Trump tries to stoke Abraham Accords by recruiting Kazakhstan

With Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman due to visit the White House this month, U.S. President Donald Trump is attempting to inject new life into the Abraham Accords.

First signed five years ago to normalize Israel’s ties with the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, the agreement will be expanded to include the central Asian nation of Kazakhstan, whose population is mostly Muslim, Trump said on Thursday.

Posting on his Truth Social media platform, Trump said he held a three-way call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

The U.S. leader said Kazakhstan would be the first of “many” new countries to join in his second term.

Tokayev said his decision to join the accords was driven primarily by financial benefits, The New York Times reports. “We will get certain dividends from the point of view of economic cooperation,” he said.

Trump has repeatedly coaxed Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader to join the agreement and said that the issue will be on the agenda for their Nov. 18 meeting.

Prince Mohammed, who has said he would like to improve ties with Israel, more recently conditioned signing the accords on the Jewish state agreeing on a “pathway” to Palestinian statehood.

Ackman sees Gaza truce easing Saudi path to Abraham Accords

Milling among the investors crowding the gilded hallways of the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, hedge fund magnate Bill Ackman expressed confidence that Saudi Arabia is moving closer to establishing formal links with Israel.

Ackman, founder of New York-based Pershing Square Capital Management, told The Circuit on Tuesday that he sees the current ceasefire in Gaza easing concerns in the Middle East about joining the 2020 Abraham Accords that normalized Israel’s ties with the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco.

“I think it’ll be in the relative short term,” Ackman said in an interview at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center, where some 9,000 registrants are attending the conference. “I think there’s going to be a major peace dividend coming out of recent positive developments in the resolution of the Israeli-Gaza situation.”

Ackman, 59, whose personal fortune is estimated by Bloomberg at $8.4 billion, bought a nearly 5% stake in the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange last year with his wife Neri Oxman. He said he has also invested in Israeli venture capital funds for the last seven years or so.

Ackman was invited to the conference, often referred to as “Davos in the Desert,” to speak on Tuesday’s panel on geoeconomics, sharing the stage with JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, BlackRock’s Larry Fink and Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon. He said he was also meeting with other business people in the Gulf and talking about the potential of Israel’s regional integration.

“The only thing holding it back, in my view, was geopolitical risk,” Ackman said. “Investors don’t like geopolitical risk. They don’t like terrorism. They don’t like uncertainty.”

If conditions continue in a positive direction, Ackman said the Middle East at large will draw more foreign capital, a key goal of Saudi Arabia amid declining oil prices.

“As uncertainty goes down, as terrorists get set back, as peace deals get made, as the Abraham Accords expand, I think I’m very bullish for the region,” he said.

Dina Powell McCormick, meanwhile, an investment banker and former Deputy U.S. National Security Advisor during President Donald Trump’s first term, told the conference during a panel discussion that the Abraham Accords have played an important role in the Middle East’s economic development over the past five years.

The Israeli-Arab agreement also paved the way for a growing coalition of Arab and Muslim states that announced their support for the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in Gaza and joint international efforts to rebuild the wartorn territory, said Powell McCormick, a former senior Goldman Sachs executive who is now Vice Chairman and President of Global Client Services at BDT & MSD Partners, a U.S. merchant bank.

“I think it’s because, in many ways, the seeds were planted… not just by the United States, but over 50 countries, again, from Egypt and Jordan, the Emiratis, the Qataris, the Turks, the Pakistanis,” Powell McCormick continued. “This is remarkable.”

Powell McCormick, 52, who was born in Egypt before her parents moved to Dallas, Tex., said Saudi Arabia and its neighbors are exercising broad global influence on a scale that could not have been foreseen a decade ago.

“It would have been hard to imagine that this kingdom and this region of the world is now the dominant source of capital for innovation, the dominant source of capital for the change that we’re witnessing in every industry, artificial intelligence, biotech, robotics, longevity,” Powell McCormick said.

N7 spotlights projects that could provide resources for Middle East

What can the Abraham Accords countries learn from an impact investor who is focused on electrifying sub-Saharan Africa?

Angela Homsi said she found herself answering that question from a number of people whom she met at last week’s N7 Conference on Agriculture, Water and Food Security in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Beirut-born Homsi co-founded the renewable energy company Ignite Power as a vehicle for supplying remote villages across the world’s least-connected continent with the tools and infrastructure they need to prosper in the modern world. Teaming up over the past seven years with organizations such as the World Bank, UK Aid Direct, Power Africa and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Homsi has focused on bringing electricity, fresh water and internet access to some of the poorest countries on earth.

Homsi’s company, which has its main offices in the United Arab Emirates and Israel, was one of the Middle Eastern businesses featured at last week’s N7 Conference, a project of the Atlantic Council and Jeffrey M. Talpins Foundation aimed at showing tangible benefits from the normalization of ties between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

“I grew up in these places,” Homsi told The Circuit. “From the start of my career, I’ve wanted to find solutions that would help with the situation in our region.” The one-time Goldman Sachs trader was born to Jewish and Christian parents in the midst of the long-running Lebanese civil war.  

“Our relationship together is not about a few more billions of dollars of bilateral trade, it’s about what our partnership could mean for us in unlocking massive problems that are really global problems,” she said in a Zoom interview from Abu Dhabi.

