From Casablanca to the Abraham Accords

Israel and Morocco’s intelligence relationship is among the Middle East and North Africa’s more enduring—and least understood—security partnerships. It began as a set of pragmatic, covert arrangements during the Cold War. However, it evolved into a structured cooperation that today intersects with defense-industrial ties, counterterrorism against jihadist networks, and strategic alignment on Iran. Far from being an anomaly, the relationship has become a pillar that fostered the 2020–2023 wave of Arab–Israeli normalization, including Morocco’s own path under the Abraham Accords. For Western partners, the quiet intelligence pact between Jerusalem and Rabat is valuable not only because it deters malign actors and improves stability from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Sahel, but also because it demonstrates how Israel’s distinctive security know-how can be harnessed to advance regional public goods when paired with a trusted Arab nation. Thus, this essay reconstructs the relationship’s origins, surveys documented activities, assesses its current status, and explains its significance for the West, using a Chicago author–date style and drawing on primary statements and reputable reporting where available.

The origins of Israeli–Moroccan intelligence ties lie in the paradoxes of post-colonial statecraft. Morocco, a fully independent country since 1956, quickly faced nation-building pressures and polarized politics. It was also home to the Arab world’s largest Jewish community, whose legal, social, and economic ties spanned centuries. Beginning in the late 1950s and accelerating after King Hassan II’s accession in 1961, the Moroccan crown tolerated and in phases cooperated with clandestine Israeli channels intended to facilitate the orderly emigration of Jews to Israel—most visibly in the operation later known as “Yachin” (1961–64). Through this arrangement, the Mossad worked with Moroccan authorities and the NGO HIAS to move tens of thousands of Moroccan Jews through Casablanca and Tangier toward Europe and onward to Israel; scholarly and institutional summaries place the total between roughly 90,000 and 97,000 people, reflecting both humanitarian and regime-stability considerations at the time (CIE 2023; Wikipedia 2025).  The quid pro quo was not just monetary; it created habits of contact between the royal court and Israeli operatives that would later extend into political and intelligence spheres.

Two episodes from 1965 distilled the emerging bargain. First, multiple accounts from former Israeli intelligence officials and subsequent journalistic reconstructions hold that King Hassan II permitted Israeli services to record proceedings of the Arab League summit held in September that year in Casablanca. The tapes—transcribed by Israel’s Military Intelligence research unit—reportedly revealed a gap between public rhetoric and actual Arab military readiness, shaping Israeli threat assessments on the eve of the 1967 war (Bergman 2018; Ynet 2016; IntelNews 2016). On the other hand, that same year, the notorious disappearance of Moroccan opposition figure Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris. While the details remain contested, prominent reporting based on interviews with Israeli veterans alleges that the Mossad, as part of a reciprocal understanding with Rabat, helped Moroccan operatives surveil and kidnap Ben Barka and later dispose of the body—even as the killing itself was not carried out by Israelis (Bergman 2018; Wikipedia summary updated 2025). These episodes, however uncomfortable, illuminate the logic of the early relationship: Morocco sought technical and operational assistance to neutralize perceived threats and to manage sensitive political dilemmas; Israel sought insights into Arab decision-making and freedom of movement for Jewish emigration. In strictly historical terms, the alliance was an instrument of raison d’état for both sides.

The ensuing decade broadened these discreet links into diplomatic backchannels. In 1977, as Egypt and Israel inched toward historic reconciliation, Morocco hosted secret exchanges between senior envoys—including a meeting in Rabat between Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister Hassan Tuhami—that paved the way for Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem and, eventually, the 1979 peace treaty; in fact, contemporary minutes and institutional retrospectives confirm the Moroccan king’s brokerage (CIE 2024; Jewish Virtual Library 1977; Time 1978).     Certainly, this is often remembered as diplomatic statecraft, but it also had an intelligence complexion: the same personal trust, tradecraft, and risk tolerance that enabled covert liaison work also made Rabat a credible host for exploratory talks. For Israel, Morocco had become a rare Arab monarchy willing to move quiet understandings into constructive regional outcomes—an early sign of Israel’s capacity to transform clandestine cooperation into stabilizing public goods.

