The Abraham Accords, 2020 to now

What happened

On Sept. 15, 2020, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords at the White House, establishing formal diplomatic relations between Israel and two Gulf Arab states that had never recognized it. ¹ The Trump administration brokered the agreements, with Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Avi Berkowitz as the lead negotiators. ¹ Sudan agreed to join in October 2020 and formally signed the accompanying declaration in January 2021. Morocco joined in December 2020. ¹

The accords produced concrete changes fairly quickly: direct phone links between Israel and the UAE, new business activity in venture capital, fintech, and law, defense cooperation agreements with Morocco, and a wave of flights and tourism between Israel and the Gulf states that hadn't existed before. ¹

The list stayed at four countries for years. That changed on Nov. 6-7, 2025, when Kazakhstan's foreign ministry announced the country's accession to the accords, following a meeting between President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and President Trump at the White House, with a joint call including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ² Kazakhstan's government described the move as consistent with its "balanced, constructive, and peaceful foreign policy," and said it did not affect Kazakhstan's other bilateral relationships. ²

Then, on Dec. 26, 2025, Israel recognized Somaliland, the self-declared, unrecognized breakaway state in the Horn of Africa, as an independent country, the first nation in the world to do so. Prime Minister Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar signed the joint declaration with Somaliland's president, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi. Netanyahu called the move an action taken "in the spirit of the Abraham Accords," and Somaliland's president said his country would move to join the framework itself. Somalia's government rejected the recognition as a violation of its sovereignty, and the move drew objections from Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the African Union. ³

As of this writing, Saudi Arabia has not joined. Saudi officials have consistently said normalization with Israel requires meaningful movement toward Palestinian statehood, and no agreement has been reached on that condition. ¹ Sudan sits in a similar holding pattern from a different direction: it signed on to the general declaration in early 2021, but the country's own instability since then has kept it from finishing a bilateral normalization agreement with Israel. ¹

Why it still matters

The Abraham Accords broke a decades-old pattern in which Arab recognition of Israel had come only after wars, as with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. The Gulf states that signed in 2020 had no war with Israel to end. They normalized relations because their governments calculated it served their own interests, security cooperation against Iran, trade, technology, without requiring a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict first. That was the break from the old assumption, going back to the "land for peace" framework after 1967, that Arab recognition would be the reward for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement rather than something that could happen alongside it, or before it.

That is also what makes the accords contested. Palestinian leadership has criticized each new signing as a country moving forward without them, weakening whatever leverage a unified Arab position once gave the Palestinian cause. The Somaliland recognition tested that dynamic in a different direction, since it had nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at all and instead extended the "Abraham Accords" brand to an unrelated territorial recognition dispute in Africa, which is part of why it drew regional pushback beyond the usual critics. ³

Whether Saudi Arabia eventually joins remains the biggest open question hanging over the whole framework. Saudi recognition would be a different order of event than Kazakhstan's, given Saudi Arabia's role as custodian of Islam's two holiest sites and its influence across the Muslim world, and it is the one addition the framework's architects have wanted most since 2020. ¹

Kazakhstan's accession points to where the framework might actually keep growing in the meantime: not necessarily toward more Arab states weighing the Palestinian question, but toward Muslim-majority countries elsewhere that already have working relationships with Israel and see joining as a low-cost, high-visibility way to signal alignment with Washington. Kazakhstan had maintained diplomatic ties with Israel since 1992; joining the accords didn't change an underlying relationship so much as put a name on one that already existed. ² That is a different kind of addition than the Gulf breakthroughs of 2020, and it's a preview of how the list of members may keep expanding even without a Saudi deal.

The words you'll hear

Normalization. The general term for establishing formal diplomatic relations, embassies, and open trade with Israel, as distinct from a peace treaty ending an actual war.

The Accords / the Abraham Accords framework. Used both narrowly, for the original 2020 agreements, and broadly, for the growing list of countries that have since joined or aligned themselves with it. ¹

Accession. The term used when a new country formally joins the framework, as Kazakhstan did in November 2025. ²

"In the spirit of the Abraham Accords." A phrase Israeli officials have used to describe actions, like the Somaliland recognition, that extend the accords' logic of unilateral normalization to situations outside the original Middle East context. ³