Ignite’s successes with solar power projects in Rwanda and Mozambique offered lessons in developing processes and smart operations that Homsi hopes can be applied in tandem with the N7 Initiative, which is focused less on senior government officials and more on experts and program-level executives.

“When the water scientists, the ag-tech entrepreneurs and the climate experts pool their knowledge and resources, they can apply solutions to the issues that present challenges, but also opportunities that are common to all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa region,” said the N7’s Initiative director, Daniel Shapiro, who was U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration, from 2011 to 2017.

Homsi said that what she saw at the N7 conference was similar to what Ignite has found critical to its successes in Africa. “We’re bringing to the table each of our separate distinct core competencies… in order to potentially solve problems that are way bigger than just one country.”

The N7 Initiative is working to expand normalization between Israel and Arab and Muslim countries. In October 2021, it convened the first-ever gathering of ministers and other senior officials from Israel, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Bahrain and the UAE. This time four other nations participated that do not have ties with Israel, but preferred not to be identified.

The conference brought together more than 100 politicians, academics and NGO executives in what organizers of the N7 Initiative hoped would be a successful follow-up from January’s Negev Forum working group meetings and the N7’s December conference on education and coexistence.

“At a time when political dynamics are injecting a degree of instability into new regional relationships, participants from 11 different nations convened together to discuss tangible initiatives relating to water, food security and agriculture technologies,” Shalom Lipner, a Jerusalem-based, nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council who worked on the conference in Abu Dhabi, told The Circuit. “Their enthusiasm to propose actual deliverables, real projects that aim to improve quality of life for all peoples of the region, was inspiring and holds the promise for a better future in a beleaguered part of the world.”

The three-day program featured opening keynote remarks from Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s national security advisor, and Nawal Al-Hosany, the UAE’s permanent representative to the International Renewable Energy Agency. Hanegbi expressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to expand the number of countries joining the Abraham Accords.

Meanwhile, the second day’s lunch crowd heard via video link from former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is now executive chairman of the eponymous London-based Institute for Global Change. Following Blair was U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who is co-chair of the Abraham Accords Caucus. Booker was one of a handful of U.S. congressional leaders who had a presence at the event. 

And Homsi said there was a real resonance between the approach that Ignite brings to its projects and remarks to the conference from Ambassador Cindy McCain, permanent representative of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome.

“Producing more with less is crucial to building resilient food systems and requires a united global effort,’ McCain said in taped remarks. McCain is due to become executive director of the UN World Food Program next month.

Israeli Ambassador to the UAE Amir Hayek attended the conference and opened his remarks with a tribute to Emirati President Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed for initiating normalization with Israel under the Abraham Accords. He expressed the hope that the Israeli-Arab agreements would lead to “a new Middle East, a new region [and] new relationships for the benefit of the future of the next generation.”

The N7 initiative held a previous conference in December on education and coexistence and its organizers said there will be more. “We look forward to continuing our support for the governments working to advance regional integration at our upcoming conference,” Oren Eisner, president of the Talpins Foundation, told participants in the closing session.

Is the investment world ready for an Abraham Accords stock index?

More than two years after the White House signing of the Abraham Accords in September 2020, stock index maker Steven Schoenfeld thinks it’s time to give retail and institutional investors an opportunity to profit from the broad business potential unlocked by the agreements.

“When you look at the combined equities markets of the Accords countries or even those countries that are part of [last year’s] Negev Summit, we could create a representative index of maybe 250 different stocks of companies that are benefiting directly or indirectly from the diplomatic outcomes,” Schoenfeld told The Circuit.

Schoenfeld is the CEO of MarketVector Indexes GmbH, which is based in New York and Frankfurt, Germany. He joined the firm in 2020 after it acquired his own company, BlueStar Indexes, which had created a roster of investment gauges built on tech and emerging markets stocks, along with indexes of Israeli stocks and bonds.

The 60-year-old New Yorker has been thinking for several years about ways to create a broader gauge that builds on a theme across the Middle East. The Abraham Accords, in which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan agreed to normalize relations with Israel, made his hunches more realistic, as did the Negev Summit, in which Egypt also participated.

“Beginning in 2013 or 2014, years before the Abraham Accords, we prototyped what we call the “Mideast Peace and Development Index” that would include those countries that had diplomatic or economic relations with Israel,” Schoenfeld said in an interview. “The idea was not for the index to be some sort of political statement, but more a reflection of the impact, or benefit to companies of trade between the countries, including a small number of Palestinian and Jordanian companies.”

Schoenfeld, who earlier in his career was a Fulbright scholar researching the Asian derivatives markets, acknowledged that the idea of an Abraham Accords index was more aspirational, but pointed to a present-day regional opportunity, namely investing in gas and oil developments off the coasts of Israel, Egypt and Lebanon. 

“We’ve already prototyped an index that potentially could represent Eastern Mediterranean energy development,” he said. “Imagine an index with the companies  — that is, the stocks  — involved in the offshore development, which would be players big and small, the likes of Chevron, Total, Delek and Energean.”

