Post-Abraham Accords Israel-Gulf — Suzanne Maloney's reading after Gaza

Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution and previously a State Department policy planning staff member on Iran, has been one of the most cited US-based analysts of the Abraham Accords since the September 2020 signing between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain — with Morocco and Sudan added later in 2020.

Her core analytical framework is that the Accords combined two distinct things and that conflating them produced overheated expectations. The commercial component — diplomatic, consular, trade, tourism, technology and finance ties — was substantively new and has grown rapidly. UAE-Israel bilateral trade grew from approximately $1B in 2021 to over $3B in 2023, before dipping modestly in 2024. The political component — a public Arab government endorsement of normalisation with Israel without resolution of the Palestinian question — was the historically novel piece and the part most vulnerable to disruption.

Maloney's reading of the post-October 2023 trajectory is that the commercial component has been disrupted but not broken. UAE-Israel trade fell from peak 2023 levels but did not return to pre-Accords baselines. Direct flights continued through the war. The political component took more damage. UAE and Bahraini officials publicly criticised specific Israeli military actions in Gaza in ways they had not in 2020-2022. Morocco's normalisation track, more transactional from the outset, continued but with reduced visibility.

The Saudi extension, which was the next-step ambition of the Accords framework, was suspended after October 2023. Maloney's 2024-2025 work argues the suspension is not permanent but the conditions for resumption have hardened. Riyadh's price now includes a credible Palestinian-state trajectory and a US-Saudi security agreement that the Senate has not signalled it would ratify.

Her conclusion is that the Accords remain in place and the commercial channel they opened is structurally durable. The political project they were meant to consolidate — a Gulf-Israeli alignment that bypassed the Palestinian question — ran into the question the project was designed to bypass.

­Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution and previously on the State Department's policy planning staff on Iran, has tracked the Abraham Accords since the September 2020 signing of the original Israel-UAE-Bahrain agreements at the White House. Her continuing assessment, published across Brookings papers and Foreign Affairs essays through 2024 and into 2026, is that the Accords were sold as a regional transformation but in operation are a Gulf-Israel commercial channel with a thin political layer that the October 2023 Gaza war did not destroy but did substantially expose.

The trade and tourism data are the empirical anchor. UAE-Israel bilateral merchandise trade, by Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics reporting, rose from approximately $1.06 billion in 2021 to $3.18 billion in 2023, then fell to roughly $2.96 billion in 2024 — a contraction at the margin during the Gaza war but a level still many multiples of the pre-Accords baseline. The Bahrain trade volume is smaller in absolute terms but follows the same direction. Sudan's planned normalisation, which had been one of the Accords' announced scope items in 2020, has not materialised in any commercial form following the April 2023 outbreak of internal conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces.

The strategic-rationale interpretation has had to adjust to the post-2023 political environment. The original framing — advanced most fully by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Special Envoy Jared Kushner — was that economic engagement would build the political infrastructure for a broader regional architecture eventually including Saudi Arabia. The October 2023 outbreak suspended the Saudi-Israeli normalisation talks that had been visibly advancing through the summer of 2023. Maloney's reading is that the suspension is conditional rather than terminal: the Saudi political requirement, articulated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, that any normalisation deliver a concrete pathway to Palestinian statehood, was already softer than the public position suggested, and the post-war reconstruction of that pathway is the specific question the diplomatic track is now working on.

The Gulf-state political-economy reading of the Accords is more clearly transactional than the broader regional-transformation framing implied. The Emirati strategic interest in counter-Iranian coordination, in advanced defense procurement that the F-35 sale had partially conditioned, and in technology-and-cybersecurity cooperation with Israel remained operative through the war. The Bahraini interest in extended security cover and economic-corridor positioning remained operative. The Moroccan acquiescence in the Accords package, conditioned on the US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, has held even as Rabat has publicly criticised Israeli conduct of the war.

The Palestinian dimension is the structural variable. The Accords' founding text explicitly bypassed the Palestinian question, on the rationale that previous attempts to make Israeli-Arab normalisation conditional on Palestinian statehood had stalled both tracks. The post-war reconstruction of Gaza, the question of West Bank political architecture, and the longer-run question of a two-state framework are now back at the centre of the regional diplomatic agenda — at least in the language used by the Gulf governments and by the Arab League's December 2023 and 2024 declarations on the subject. Whether this rhetorical centrality translates into concrete commitments that change Israel's domestic political calculation is the open question.

The 2026 horizon is what the Maloney analytical frame foregrounds. The Accords' commercial layer is durable and will continue to deepen in the absence of an active regional war. The political layer requires a settlement on Gaza and the West Bank that produces a partner the Gulf governments can defend domestically when extending recognition to Israel. The conditions for that political layer to stabilise are outside the Accords framework — they are functions of Israeli electoral cycles, of Palestinian political reconstruction, and of the US administration's diplomatic bandwidth. The Accords remain an institutional achievement of meaningful scope; they are not, on the post-2023 evidence, the regional-transformation mechanism the original framing claimed.

The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.

The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.