Omar Ahmed
US and zionist officials have repeatedly pushed for an expansion of the Abraham Accords, with Saudi Arabia the most coveted prize. Normalisation between Riyadh and Tel Aviv would carry exceptional political and religious weight: the Bani Saud monarchy controls Makkah and al-Madinah, Islam’s two holiest cities, and uses that control to bolster its claim to leadership of the Muslim world, while the zionist entity seeks acceptance in a region whose people remain overwhelmingly committed to the Palestinian cause.
For President Donald Trump, such an agreement would be a diplomatic trophy. For the zionist entity, it would convert ties long cultivated behind closed doors into open political, commercial and security partnerships. The question is what these agreements deliver to the people whose future is being traded across negotiating tables.
The Emirati bargain
The UAE was the most prominent Gulf participant in the Abraham Accords. Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv announced normalisation on August 13, 2020 and signed the agreement at the White House on September 15. The relationship developed alongside the UAE’s efforts to pursue an increasingly independent regional strategy, sometimes at odds with Saudi Arabia.
Abu Dhabi’s maritime ambitions extend across the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and Horn of Africa. Its backing for southern separatists in Yemen, involvement in Puntland, and support for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) form part of a contest over ports, corridors and commercial access.
The UAE denies arming the RSF, but its regional interventions have attracted sustained scrutiny. The alliance with the zionist entity strengthens a project that predates the Abraham Accords and increasingly collides with Saudi ambitions.
The UAE seeks to make itself indispensable to maritime commerce while developing security and intelligence ties with the zionist entity and reducing its dependence on Saudi-led arrangements. Its withdrawal from OPEC in May 2026, after years of disputes over production quotas, also reflected its growing economic divergence from Saudi Arabia.
Bilateral merchandise trade reached $3.254 billion in 2024, according to UAE figures, while estimates for the first half of 2026 put the figure at roughly $1.5 billion.
The Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), signed in 2022 and in force from April 2023, helped institutionalise the relationship as the zionist entity’s first free-trade agreement with an Arab state. For major firms and strategic industries, the incentives are evident.
A comparable improvement in living standards for ordinary Emiratis or the millions of migrant workers underpinning the economy is much harder to establish.
Bahrain’s monarchy approached normalisation through its dependence on Saudi security guarantees and its confrontation with Iran. Sectarian language has long served the ruling family’s political purposes, but the Sunni–Shi‘a divide cannot explain away popular demands for representation or opposition to the zionist entity. The agreement was made by the palace, not by the Bahraini people.
Although Bahrain–the zionist entity trade remains modest beside the Emirati relationship, it is not insignificant. UN Comtrade figures record approximately $100 million in zionist imports of mineral fuels from Bahrain in 2024, falling markedly in 2025. The opening of these commercial and security channels matters to Tel Aviv, but does not resolve the dispossession of Palestinians or the objections of Arab and Muslim publics.
Why Riyadh hesitates
Saudi Arabia remains the principal target of Washington’s normalisation campaign. Its control of the Haramain makes an agreement more consequential than those signed by the UAE or Bahrain. The Bani Saud’s claim to leadership in the Muslim world, built partly on its control of the Haramain, would come under renewed scrutiny if it established formal relations with the zionist entity while Palestinians remained under occupation and siege.
The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, advanced by Saudi Arabia itself, conditioned normalisation on zionist withdrawal from occupied Arab territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state. Joining the Abraham Accords without a credible settlement would hollow out that position and expose the distance between official Arab diplomacy and the demands of the Palestinian people.
Public opposition, boycotts and disputes within the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) could turn normalisation into an expensive political liability for Riyadh. The Bani Saud would be expected to justify abandoning the Palestinians while presenting themselves as custodian of Islam’s holiest sites.
Saudi officials recognise the dilemma. Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan has repeatedly insisted that Palestinian statehood must be addressed before normalisation.
The economic incentives are nonetheless substantial. Vision 2030 depends on transport links, digital infrastructure, investment and new industries.
Projects such as NEOM, the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), data centres and fibre-optic networks have encouraged arguments that the zionist entity could become an important technological and transit partner.
Yet none of these schemes makes zionist participation an economic necessity: alternative corridors and partnerships remain available.
The zionist entity’s proposed $27 billion railway expansion has been presented as a possible foundation for a future link to Saudi Arabia and Gulf markets. Such ambitions illustrate the broader purpose of IMEC: to make zionist ports and infrastructure a key junction between South Asia, West Asia and Europe.
Large contracts may reward contractors, sovereign funds and politically connected investors without delivering comparable gains to workers and households. For Saudi Arabia, the issue is not whether zionist-linked corridors could generate revenue. It is whether dependence on them would surrender political leverage and make the kingdom more vulnerable to regional confrontation.
The wider economic ledger
The experience of earlier Arab agreements with the zionist entity offers grounds for caution. Egypt, the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with the zionist entity, has maintained diplomatic and security relations since 1979.
The treaty removed the immediate threat of another interstate war, but it did not create broad popular acceptance of the zionist entity or transform the economic fortunes of most Egyptians.
Bilateral trade has remained shaped by political constraints, energy arrangements and a limited number of large businesses. Economic cooperation has benefited particular sectors and well-connected interests, while Egypt’s enduring debt, inflation and employment problems underline the limits of treating a peace treaty as a development programme.
The Red Sea crisis exposes the wider costs of regional confrontation. Egypt lost substantial Suez Canal revenue as ships diverted around Africa. Cairo was not among the original signatories to the August 2026 Makkah Joint Defence Agreement between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkiye. Its avoidance of direct military confrontation with Sana‘a did not insulate its economy from the shipping shock.
The Ansar-Allah movement has described the maritime campaign conducted by Yemen’s Ansar-Allah-aligned armed forces as an act of solidarity with Palestinians facing the zionist entity’s assault on Gaza. These operations imposed costs on shipping and on Egypt’s canal revenues, while also exposing how vulnerable international commerce becomes when the Palestinian question is pushed aside. The costs of that confrontation cannot be divorced from the war and blockade that gave rise to it.
Bani Saud’s years of war on Yemen, confrontation with Iran and heavy military expenditure have also drained resources that could have supported domestic development. Cooperation with neighbouring states, including Iran and Iraq, offers a different economic horizon from one built around zionist security systems and US-sponsored corridors.
The zionist entity’s penetration of regional technology, agriculture and communications markets also raises questions of sovereignty.
The 2024 pager terrorist attacks in Lebanon and the zionist entity’s 2025 strike on Doha exposed the dangers of assuming that commercial or diplomatic contact restrains zionist military and intelligence operations. Infrastructure that carries data, food and trade is also infrastructure through which power can be exercised.
Agriculture, telecommunications, logistics and energy cannot be reduced to commercial transactions when the supplier is a state engaged in occupation and repeated regional military operations. Normalisation risks placing essential systems within networks of dependence that may be turned against their hosts in a future confrontation.
The zionist entity’s economy retains strong connections to Europe and the US. The Abraham Accords and projects such as IMEC seek to extend that reach by making the zionist entity a central commercial gateway for the Arab world and South Asia.
Decades of Arab normalisation have produced diplomatic recognition, commercial contracts and security cooperation with the zionist entity, but no Palestinian freedom.
A regional economic order that strengthens trade among neighbouring states, including Iran and Iraq, and protects independent access to ports, energy and technology offers a more durable foundation than one built around zionist centrality.
Prosperity cannot be measured by the profits of a few corporations while occupation is written out of the equation.
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