Among other prominent companies in the region, Schoenfeld said, “all of the airlines – El Al, Emirates, Etihad – have been big beneficiaries of the Accords, and would be obvious constituents in an index.”

Schoenfeld and his MarketVector colleagues currently create and license indexes that track countries from Australia to Vietnam. Along with his gauges that track the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Israel and Turkey, these hypothetical baskets of stocks are used by fund issuers to create exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that investors can use to “buy” a country’s performance.

A market index is a hypothetical portfolio of investment holdings that represents a segment of the financial market. The calculation of the index value comes from the prices of the underlying holdings. Among the most popular indices used to track the performance of the U.S. stock market are the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 Index and the Nasdaq Composite Index.

In the case of Israel, Summit, N.J.-based fund issuer ETFMG uses MarketVector’s BlueStar Israel Global Technology Index as the underlying gauge for its $118 million BlueStar Israel Technology ETF. ARK Invest, the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based asset management company led by chief investment officer Cathie Wood, uses an index created by gauge maker Solactive for its 76-stock ARK Israel Innovative Technology ETF. 

Together with two others, BlackRock’s iShares MSCI Israel ETF and VanEck Israel ETF, the Israel-focused exchange-traded funds hold a combined $440 million in assets under management. The four ETFs are up 5.3% on average for the year-to-date. The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange benchmark TA-35, a proxy to the Israeli economy similar to the S&P 500, has eked out a 0.8% gain. 

To be sure, the total invested in the four Israel-focused funds represents a tiny portion of the broader $5.75 trillion investment fund universe. 

ETFs have become a top investment choice among both institutional and retail investors in the 30 years since their introduction. In 2022, 146 fund issuers attracted $604 billion in new investor money, at 12.3% annual organic growth, their second-biggest year of inflows despite sharp market declines, data provider FactSet reported earlier this month. 

Until a cross-border index and ETF or other investment vehicle exists, Schoenfeld thinks regional interests could be served for an Israel-focused fund to be listed on the Dubai Financial Market, or for a UAE-oriented fund trading on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

He admits that the phone isn’t ringing off the hook yet with Israeli investors looking for a way to play the new level of regional cooperation. Still, Schoenfeld said, “it’s only a matter of time.”

Robert Lakin is editor of the TLV Strategist newsletter and former markets editor for Bloomberg News in Tel Aviv.

Missing pieces to cultural puzzles appear in UAE-Israel library ties

Nearly 120 years ago, Hermann Burchardt, a German Jewish explorer, was traveling in the Middle East, talking to Arab leaders and taking photographs. 

Among the iconic pictures was what is thought to be the first image of the founding father of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, known as Zayed the First. He was the great-great-grandfather of the current president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Although the pictures Burchardt took in Abu Dhabi became famous in the region and reproduced many times, his personal impressions of the people and places he photographed remained a mystery. He and his fellow travelers were murdered in Yemen in 1909 and his journals were assumed to have been lost. 

Eventually, via the estate of Eugen Mittwoch, a German scholar of Islamic and Judaic studies, Burchardt’s missing diary — and hundreds of pages of correspondence, notes and official documents, together with numerous photos — all found their way to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. 

It was this material that delighted Hamad Al-Mutairi, director of the Archives Department of the Emirates National Library and Archives (NLA), based in Abu Dhabi, when he and other colleagues visited Israel last summer. For Al-Mutairi, seeing the Burchardt collection in Jerusalem was thrilling, and filled in the blanks for his researchers. “We were able to see details about the kind of food he ate, and the type of traditional hospitality given to him at that time as a traveler in the region.”

The Emirati visit — and a memorandum of understanding between the two libraries — is a direct and tangible result of the Abraham Accords, signed initially between Israel and three partners — the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco — in 2020. 

Libraries and their scholars have an open-handed approach to their research. In general, the libraries are inclined to share as has been the case with Burchardt’s collection, in the early stages of collaboration between Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi. The Burchardt material is essential to drawing a fuller picture of the first years of the individual emirates that now make up the UAE. The Israelis have provided Abu Dhabi with digital copies of Burchardt’s diary and the accompanying papers, which will become part of the NLA collection.

“We didn’t stop there,” said Al-Mutairi. “We’re now trying to find the right time to put together some sort of exhibition about Burchardt, charting his journeys across the region. It might be online or it might be physical.” The formal agreement between the two libraries will ensure that the material will marry the holdings that each has; and in the meantime, experts from the two institutions will work together to enrich and expand background information and metadata related to the archive’s contents, including translations, greatly increasing its value to scholars across the globe as a rare reflection of Gulf history.

It’s difficult to know what expectations each library had of the other, before the Abraham Accords enabled them to work together. But today, what they are both keenest on is developing cooperation, based on their separate expertise.

The UAE has built up an enviable body of material based on oral history, while the Israeli library has tended to focus more on physical collections — its Islam and Middle East collection, for example, includes priceless documents and manuscripts not even found in much of the Arab world.

Samuel Thrope, curator of the Islam and Middle East collection in Jerusalem, said he has been talking with colleagues at the NLA about oral history connected to a project on Clinton Bailey, an American-Israeli researcher who spent 50 years documenting Bedouin culture and society.

