Saudi Arabia. However, the accords’ rationale and derived benefits might be determined less by geopolitical gains, which are no longer as vital, than by their economic dimension, as originally envisaged. The shared economic prosperity associated with the Abraham Accords still needs to be proven on a larger scale, against the massive effort required to rebuild Gaza and support reconstruction in crisis-stricken Arab countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Yemen.
The way Gaza is rebuilt and governed could become a crucial indicator of the shared economic prosperity associated with the accords. A coordinated rehabilitation project that includes the Arab states and other international stakeholders, drawing from the Egyptian plan unveiled by the Arab League in early March 2025, could pave the way for a comprehensive regional peace settlement and reconstruction framework. In turn, tying Gaza’s revival to regional economic initiatives—including reconstruction in Syria and Lebanon, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, shared energy initiatives, and offshore gas exploration and export—could bolster shared interests and heighten trust among participants. Economic partnerships, particularly in technology, trade, and renewable energy, could support business and civil society-led normalization efforts.
However, if we have seen anything in the recent past, it is that, absent a credible commitment toward Palestinian statehood (the contentious issue the Abraham Accords tried to circumvent), any normalization from below could prove to be a Sisyphean task—something eternally repeated and never completed.
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