Bahrain is due more credit for the Abraham Accords
Bahrain deserves far greater credit for the Abraham Accords. Not only for signing the agreement on the lawn of the White House six years ago this week, but for what it has done since, and for the deeper history of pragmatism, collaboration and peaceful coexistence that made it possible.
Begin with the diplomatic records. One year after the agreement was signed, Bahrain and Israel had established embassies in each other’s capitals and exchanged ambassadors. Subsequently, the two countries reached several bilateral agreements in technology, healthcare, and telecommunications. After the Gaza conflict broke out, Bahrain’s parliament voted to suspend relations with Israel, but the Bahraini leadership remained resolute. The agreements were never withdrawn. The Israeli embassy kept functioning. In August 2025, Bahrain officially appointed a new Israeli ambassador, and by December the Crown Prince was hosting him to discuss ways of expanding economic cooperation. In July 2026, King Hamad and Israeli President Herzog spoke by phone about the future of the Accords.
The Abraham Accords are easy to see as a purely transactional arrangement, but for Bahrain, it followed a long tradition of pragmatic engagement in the region, always focused on peaceful coexistence.
Bahrain is home to the Gulf’s only indigenous Jewish community. Jewish families settled in Manama from Iraq, Iran, and India in the late nineteenth century and became integral to the island’s commercial and civic life. References to a Jewish presence date back over a millennium. Houda Nonoo’s appointment as Bahrain’s Ambassador to the United States in 2008, the first Jewish ambassador sent abroad by any Arab country, was no token gesture. The House of Ten Commandments, Bahrain’s synagogue, the oldest in the Gulf, was restored and reopened in 2021 for the first time in seventy-four years. In 2017, King Hamad issued a formal declaration on religious tolerance and, the following year, established the King Hamad Global Centre for Peaceful Coexistence. The Abraham Accords formalised in diplomatic language what Bahrain had been practising for generations.
The sharpest test came in November 2023. Barely six weeks after Hamas’s massacre of over 1,200 Israelis, Crown Prince and Prime Minister Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa delivered the keynote address at the IISS Manama Dialogue. In a room of senior officials, he became the first Arab leader to condemn Hamas publicly, calling the attacks “barbaric” and “horrific” and condemning the seizure of hostages. Crucially, he also condemned the civilian toll in Gaza, insisting there must be no displacement, no reoccupation, and no reduction of Gaza’s territory.
At a moment when those opposed to the Abraham Accords hoped for the agreement’s collapse, Bahrain’s Crown Prince showed that normalisation could be the basis for honest dialogue and mutual accountability, not simply a fair-weather arrangement.
The question now is how to build on this record. Bahrain sits right at the intersection of the Accords’ three pillars, security, economics, and people-to-people engagement.
As home to the US Fifth Fleet and the Combined Maritime Forces, Bahrain is already an anchor of Gulf maritime security, and any Accords-linked security architecture will run through it. CSIPA, the Comprehensive Security Integration and Prosperity Agreement, was signed between the US and Bahrain in September 2023 and is explicitly described as building on the Abraham Accords. The UK formally signed on in December 2024. In early 2026, when Bahrain came under sustained attack from Iran, they invoked Article II of the agreement, triggering the mutual-concern and defence-coordination mechanism.
The Abraham Accords are too often discussed as principally an Emirati–Israeli story, with Saudi Arabia as the prize still to be won. This framing does a disservice to Bahrain, a country that signed on the same day as the UAE, and maintained its commitments through the most severe test the Accords have faced. The next phase should be to translate this diplomatic resilience into deeper economic and people-to-people ties. Bahrain need not replicate the UAE model; it can build a relationship suited to its own strengths.
The Abraham Accords shouldn’t be evaluated merely by the number of new agreements reached or the number of tourists who cross the borders. They should also be assessed by what happens when the political climate turns against them, and on that count Bahrain has earned far more credit than it has received.