The Bailey recordings — all 350 hours of them — are “super-interesting,” said Thrope, and chronicle Bedouin life in the Negev and Sinai between the late 1960s and 2009. They have all been cataloged and digitized — and now we are in the process of transcribing them.”

Bailey was in the desert region in 1967 to conduct a series of now legendary interviews with Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion’s kibbutz, Sde Boker, was surrounded by Bedouin tribes and the curious Bailey, when not talking to the retired politician, began talking to the local Bedouin.

“He talked to them about their daily lives,” said Thrope, “about literature, poetry — there were reciters of poetry, people who had memorized different poems. But the conversations also touched on different topics, of society, law, the oral culture that Bedouin had been expanding and observing for many generations. It’s an amazing primary resource.”

But the team learned that a history heavily reliant on oral traditions had its downsides. “Because Bedouin life has changed so much in the past 50 years, even recordings from 20 or 30 years ago — and certainly recordings from 50 years ago — are almost unintelligible. I’m just learning this now as we work with the transcribers, who are themselves young Bedouin living in the south, often in places where the recordings were made. They tell me that almost every sentence has a word that they just don’t know — because the [present-day] Bedouin don’t use it any more.”

The challenge, said Thrope, “of dealing with a language that even native speakers can’t understand” led his team to ask for help from UAE colleagues. “They have produced a series of books in Arabic, called Their Memory, Our History, based on their work. The written history of the UAE is fairly limited, but the oral history is a hugely important part of the national memory. It’s great to have been able to turn to them, they have been incredibly helpful.”

For Al-Mutairi, the opportunity to work with the Jerusalem team on this oral history project allowed the Abu Dhabi library to demonstrate what it had learned about oral history. The Emiratis realized, he said, that the Jerusalem transcribers were dealing “with Arabic, but in a different dialect than we use in this region.” They sat with their Jerusalem counterparts and told them how they dealt with oral history: “There are some requirements to be identified. For example, the speaker or the storyteller, the location of the interview, some keywords which might be useful later on for the retrieval of the information. And the last part is how to publish the material.”

Al-Mutairi said that various Bedouin tribes had very specific terminology “when dealing with camels, or food, or tools for day-to-day activities.” Some of these words have gone into a glossary in the NLA for use with their oral history material — and now it’s hoped that such a glossary will be made available to Jerusalem.

If the NLA is the senior partner in the oral history project, it’s the other way around when it comes to written material, manuscripts and artworks. As Al-Mutairi explains: “We used to be the National Archives only and recently we became the National Library and Archives. Now, we are concentrating on manuscripts and other such material and it’s something new to us. We are sure we will have so much collaboration in that area.”

The Emiratis are expanding what they do, figuring out their acquisition strategy and putting new buildings up for the library work. In that regard they’ve been holding small online workshops with the NLI — itself moving into a grand new building later this year — about how to make the buildings user-friendly.

Separate from the NLA in the capital city of Abu Dhabi, one of the most distinctive new buildings in the UAE is the new Mohammed bin Rashid Library in Dubai, which opened in June and was designed to look like an open book.

The Abraham Accords, said Al-Mutairi, “have opened the door for collaboration and exchange of knowledge between two very experienced teams.” But the Emiratis did not confine their outreach just to the NLI in Jerusalem. They also signed a memorandum of understanding with Haifa University and to date have held two physical and three online workshops with the Haifa academics. They are discussing the possibility of joint research projects between the two institutions, about the topography and geography of the region.

Al-Mutairi was particularly impressed, during his visit to Haifa, to see that the university students “were working in our platform, Arabian Gulf Digital Archives, or AGDA, and they had created a tool and enhanced it. I was really surprised and really happy; I told them that we need to present this to any international event relating to archives.” In fact, an opportunity is coming up soon, when in October 2023 Abu Dhabi hosts the International Archives Congress, which is expected to attract around 5,000 delegates.

Meanwhile there continues to be a flow of visitors between the two countries. Last month, said Al-Mutairi, a delegation of Israelis taking part in a technology conference in Abu Dhabi made a side visit to the NLA. “It’s said that the new oil is data — and we have the data,” he said with a laugh. “The Israelis wanted to know what technology we were using” — specifically, what steps the Emiratis were taking to make the data they are presently collecting, future-proof.

The NLA is exploring new ways of data preservation, updating continuously, conscious that they may run out of physical storage room. One such system is called “PIQL film,” which could allow material to be kept for 2,000 years. The possibilities are being shared with the Israelis.

Both Al-Mutairi and Thrope are clearly excited by the opportunities presented in sharing ideas. “To have the wall break down between our collection and the Arab world through the auspices of the UAE — that’s just great. I would love people from all over the region to benefit from the collections we have, to use them, to study them,” Thrope said. “Having this relationship with Abu Dhabi and Dubai just makes that possible.”

UAE foreign minister marks Abraham Accords anniversary in Israel

JERUSALEM – Israel and the United Arab Emirates celebrated the second anniversary of the Abraham Accords with a series of diplomatic meetings, hailing the rapid development of business and security ties since the White House signing of the normalization agreements.

At the center of last week’s events was UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who met Sept. 15 with Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid and President Isaac Herzog on his first visit to Jerusalem, later going to the Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, to lay a wreath. In the evening, the UAE’s embassy in Israel hosted a celebratory dinner in the seaside city of Herzliya.

