The Abraham Accords (2020)

The Abraham Accords are a set of US-brokered peace and normalization agreements, signed beginning 15 September 2020, under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco established full diplomatic relations with Israel, becoming the third, fourth, fifth and sixth Arab states to do so after Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994). They ended, for the states that signed, a policy commitment going back to the Khartoum Resolution of 1967: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation with Israel. The accords did not require Israel to first cede territory to a Palestinian state, which is the feature that made them historic and the feature their critics attack hardest.

What the document is

The core text is the Abraham Accords Declaration, signed at the White House on 15 September 2020 by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani, with US President Donald Trump as broker and witness. It sits alongside two separate bilateral instruments signed the same day: the Abraham Accords Peace Agreement (Israel-UAE) and the Israel-Bahrain Declaration of Peace. Morocco followed with a Joint Declaration on 22 December 2020, and Sudan agreed in principle in October 2020, with its process slowed by the country’s subsequent civil war. The name comes from Abraham, the shared patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, chosen deliberately to frame the deal as civilizational rather than merely transactional.

The Declaration’s operative language is brief and direct: the parties “encourage efforts to promote interfaith and intercultural dialogue to advance a culture of peace,” and commit to “the pursuit of peace in the Middle East region” through cooperation rather than the land-for-recognition sequencing that had governed every prior Arab-Israeli peace effort since the 1967 Six-Day War.

Who signed and why

The UAE and Bahrain moved first because their strategic calculus had already shifted: both saw Iran, not Israel, as the primary threat to their security, and both wanted overt access to Israeli defense technology, intelligence sharing and, in the UAE’s case, US F-35 fighter jets, a purchase widely understood to be tied to the normalization deal. Morocco’s motive was more specific: in exchange for normalizing, the United States recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a decades-old territorial dispute with the Polisario Front, unrelated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but bundled into the same announcement. Sudan’s transitional government, isolated and seeking removal from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, agreed under significant financial and diplomatic pressure following the fall of the Umar al-Bashir regime; its accord remains the least implemented of the four.

Notably absent were the Palestinians themselves, who were not party to the negotiations and denounced the accords as a betrayal, and Saudi Arabia, whose normalization talks with Israel were advanced through much of 2023 before being frozen after the October 7 attacks and the Gaza war that followed.

Why it happened: the collapse of the old sequencing

For over five decades, the Arab League’s official position, set at Khartoum in 1967 with its “three no’s” (no peace, no recognition, no negotiations with Israel), held that normalization could only follow a full Israeli withdrawal and Palestinian statehood. Egypt broke that consensus with the Camp David Accords in 1978 and Jordan followed with its own peace treaty in 1994, but both were direct outcomes of prior wars with Israel and both involved actual land transfers, Sinai and border adjustments respectively. The UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan had never fought a war with Israel and held no disputed territory with it. Their normalization was not a war settlement; it was a strategic realignment, driven by shared alarm at Iranian expansion (Tehran’s proxies then active in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen), by fatigue with a Palestinian leadership that had rejected repeated statehood offers, and by the economic and technological benefits Israel could offer directly. The Trump administration brokered the deals as part of its broader Middle East strategy and provided the incentives, F-35 sales to the UAE and Western Sahara recognition for Morocco, that closed each agreement.

What happened as a result

Since 2020, Israel and the UAE alone have built roughly $10 billion a year in bilateral trade, exchanged ambassadors, and seen over a million Israeli tourists visit the Emirates in the accords’ first two years. The Negev Summit of March 2022 brought the foreign ministers of Israel, the US, UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt together at Sde Boker, producing the Negev Forum, a standing framework for security, technology and diplomatic cooperation among the signatories. Defense integration deepened as well: UAE and Bahraini officers have participated in US-Israeli regional air-defense exercises against Iranian drone and missile threats, most visibly during Iran’s direct missile attacks on Israel in 2024 and 2025.

The accords’ durability was tested directly by the October 7 massacre and the two years of war that followed: none of the four Abraham Accords states severed relations with Israel, though public diplomacy cooled and expansion talks with Saudi Arabia stalled. That the agreements held through the most violent period in the conflict’s recent history, rather than collapsing at the first real test, is itself part of the record.

The legal status and the propaganda around it

Each bilateral agreement is a binding treaty under international law, registered with the United Nations, distinct from a mere joint statement. Critics on the anti-normalization side, chiefly the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, have characterized the accords as a “stab in the back,” arguing that Arab recognition of Israel was supposed to be the Palestinians’ last point of leverage and that trading it away for F-35s and Western Sahara recognition abandoned Palestinian interests entirely. It is also true that the accords did nothing to resolve the underlying Israeli-Palestinian dispute itself; they reordered the region’s priorities around it rather than settling it. That limitation does not erase the point the critics themselves concede: the accords proved that Arab-Israeli peace no longer requires Palestinian consent as a precondition, a linkage the Khartoum framework had treated as absolute for over fifty years.

The Khartoum Resolution · Camp David Accords (1978) · Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty (1994) · Oslo Accords (1993-1995) · Who attacked first on October 7 · Iran’s Ring of Fire