From the 1990s through the 2010s, the tempo of bilateral intelligence interactions fluctuated with the “regional geopolitical climate”. After the 1993 Oslo breakthrough, Morocco and Israel opened liaison offices; the Second Intifada later chilled public engagement, but contacts never vanished. In 2018, Morocco ended diplomatic ties with Iran, publicly accusing Tehran (via Hezbollah) of arming the Polisario Front through clandestine networks in Algiers—a charge Rabat said it substantiated for Iranian counterparts. While Tehran denied the allegation, the episode underscored Morocco’s growing perception of Iran’s reach into North and West Africa and added a shared adversary to the Israeli–Moroccan ledger (Al Jazeera 2018; Xinhua 2018; Atlantic Council 2018).    

The decisive upgrade came with the U.S.-brokered understandings of December 2020. In a Joint Declaration signed in Rabat on December 22, 2020, the United States, Morocco, and Israel committed to reopening liaison offices, establishing direct flights, and moving toward full diplomatic relations. Washington concurrently recognized Moroccan sovereignty claims over Western Sahara (U.S. Department of State 2020; Axios 2020). The normalization created formal rails for what had long been true in practice: intelligence and security cooperation had preceded and enabled political normalization. Less than a year later, on November 24, 2021, Israel’s defense minister signed in Rabat the first-ever Defense Memorandum of Understanding between Israel and an Arab state—a framework explicitly described by both sides as enabling structured intelligence sharing, defense procurement, and joint programs (Israel MOD 2021; Reuters 2021; Al Jazeera 2021).     The MOUs did not reveal specific intelligence collection tasks, as expected, but they institutionalized liaison mechanisms that had previously relied on several personalities.

Alongside formal defense diplomacy, a series of visits operationalized the new relationship. In July 2022, IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi made the first official visit by an Israeli military chief to Morocco for consultations with senior commanders—an engagement covered by both Israeli and international media (IDF 2022; Reuters 2022; France24 2022).     During that period, Morocco’s powerful internal security and domestic intelligence chief, Abdellatif Hammouchi, engaged visiting Israeli officials on cooperative policing and counterterrorism; and Israeli police counterparts concluded practical agreements in Rabat (Morocco World News 2022; i24News 2022). The cumulative effect was to broaden a bilateral agenda that had long been intelligence-centric into adjacent domains—cybersecurity, counter-organized crime, and border security—while still preserving the operational discretion characteristic of intelligence relationships.

If the origins of the relationship were transactional, its present status is strategic. Three converging drivers stand out. First, shared threat perceptions—especially regarding Iran—have deepened. Since 2018 Rabat has framed its Western Sahara contest partly in terms of Iranian and Hezbollah meddling; Israel, for its part, sees in Morocco a stable Western-aligned monarchy willing to cooperate against regional proxy networks. Analysts tracking 2024–25 developments note that, despite public demonstrations in Moroccan cities during the Gaza war, security and intelligence cooperation has continued in a low-profile register, underwritten by a convergence on Iran and by enduring institutional habits (Atlantic Council 2025; Africa Intelligence 2024).

Second, defense-industrial complementarity has created new channels for intelligence-adjacent collaboration. Reporting in 2024–25 pointed to Israeli companies transferring know-how for unmanned aerial systems production in Morocco and to a planned high-resolution reconnaissance satellite procurement—precisely the sort of capabilities whose employment requires mature intelligence processes and joint doctrine (Le Monde 2024; Reuters 2024).    

Third, political ballast has increased: in July 2023 Israel recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, a move welcomed in Rabat and tethered to Morocco’s decision to deepen bilateral frameworks—a reciprocal gesture that, although political, has obvious intelligence implications for regional posture (Reuters 2023).

How, specifically, has the Israel–Morocco intelligence partnership operated? By its nature, documentation is sparse. Yet across open sources, three clusters of activity recur.

The first cluster is information exchange and assessments. From the 1965 Casablanca intercepts to today’s watch-floor analysis of jihadist networks and Iranian proxy activity, the core logic is to reduce strategic surprise. Morocco’s own counter-extremism architecture is regarded by the United States as comparatively robust; the State Department’s most recent Country Reports on Terrorism credit Rabat with a comprehensive, prevention-oriented approach that integrates policing, religious education, and socioeconomic programming (U.S. Department of State 2023).   Israeli partners contribute technical collection, targeting methodology, and battle-tested analytic tradecraft; Moroccan counterparts contribute deep human terrain knowledge of the Maghreb–Sahel, excellent Arabic and French HUMINT access, and sovereign reach in border zones and diaspora spaces. The value for Western allies is the blend: fused Israeli–Moroccan perspectives can flag trans-regional trends—such as Sahelian jihadist migration routes, illicit finance tied to smuggling, or drone proliferation—that might elude single-country lenses.