“What began as a wish and as an aspiration uniting us all is now an established fact,” Herzog said during the reception at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, according to a statement from his office. “The Abraham Accords transformed, and continue to transform, our region beyond recognition.”

Bin Zayed said it was an honor to be in Israel, telling Herzog earlier in the day at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, “This is historic, but I think in many ways this is a relationship which very few thought that in two years it would be as successful.”

Lapid greeted Bin Zayed at his office in Jerusalem, saying the trip “will advance the regional architecture we have been building this past year in the Middle East.”

The two leaders discussed efforts to strengthen ties between their countries, focusing on economic development and cooperation in the fields of agriculture, energy, water and food security, according to a statement.

Lapid described Bin Zayed’s trip to Israel as “a visit of a close and dear friend, with whom I can talk about everything.” 

The UAE foreign minister also stayed through the weekend and held low-key visits on Sunday to the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation.

The UAE and Israel signed a free trade agreement in May that officials said would generate $10 billion a year in bilateral trade within five years. At least 450,000 Israelis have traveled to the UAE since the Abraham Accords were signed, according to Israel’s ambassador to the UAE, Amir Hayek.

Traveling to Israel with the foreign minister were Reem Ebrahim Al Hashimy, the UAE minister of state for international cooperation; Noura bint Mohammed Al Kaabi, minister of culture and youth; and other senior officials. They were joined during the meeting with Lapid by a group of Israeli government officials including Energy Minister Karine Elharrar, National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata and the prime minister’s military secretary Maj.-Gen. Avi Gil.

Lapid and bin Zayed forged a friendship when they worked closely together on creating the Negev Forum before Lapid became prime minister in June – he previously served as Israel’s foreign minister. The event last March brought together foreign ministers from Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco and the United States.

On Sunday, Lapid’s cabinet approved funding to extend the Negev Forum’s multilateral activities in the fields of food security and water, energy, tourism, health, education and tolerance, and regional security, according to a statement.

“These working groups will create economic and security links which, just a few years ago, we could not have even dreamed of,” Lapid said.

During his visit to Yad Vashem last week, Bin Zayed laid a wreath at the stark Hall of Remembrance: “I am here today to remind ourselves of the lessons that history teaches us and the great responsibility upon us to act with tolerance for building our community and society,” he wrote in the guestbook, according to the Times of Israel. “We must take the brave step of building a bridge of true peace for the coming generations.”

While at Herzog’s residence, Bin Zayed invited the Israeli president to attend the Abu Dhabi Space Dialogue conference in December, according to a UAE government statement. Later, Herzog announced that he plans in the next few months to visit Bahrain, the other Gulf state that signed the Abraham Accords on Sept. 15, 2020. Morocco and Sudan subsequently agreed to normalize relations with Israel.

“The Abraham Accords heralded the return of hope, of dramatic regional change, of a horizon of cooperation and prosperity, of a future that draws its power from the togetherness created in the present,” Herzog said in his dinner speech. “I hope that we shall see more and more groundbreaking accords, including with our close neighbors, the Palestinians, and that the historic process, gaining unimaginable momentum, of Israel’s integration into this region will continue, layer upon layer.”

‘Like the Gold Rush’: Aryeh Lightstone on how much more the Abraham Accords could have been

Aryeh Lightstone, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman’s closest aide, said that the Abraham Accords have “succeeded beyond the imagination of most of the leadership involved” since they were signed two years ago on the White House lawn.

On the other hand, Lightstone said, he believes an additional five to 10 countries would have normalized relations with Israel had former President Donald Trump won a second term and followed the playbook that yielded the historic 2020 agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.

“It would have been like the Gold Rush,” Lightstone, 42, who was chief of staff to Friedman and was appointed special envoy for economic normalization in the Middle East, told The Circuit in an interview. He said the Biden administration could have expanded the cohort of nations initiating ties with Israel if it hadn’t been gripped by “Trump derangement syndrome” and distanced itself from the previous president’s achievements when first taking office. President Joe Biden has since said that he “strongly supports” the Abraham Accords.

Lightstone, an ordained rabbi, now hunts for potential Israeli investments as a consultant to Affinity Partners, the Saudi-backed private equity firm started by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and special White House adviser who led the team that negotiated the Abraham Accords. Lightstone recently wrote a book about his diplomatic experiences titled Let My People Know: The Incredible Story of Middle East Peace – and What Lies Ahead, published by Encounter Books.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Jonathan Ferziger: How would you rate the success of the Abraham Accords thus far?

Aryeh Lightstone: If you want to grade it on a curve, you had a pandemic, you’ve had three Israeli prime ministers and you’ve had two U.S. presidents. You had Iran, China and the Russia and Ukraine issues. I would argue that the Abraham Accords have not only withstood the challenges thrown at it but have grown and succeeded beyond the imagination of most of the leadership involved. Overall, I give it an 8 1/2 out of 10.

Have you been surprised by the way that business connections have developed since the agreements were signed?

