The Abraham Accords at Six: How a New Paradigm Outpaced the Old Peace
By Hussain Abdul-Hussain
Six years after the Abraham Accords were signed on the White House lawn, perhaps the clearest evidence of how profoundly they have changed the Middle East came not at another diplomatic ceremony, but behind closed doors. Just days before their sixth anniversary, the military chiefs of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan and Egypt quietly gathered in Germany under the auspices of U.S. Central Command to discuss Iran and regional security. Several of those states still have no diplomatic relations with Israel, yet their senior commanders were sitting around the same table discussing common threats and common interests.
That scene captures what the Abraham Accords have accomplished better than almost any anniversary speech could. They have transformed Arab-Israeli peace from a fragile, top-down security arrangement into a growing matrix of economic, strategic and human integration, while breaking the old assumption that Arabs and Israelis must first resolve every political dispute before they are permitted to cooperate on anything else.
For forty years, the baseline for Middle Eastern diplomacy was defined by the 1979 Camp David Accords with Egypt and the 1994 Wadi Araba treaty with Jordan. While crucial for regional stability, those earlier agreements effectively became glorified ceasefires—transactional arrangements brokered by Washington in which peace was tied heavily to American financial, diplomatic and military support rather than to a shared vision of regional partnership.
Neither relationship ultimately developed around the idea that peace with Israel, in and of itself, would become an engine for economic growth. Indeed, the Bank of Israel has noted that even decades after the treaties were signed, economic relations with Egypt and Jordan had failed to reach “macroeconomic significance.” The peace was strategically invaluable, but economically and socially it remained cold.
The Abraham Accords shattered this outdated paradigm. Built on the cold calculus of mutual benefit and economic modernization, this new bilateral peace model has outpaced its predecessors by a mile.
The governments of the Abraham Accords approached integration with a completely different mindset. They recognized that partnering with Israel, a high-tech, innovation-driven powerhouse, offered access to advanced technology, defense capabilities, agriculture, water expertise, cybersecurity and the global knowledge economy. Israel, meanwhile, gained access to Gulf capital, new markets, logistics hubs and Arab states whose strategic interests increasingly overlapped with its own.
While geopolitical dividends existed—most obviously Washington's recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara—those were merely the initial down payment. The real, compounding returns of the Accords have increasingly come from commercial, security and societal relationships that took on a life of their own.
Nowhere is this paradigm shift more evident than in the trade and tourism data. The UAE anchors this regional transformation. According to official UAE figures, cumulative merchandise trade between Israel and the Emirates reached approximately $14.53 billion between September 2020 and May 2026. Annual goods trade reached $3.25 billion in 2024 and remained above $3.2 billion in 2025, while another $1.24 billion was recorded in the first five months of 2026 alone.
The people-to-people figures are just as striking. Passenger traffic between Israel and the UAE reached approximately 1.53 million travelers in 2025, compared with 892,000 the previous year, an increase of more than 70 percent. At peak capacity, direct air links reached 136 flights per week. What began six years ago as diplomatic normalization has developed into one of Israel's most heavily traveled regional corridors.
This economic gravity is equally visible in Morocco, which has cultivated a deeply complementary relationship with Israel. UN Comtrade data analyzed by the Observer Research Foundation show approximately $576 million in bilateral goods trade between 2021 and 2024, while the strategic side of the relationship has developed even more dramatically. ORF's analysis of Abraham Accords trade shows that Morocco's trade relationship has grown steadily despite political tensions surrounding Gaza.
The Moroccan-Israeli partnership is also rooted in deep historical and human ties, with tens of thousands of Israelis traditionally visiting Morocco each year and hundreds of thousands of Israelis tracing their family origins to the kingdom. More importantly, security cooperation has moved far beyond symbolism. Morocco purchased Israel's Barak MX air-defense system in a deal reported at roughly $500 million, while Reuters reported in 2024 that Rabat planned to acquire an Israeli reconnaissance satellite in a deal worth approximately $1 billion. That deal proceeded while the Gaza war was raging, demonstrating just how deeply strategic interests had become embedded in the relationship.
Meanwhile Bahrain, which began its journey from a modest and largely symbolic commercial base, has also demonstrated that normalization can create enduring structures even where trade remains relatively small. UN Comtrade data show just over $50 million in cumulative bilateral goods trade from 2021 through 2024, while Israeli data indicate that commerce subsequently rebounded sharply after the regional disruptions of 2025. The significance of Bahrain is therefore less its absolute trade volume than the fact that diplomatic, commercial and strategic relations endured through the most difficult period since the Accords were signed.
The resilience of these ties has proven the maturity of the Abraham Accords framework. Critics long maintained that regional peace would shatter at the first sign of serious conflict. Yet throughout the grueling Gaza war, these bilateral relationships endured. Public anger across the Arab world was real, and governments in Abu Dhabi, Rabat and Manama repeatedly condemned Israeli policies, but political disagreement did not translate into the wholesale dismantling of diplomatic relations.
Unlike the popular misconception that peace requires absolute alignment on every geopolitical issue, the Abraham Accords countries have demonstrated how adult governments interact. They can sharply criticize Israeli military or political decisions while maintaining embassies, trade, strategic cooperation and the legitimacy of the relationship itself. This distinction—between opposing a policy and rejecting the state with which one disagrees—is precisely what was too often absent from older Arab-Israeli diplomacy.
The Iran confrontation has only reinforced that logic. As Bahraini analyst Ahmed Khuzaie recently argued in a Mid.East Journal analysis of the Abraham Accords and Gulf security, normalization in the Gulf is increasingly understood not as ideological convergence with Israel, but as a practical tool for security, deterrence, technology and regional influence. That helps explain how military cooperation has expanded well beyond the formal signatories and culminated in this week's extraordinary meeting of Israeli and Arab military chiefs.
The profound success of the Abraham Accords can also be measured by the determination of their ideological opponents to discredit them. Islamist networks and Muslim Brotherhood-aligned media have repeatedly attacked Abu Dhabi and other normalization states, accusing them of breaking what they portray as Israel's regional isolation. Yet the persistence of these attacks betrays an uncomfortable reality for the opponents of normalization: every flight, commercial contract, technology partnership and security relationship makes the old model of permanent confrontation harder to sustain.
Public anger should not be confused with diplomatic collapse. The Gaza war demonstrated that Arab governments could condemn Israeli policy while preserving relationships that they judged to be in their national interest. The tangible benefits of stability, trade and strategic cooperation proved strong enough to survive precisely the kind of crisis that critics predicted would destroy them.
If regional spoilers and ideological extremists remain intent on undermining these treaties, it is because the Abraham Accords have already changed the terms of the debate. They have demonstrated that integration can generate its own constituencies, its own economic logic and its own strategic momentum, making normalization increasingly difficult to reverse.
As the region begins to look beyond the Gaza war and toward a new strategic landscape shaped by Iran, trade, technology and shifting alliances, the Abraham Accords have established a new baseline for the Middle East. They have proved that peace is not simply the absence of war, but the presence of relationships worth preserving.
That may ultimately be their greatest achievement: peace has ceased to be merely a piece of paper signed by governments and has become an interest shared by states, businesses and increasingly by people themselves.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the author of The Arab Case for Israel. He is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).