The second cluster is operational cooperation against transnational threats. Publicly known instances include liaison on aviation security, festival and pilgrimage protection (as tourism revived after 2021), and maritime watch functions linking Atlantic and Mediterranean spaces. Police cooperation agreements in 2022 indicate joint work on extradition and organized crime—areas that naturally overlap with counterterrorism financing (i24News 2022). Less visible but equally important is doctrinal and training collaboration: electronic warfare and air-defense integration, for example, require shared threat libraries and deconfliction protocols. Moroccan military communiqués have referenced expanded cooperation with Israel in these very domains—“intelligence, air defense and electronic warfare”—signaling that what began as political normalization now depends on the daily, practical labor of intelligence communities (Xinhua 2023).

The third cluster is multilateral scaffolding. The Negev Forum—launched in 2022 by Israel, the United States, Morocco, Egypt, Bahrain, and the UAE—created working groups on regional security, health, clean energy, food and water, tourism, and education/coexistence. Official descriptions place Morocco as co-chair with Israel in the food/water and education tracks, while the United States and Bahrain lead the regional security group (U.S. Embassy Israel 2023; Times of Israel 2023; USIP 2022).     Although the security working group focuses on defense and law-enforcement cooperation, its projects—information-sharing architectures, maritime domain awareness, and C-UAS collaboration—depend on trusted intelligence pipelines. In effect, the forum socializes Israel–Morocco intelligence habits of cooperation across a broader coalition, with the United States serving as guarantor and integrator.

No serious survey can ignore controversies around cyber tools and surveillance. Morocco has been accused by investigative consortia and NGOs of deploying Pegasus spyware (commercially produced by Israel’s NSO Group) against journalists, activists, and even foreign officials such as France’s president—allegations Rabat has denied; the U.S. Commerce Department placed NSO on its Entity List in November 2021, an action the current U.S. administration has not reversed (Reuters 2021; Axios 2021; Amnesty 2021; Washington Post 2025). Thus, it is important to distinguish between state-to-state intelligence liaison and the export-control governance of private cyber vendors. The former in this case has demonstrably advanced counterterrorism and regional stability; the latter has spurred Western liberal concerns about privacy and the rule of law. As a result, Israel has tightened export regulations and oversight since 2021, while Western partners have signaled that future cooperation must align with human-rights standards. For this essay’s analysis, the salient point is that the bilateral intelligence relationship persists not because of any one tool, but because of durable national-interest alignment—particularly on Iran, jihadist networks, and regional connectivity.

This intelligence alignment was not merely compatible with the Abraham Accords; it was one of their enabling conditions. Already before 2020, the Moroccan court and Israeli leaders had decades of trusted, deniable channels that could translate sensitive understandings into policy. When the Trump administration offered a trilateral package—Moroccan normalization with Israel alongside U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty claims in Western Sahara—Rabat could proceed knowing that it was not leaping into the unknown but regularizing a long-running entente. The December 22, 2020, Joint Declaration codified what liaison chiefs had practiced for years: to “fully respect” agreed principles, restart official contacts, and cooperate across sectors.   Subsequent Israeli recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in July 2023 further insulated the relationship against shocks, signaling that Jerusalem would invest political capital to sustain—and be seen to sustain—Rabat’s core territorial priority (Reuters 2023). Certainly, if the Abraham Accords sought to knit together an anti-revisionist coalition spanning the Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Gulf, then Israel–Morocco intelligence cooperation provided a proven spine for the Maghreb end of that project.

Why should this matter to the West? The answer operates at three levels—security, resilience, and norms.

On security, the Israel–Morocco axis stitches together flank regions that are often treated separately in Euro-Atlantic policy: the Western Mediterranean, the Atlantic approaches, and the Sahel. Morocco’s geographic position—controlling the southern shore of the Strait of Gibraltar and projecting into West Africa—makes it a pivotal partner for maritime domain awareness, counter-smuggling, and counterterrorism. Israel adds highly specialized intelligence competencies: signals intelligence, integrated air and missile defense architectures, and counter-UAS doctrine. The two together, operating within U.S. Central Command and European Command networks and under the Negev Forum’s regional security working group, can close seams that adversaries exploit (USIP 2022; NESA 2023). The reported Moroccan plan to procure advanced Israeli reconnaissance satellite capabilities, if consummated, would further integrate Maghreb ISR into Western-compatible architectures, improving shared situational awareness over the Atlantic littoral and the Sahel (Reuters 2024).