What surprises me is that it’s normal. I think that, in and of itself, is remarkable. When [UAE’s] Mubadala invests [$1 billion] in natural gas coming from Israel, it‘s astonishing. If you were to just say that sentence five years ago, nobody would have believed a single component of that. The fact that relations are normal means that normal business circumstances will triumph and what that means is, like any other economic circumstance that becomes deregulated – because ultimately, this was enormous deregulation —- the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, Kosovo, all had regulations [against trading with Israel] that prevented economic growth.

What do these countries actually need from each other? [The] UAE is probably one of the most professional and impressive investment houses that the world has ever seen. So now with those platforms, having access both to direct investments in Israel, and access to Israeli technologies for that platform, you’re going to see deals happen. Bahrain is obviously a separate and a different economy. What are they looking for? An enormous amount of fintech. These deep technology relationships [with Israel] are moving along nicely, and you see them because they’re happening, because they’re not abnormal.

Morocco is a completely different story. I am incredibly bullish on what can happen with Western major multinationals and Israeli technology with a country of 40 million people that is geographically situated in a fantastic time zone. I think Morocco’s going to become the new Ukraine and India for sort of back office, and technological opportunities for multinational, specifically American and Western European, companies.

The Middle East and North Africa region needs Sudan to be a net food producer, and not a net food importer. And I think that you’ve got a lot of meaningful, powerful and visionary leaders who are sitting here rolling up their sleeves saying, how do we bring Sudan back to a time where they are the breadbasket of Africa? Because you’ve got enormous food security challenges, right? And I think you’ve got a confluence of events of Sudan trying to come out of the horrendous histories of the past.

How would the Abraham Accords have developed had President Trump won a second term in office?

I think you’d have had five to 10 more countries as part of the Abraham Accords. It would have been like the Gold Rush of 1848. You would have unadulterated U.S. economic power in the greater Abraham Accords countries like we’ve never seen before in this region. We would be energy independent at home in America. We’d be pivoting as much trade away from China as humanly possible. Imagine taking the Abraham Accords countries and placing meaningful and sustainable industry in Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan and Morocco.

Would Saudi Arabia have normalized relations with Israel?

Saudi Arabia is publicly reported to be a question of when and not if. There’s an economic dividend to be paid. I know Oman sees it. I’m sure Saudi Arabia sees it too. Go look at the greeting that President Biden got when he went to Saudi and look at the greeting that President Trump got when he got to Saudi. What did President Trump run on? When he ran for office the first time, if you remember, as the most Islamophobic racist presidents in America’s history. He ran on the Muslim ban, as it was known in the press, and he shows up to Saudi Arabia. There’s a meeting of dozens, if not close to 100 leaders of the Arab Muslim world. And he comes in and tells them radical Islam is not good for me, but it’s much worse for you. And they respected that and they understood that and they heard that and they greeted him royally. Because I think they appreciated the straight talk.

So you weren’t impressed with how Biden was greeted by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman?

If you look at the conversation around President Biden’s trip, it was ‘Will he or will he not fist-bump or shake hands with the Crown Prince?’ That became the conversation and not the fact that if Saudi modernizes, that will be the single greatest achievement for this part of the world, this part being in the Middle East. There are a billion and a half Muslims who look to Saudi Arabia five times a day. Saudi Arabia can look a lot like Abu Dhabi, or it can look a lot like Afghanistan. I think the world is going to be much better if Saudi continues on the trajectory of looking much more like Abu Dhabi and Dubai. There’s an enormous desire to modernize the country. We should be rooting for their success and we should be helping with their success.

You were given the job of running the $3 billion Abraham Fund, which was set up to promote regional economic cooperation through private sector investment. How did you feel about its demise?

The one thing that upsets me greatly was the canceling of the Abraham Fund. If the United States of America could bring all of these entities together and say, we’re going to do this with Israeli technology and Gulf Cooperation Council support, political and otherwise, we could accelerate that. When you’re dealing with a country like Sudan or with parts of Egypt and elsewhere, and these projects take too long, that gives an opportunity for another coup, for another leadership issue. There’s not a lot of patience.

The money that the United States stipulated for this was not charity. It was a loan. We were going to make our money back. We were going to be a convenient platform. That’s all we needed to do. There’s lots of money in the region to do game-changing projects, but there’s also a lot of disparate personalities and interests. And when the United States of America creates a platform and says, look, this is not going to reach 100% of what you’re looking for but you can’t get there anyway. So we’re going to hit 75% of your to-do list and 50% of their to-do list, and 40% of their to-do list and America is going to this project, the project happens. Instead, these projects just wind up sort of limping along because there is no shepherd shepherding them. It’s not a money issue. It’s a platform issue.

Why wasn’t [former Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu allowed to go to the UAE before he left office and get his share of the glory for signing the Accords?

To the best of my knowledge, he wasn’t treated badly. There was an enormous amount of logistics issues that were happening. Prime Minister Netanyahu deserves enormous credit. The Abraham Accords would not have occurred without him, and history will remember that.

Do you think the Palestinians will ever accept the Abraham Accords?

Yes, because peace is going to win. We live in an information age where the people growing up in Jenin and Ramallah see Dubai and Abu Dhabi. They see Riyadh, they also see Afghanistan. They also see Tehran. They also see Haifa and Tel Aviv. There’s a point in time, where the Palestinians will have leadership that will look out for the future of the Palestinian people and not for their own bank accounts, or whatever it is that the so-called Palestinian leadership look out for. I promise you, they get it. All they need to do is deregulate. It will fly because it is meant to fly. There are too many fantastic things happening.

