With the Abraham Accords now comfortably in its third year, officials from the four signatories of the landmark treaty – Israel, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco – gathered in the UAE on Monday alongside representatives from Egypt and the United States to discuss key issues for the Middle East.
The two-day meeting in Abu Dhabi is a forerunner to the official gathering of foreign ministers – the second of its kind – in Morocco, most likely in the spring.
“We are seeing here the results of more than two years of work since the Abraham Accords,” Michal Schwartz of the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Gulf States department told The Media Line on Monday.
Schwartz dismissed the suggestion that the summit was marred by recent tensions between Israel and the Arab world over a visit to the flashpoint Temple Mount in Jerusalem by Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. The UAE, along with China, requested last week’s United Nations Security Council special session on the visit.
“We are in an ongoing process,” Schwartz said, adding that it is “a very long process that is not tied to any particular point in time.”
We are seeing here the results of more than two years of work since the Abraham Accords
The cooperation being seen at the summit is designed to “bring stability to the entire region,” she said, “and I believe it is strong enough to achieve it.”
Nonetheless, Jordan, the remaining Arab state with which Israel has a peace agreement, was absent from the meeting, as it was from the inaugural Negev Forum in its namesake Israeli desert in March 2022.
Schwartz downplayed the absence of Israel’s neighbor to the east, saying that “there is a place at the table for Jordan when it decides to join.”
In fact, she stressed, there has been a place for the Hashemite kingdom “from the start.”
Foreign Ministry spokesman Lior Hayat told The Media Line that the gathering in Abu Dhabi is “very official.”
“This is a historic event; there hasn’t been a meeting like this since the Madrid Conference,” Hayat said, referring to the 1991 international conference in the Spanish capital aimed at cultivating Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that was attended by Israel and the Palestinians along with Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
Hayat said that the working groups were dealing with the issues of health, energy, education and tolerance, food and water security, tourism, and regional security. Schwartz was reluctant to talk about whether Iranian nuclear ambitions, long a source of concern to Israel and its Arab allies, were under discussion.
She said that, as far as she was aware, Iran was not one of the topics raised for discussions on regional security, but repeated the caveat that this is an ongoing process.
The attendees from each nation gathered in Abu Dhabi on Monday and Tuesday will draft a list of projects covering the six issues in focus, which will then be presented to the foreign ministers of the six nations at their next meeting.