Three Thousand Missiles Later: Why the Abraham Accords Didn’t Break

When the Abraham Accords were signed six years ago today, the objection from sceptics was not that they were undesirable but that they were untested. Normalisation between Israel and three Arab states, brokered in a period of relative calm, had never been asked to survive a real crisis. What would happen, the argument went, when the region caught fire?

We now have the answer. The region caught fire in late February, and the Accords are still standing.

The stress test nobody planned for

The war with Iran that began at the end of February hit the Gulf harder than most people outside the region appreciate. Manama was damaged, by some accounts considerably. The United Arab Emirates absorbed close to three thousand Iranian ballistic missiles and explosive drones, according to one eyewitness account from Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi’s airport was struck on the first day and shut. The United States evacuated most of its embassy staff, and several Western missions followed. Some companies pulled their people out.

This was precisely the scenario the Accords’ critics had in mind. A Gulf state under sustained attack, its population frightened, its expatriate majority drawn from every corner of the Arab and Muslim world, and a political class facing every incentive to distance itself from Israel. If the Accords were going to break, this is where they would have broken.

They did not. The relationship between Israel and the UAE did not merely survive the war; it deepened during it. At the height of the fighting, Israel deployed an Iron Dome battery to the Emirates, together with the military personnel needed to operate it. That is not a symbolic gesture. It is the kind of assistance one extends only to a partner one expects to keep. Other areas of security cooperation followed, some of them still unpublicised.

The Emirati side, for its part, held its nerve. Its layered air defences performed with a success rate that impressed those who lived through the first nights of booms and the occasional shower of debris in the streets. There are widespread reports, never officially confirmed, that the UAE struck back at targets inside Iran. Of all the Gulf states it was hit the most, and it defended itself the most effectively.

Why they held

The reason the Accords held under pressure is that they were never as thin as they looked on the signing lawn in 2020. They formalised relationships that already existed.

Israeli companies had been operating in the Gulf for years before normalisation, discreetly, through foreign subsidiaries and partners who knew exactly who they were dealing with. They brought technologies the Gulf wanted. Intelligence and security cooperation, including with Saudi Arabia, went back not years but decades. Israelis had begun to appear at Gulf conferences and events in ones and twos. There was engagement without relations.

What the Accords did was bring all of this into the open, and in doing so they gave it roots. Trade with the UAE has grown steadily and is more varied than the headlines suggest: diamonds are a surprisingly large share of it, alongside cyber, medical technology and agriculture. Before October 7, 2023, a large proportion of Israelis had visited Dubai or Abu Dhabi at least once. A striking number of them were Israeli Arabs, who discovered they could holiday in an Arab country where their Israeli passport was treated as an Israeli passport and nothing more, without the scrutiny they felt in Cairo or Amman. That tourism has largely paused since the war, and the synagogue at the Abrahamic Family House has been closed for security reasons, but business visitors keep coming and the demand has not gone anywhere.

A relationship with that much substance underneath it does not evaporate under fire. It hardens.

The social front

The more delicate test was social rather than military. Emirati nationals are only ten to twelve per cent of the country’s residents. The rest come from everywhere, including large Palestinian, Syrian, Egyptian and Iranian communities, not all of whom welcomed the presence of Israelis and Jews.

Here the contrast with Europe is instructive. The UAE permitted no demonstrations and no public expressions of hatred. People who took to social media to make threats were, in many cases, told to leave the country. The authorities kept a close watch on international schools to ensure that Jewish and Israeli pupils faced no antisemitism, and the community noticed and was grateful.

One anecdote from the period captures something the statistics cannot. A teenager, an American of Israeli background, at an Abu Dhabi school went to a party with an Emirati friend. A group of Arab boys came looking for a fight. The Emirati friend stood between them and said that anyone who picked a fight with his companion picked a fight with him. They backed down.

That story matters because it points to something the war created rather than destroyed. Emiratis who watched foreigners stay when they could have left responded with a slogan, “Everyone now is Emirati,” and meant it. A resident walking his dog on the first morning of Eid found young men returning from the mosque stopping their cars to thank him for not leaving. The bond that formed under attack is part of the Accords’ resilience now, and it was not there in 2020.

Three relationships, not one

It would be a mistake to speak of the Accords as a single thing. Each relationship has its own character. Bahrain’s is quieter and driven more by the government than the public, constrained by a large Shia population with varied ties to Iran, but the king’s commitment has not wavered. Morocco’s, at the far western end of the Arab world, is built more on agriculture and security than on tourism, and it is strong enough that Algeria’s decision to break relations with the UAE last week is widely read as partly a protest against the Accords and the axis between Abu Dhabi and Rabat.

Sudan is the exception, and the cautionary tale. Its normalisation collapsed not because of Israel but because Sudan itself collapsed, first into a military takeover and then into a civil war between two factions of that military. The lesson is that the Accords cannot save a state from itself. What they can do is survive almost everything else.

What comes next

The obvious question is whether the resilience on display this year will pull others in. Saudi Arabia was, by its own officials’ account, on the brink of normalisation on the eve of October 7, 2023, and blamed Iran for pushing Hamas to wreck it. It has since retreated behind a demand for a path to a Palestinian state with fixed stages and dates that no plausible Israeli government is about to offer. Riyadh is under attack from Houthi and Iraqi militias, its new pact with Pakistan and Turkey failed its first test, and it is now consulting Cairo. Where it lands will depend on how this war ends and how exposed the kingdom feels when it does.

Oman, under a new sultan and a new foreign minister, has cooled. Indonesia, home to the largest Muslim population in the world, has had contacts with Israel and remains a genuine possibility once the region is calmer. But the anniversary verdict is already in. The Accords were built to be tested. Three thousand missiles later, they passed.

This article draws on a BICOM (Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre) briefing with Ambassador Marc Sievers, former US Ambassador to Oman from 2016 to 2019, a career Senior Foreign Service officer with postings in Cairo, Baghdad, Tel Aviv and Algiers, and founding director of AJC Abu Dhabi from 2021 to 2026, now a consultant and policy analyst based in Abu Dhabi.