In writing your book, Let My People Know, what were you trying to add to the sum total of knowledge about what happened behind the scenes of the Abraham Accords?

Every waking moment of that job was a thrill of a lifetime. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. It was people who wanted to do what we wanted to help them to do, so that was fantastic. If these Accords had been led by anybody other than President Trump and, possibly, anybody other than Bibi as the signatory on behalf of Israel, this likely would have been the greatest news story of the last 20 years. Peace breaking out meaningfully in the Middle East. And expanding. It was rapid fire. Every other Friday, there was another country joining and there were countries who were still calling back after President Trump lost the election. There were countries that were still calling after January 6.

This was not a hard mental thing for the current administration to pick up and run with. The fact that they didn’t do it is the height of Trump derangement syndrome. They decided not to go with policies that work because they were affiliated with somebody else. I fear the change in foreign policy over the last 20 months may set us in a direction that is irreversible and may have been one of those points in history where we were able to stop the growth in the outlandish actions of Iran and China and now Russia, and we’ve gone the opposite way. At some point in time, there’s a tipping point where they will just be unstoppable. I pray that we’re not there. But we were at the point where they were stopping and we reaccelerated them and that’s why I wrote the book. It’s not a Republican thing. It’s not a Democratic thing. The Abraham Accords are in all of our interests. And I tried to describe that because nobody knows who I am. Nobody cares who I am. Nobody should care who I am. I’m a guy who was on the ground and who saw peace happening. And people should be excited about that. Peace is a good thing.

UAE-Israel cyber intelligence firm grows with its perch in the Gulf

Years before the Abraham Accords enabled Emiratis and Israelis to openly run businesses together, Abdulla Baqer operated a back-channel in Dubai that brought Israel’s cybersecurity expertise to the Arab world. Working with intelligence veterans in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere, the charismatic entrepreneur helped facilitate the growing commercial ties that were poking through the longtime Arab-Israeli divide.

Those were days when Israel’s computer startups were becoming competitive with Silicon Valley for government contracts around the world. Check Point Software Technologies and CyberArk were sensations on Wall Street and virtually every country in the world sought access to the smartphone-penetrating software made by Israel’s NSO Group. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who made a groundbreaking public visit to the Sultanate of Oman in 2018, often described cyber know-how as the linchpin of Israeli diplomacy. Today, Israel is using a similar formula to strengthen ties with Saudi Arabia, the region’s biggest economy.

After the Accords were signed at the White House two years ago, Baqer and his partners unveiled Black Wall Global, a firm that finds little need these days to obscure its mission of marketing Israeli technology to nations that have been reluctant to deal directly with the Jewish state. Baqer, 45, is also co-president of the UAE-Israel Business Council, through which he coaches Israelis on using the United Arab Emirates as a platform for dealing with Arab markets.

“There are a lot of countries that don’t allow Israeli companies to set up shop,” Baqer told The Circuit. “They can always come to the UAE, partner with a UAE company and basically go out and be sold as an Emirati company.”

With Baqer in Dubai, Black Wall is led by a collection of Israeli intelligence veterans and computer scientists. Chairman Asher Ben Artzi worked for 34 years in Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency and its National Police force, becoming director of the Israeli branch of Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization. Khoo Boon Hui, who was president of Interpol after retiring as Singapore’s police commissioner, is Black Wall’s honorary president. Others include CEO Anri Amir David, a consultant to Israeli defense contractors and fellow at Russia’s International Academy of Technological Sciences; and Arik Barbing, former director of the Shin Bet’s cyber division.

“We cover it all, from intelligence to cyber defense, border control and protection of critical infrastructure facilities and big data,” Black Wall says on its website. “We provide governments, law enforcement, security forces, and global enterprises with the highest level of safety and security.”

Black Wall is one of the smaller Israeli-led companies that have prospered in the new atmosphere of normalized relations with the Gulf states. Israel and the UAE signed a free-trade agreement in May that eliminates most tariffs and is projected to bring annual trade between the two countries over the next five years to more than $10 billion.

The biggest deal between the Emirates and Israel has been Delek Drilling’s $1 billion sale last year of its stake in an offshore Mediterranean gas field to the UAE’s Mubadala Petroleum. State-owned Israel Aerospace Industries has signed drone-development deals with Edge Group, a government-owned defense company in the UAE. And OurCrowd, a Jerusalem-based venture capital investment platform, set up a subsidiary in the UAE and last November became the first Israeli VC registered by the Abu Dhabi Global Market to operate in the emirate

Baqer points out that the path to Gulf-Israel joint ventures was paved by the Israeli companies that he said operated for decades “under the radar.” The practice, he explained, was to register affiliated corporate entities in third countries and operate through Israeli dual citizens with separate passports who could travel to Arab countries that didn’t have diplomatic relations with Israel.

