Published by the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center · April 2025
The Abraham Accords were signed at the White House on 15 September 2020, and led to agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and subsequently Morocco. A normalization process with Sudan was initiated but never completed, overtaken by the country’s domestic turmoil.
The war in Gaza was widely expected to undo them. This paper examines what actually happened, and finds that the agreements have largely held. The more consequential question is what comes next — and the answer turns less on the Accords themselves than on wider regional and global dynamics that none of the signatories fully control.
For institutions with exposure across the region, the distinction matters. An arrangement that survives a war is not the same as one that has been reaffirmed, and the difference between the two shows up in investment horizons, counterparty risk and the durability of commercial arrangements built on top of the political ones.
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