On resilience, the partnership supports Western objectives in energy, food, and water security—domains where climate change is a threat multiplier. Morocco’s sophisticated desalination build-out and agricultural modernization agenda align with Israeli water-tech and agri-tech strengths; the intelligence dimension here is not covert action but the protection of critical infrastructure, cyber-resilience for water grids, and the protection of supply chains against hybrid threats. As aforementioned, in the Negev Forum, Israel and Morocco co-chair working groups on food/water and education/coexistence, indicating recognition that true stability requires societal as well as kinetic investments (Times of Israel 2023; U.S. Embassy Israel 2023). Today, Western partners benefit when trusted regional actors harden critical systems against both physical and cyber disruption.

On norms, the relationship models a form of Arab–Israeli security cooperation that is not solely transactional but gradually public-facing and project-oriented. Morocco’s long-standing preservation of Jewish heritage and, more recently, the inclusion of Jewish history and culture in school curricula have created a societal context for de-escalating sectarian narratives. Israel’s large Moroccan-origin community—politically and culturally influential—provides connective tissue that Western diplomacy can mobilize for people-to-people normalization. Even during periods of public anger over Gaza since October 2023, Moroccan authorities neither ruptured ties nor shuttered liaison channels, a choice that Western governments read as evidence of strategic patience (Atlantic Council 2025).   In short, intelligence liaison built trust; trust enabled diplomacy; diplomacy now broadens into practical cooperation that serves Western interests.

To portray Israel constructively within this framework is not special pleading; it is a recognition of empirical contributions. Israel’s intelligence community, constrained by law and sharpened by decades of complex threat environments, has developed capabilities—from SIGINT fusion to counter-UAS—that partners seek. When these capabilities are engaged within agreed legal frameworks and with respect for partners’ sovereignty, they can enable precisely the goods Western policy prizes: deterrence against revisionist states, disruption of transnational criminal-terrorist convergence, and hardening of critical infrastructure. The Israeli decision in 2023 to recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara—whatever one’s view of the dispute is—was a politically costly signal of commitment that strengthened the institutional spine of bilateral cooperation (Reuters 2023). That signal, combined with a first-of-its-kind defense MOU and a consistent operational tempo, has made the relationship resilient even amid regional turmoil (Israel MOD 2021; Reuters 2021).   

Skeptics will note that public opinion in Morocco remains intensely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and that episodes—such as mass protests or diplomatic missteps over cartography—can inject friction. That is true, and it counsels humility. Yet the notable pattern since 2020 is not rupture but managed continuity: liaison channels stay open; defense-industrial projects proceed; and multilateral frameworks remain available even when ministerials are postponed. In diplomatic terms, this is what strategic alignment in a contested region looks like. It is not sentimental; it is not ideological; it is the accumulation of deliberate, interest-based choices by sovereigns who have discovered that, together, they advance their security and economic agendas more effectively—and, in doing so, provide Western partners with a dependable node in an increasingly fractured security environment.

In conclusion, the intelligence relationship between Israel and Morocco is best understood as a long-cycle investment that has repeatedly paid dividends: early on, in reducing uncertainty during inter-Arab crises and enabling Jewish emigration; later, in brokering historic Egyptian–Israeli peacemaking; and today, in structuring counterterrorism cooperation, integrating defense technologies, and anchoring the Maghreb flank of the Abraham Accords. For the West, this is not a curiosity but a model: a partnership that turns clandestine trust into visible stability, that repurposes intelligence for public goods, and that proves Israel’s constructive role when embedded in respectful, mutually beneficial ties with a key Arab monarchy.

References

Al Jazeera. 2018. “Morocco Cuts Diplomatic Ties with Iran over Western Sahara Feud.” May 1, 2018.

Al Jazeera. 2021. “Morocco, Israel Sign First-Ever Defence Agreement in Rabat.” November 24, 2021.

Amnesty International. 2021. “Investigation Finds NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware Used to Target Sahraoui Activist.” Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (summary with AI findings).

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