In the lore of secret dealmaking, the experience of AGT International stands out. The company, led by Israeli entrepreneur Moti Kochavi, won a contract from the Abu Dhabi government in 2008 to create a “smart city” network of surveillance cameras, electronic fences and sensors that paid about $6 billion over seven years. During that period, AGT’s Israeli affiliate, Logic Industries, ferried dozens of engineers each week on an unmarked charter plane between its headquarters in Israel and the UAE capital, according to some of the employees involved who lived in a secure compound under made-up names.

Another example is Israeli defense contractor Elbit Industries, whose American subsidiary had a contract with the Saudi government to sell and service TOW anti-tank missile systems. The relationship came under strain when an employee of Elbit’s American unit died under mysterious circumstances while working in the northwestern Saudi city of Tabuk and the company required Israeli and U.S. diplomatic intervention to retrieve the body.

Now, as president of the new business council, Baqer helps Israelis develop their frontal approach, explaining the nuances of Emirati business culture and guiding them not to expect quick results.

“So many companies came to the UAE at the beginning of [the Abraham Accords] and then they disappeared,” Baqer said. “We decided that we need to help educate Israelis about how Emiratis think and Emiratis about how Israelis think so that they can avoid making mistakes.”

Baqer’s knack for navigating the sensitive realm of Arab-Israeli relations impressed the Israeli founders of the UAE-Israel Business Council. He’s become instrumental in the council’s efforts to promote building further contacts in the Gulf.

“The most interesting thing about trade with the UAE [and Israeli companies] is not so much what trade they’re going to do with the UAE but what trade they’re going to do through the UAE,” Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a co-founder of the business council and a deputy mayor of Jerusalem, told The Circuit. “For any Israeli companies that see themselves trading with the East, Dubai and Abu Dhabi are very interesting hubs for them to do it through.”

Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid has sought to expand Israel’s relations with Arab countries and enlisted U.S. help during President Joe Biden’s Middle East trip in July. Biden wrote in The Washington Post that he flew directly from Israel to Saudi Arabia for a summit meeting with Gulf Cooperation Council leaders in Jeddah as a “small symbol of the budding relations and steps toward normalization between Israel and the Arab world, which my administration is working to deepen and expand.”

Affinity Partners, a private equity firm founded by Jared Kushner, the former White House adviser and son-in-law of former President Donald Trump, plans to invest millions of dollars in Israeli startups from the $2 billion it raised from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Israelis with experience in trade with Saudi Arabia said much has changed in recent years. “It used to be, OK, pretend to be American, pretend to be British, pretend to be this or that,” Shmuel Bar, chief executive of Herzliya, Israel-based IntuView, told The Circuit before Biden’s trip. “That’s no longer the case. When you talk to them, it’s not, ‘let’s play make-believe.’”

Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir said during Biden’s visit that normalization with Israel was a “strategic option,” but only if Israel agrees first to a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

Hassan-Nahoum, 48, who grew up in Gibraltar, where her father was mayor and chief minister of the British territory, said Israel’s commercial relations with Saudi Arabia are following a “similar pathway” to the business links with the UAE before the Abraham Accords, when an estimated 200 companies were engaged with the tiny Gulf state. She said many Israeli companies in fields ranging from food-tech to renewable energy are now operating discreetly in the Saudi kingdom.

“We may not get a big shiny ceremony on the White House lawn, but I think Saudi Arabia is in the process of normalizing quietly with Israel,” Hassan-Nahoum said.

Two years after Abraham Accords, Israel promotes joint travel packages with the UAE

Planning a trip to Israel but already familiar with all the most-visited holy sites and tourist attractions? Now, veteran and new visitors to the country can add a once-unthinkable dimension to their trip: an additional stop in Dubai or Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

Taking advantage of the warmed ties brought on by the Abraham Accords – and the short three-hour flight from Tel Aviv to the Gulf – Israel’s Ministry of Tourism announced last week that it is ramping up its marketing of two-country travel packages, Israel-UAE, for U.S. tourists, with a focus on luring the Jewish community.

Boosting tourism was named as an explicit goal as part of the effort to advance political and economic cooperation between the countries party to the September 2020 normalization agreements. The foreign ministers of Israel, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco and the UAE, as well as U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, also discussed attracting more tourists during the Negev Summit earlier this year.

Over the past two years, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Israeli tourists have flocked not just to the UAE, but also to Bahrain and Morocco.

“The Abraham Accords opened a new scope and a new opportunity that helps us to galvanize our relationships in the region, and an aspect of that is also the option to have tourism packages together,” Kobby Barda, deputy general director of Israel’s Tourism Ministry, told The Circuit last week.

Barda said the concept of visiting Israel and the UAE during one combined trip would especially benefit U.S. tourists because, he noted, most transatlantic visitors spend more days traveling to the region than travelers coming from Europe because the journey takes longer.

“It’s like if we [Israelis] visit the United States and decide to travel between the East Coast and West Coast or something of that nature,” Barda pointed out. “It just gives tourists wider leisure and travel options.”

While Israel’s Ministry of Tourism has a weighty marketing budget of some $100 million per year to promote travel to Israel, but it does not sell travel packages. Roughly $2 million of the ministry’s budget, Barda said, targets tourism options with, and in, the UAE – working to sell the concept to local tour operators and coordinating between Israel’s national airline, El Al, and Emirati carriers. The effort extends to several of the ministry’s North America offices: New York, Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Since the signing of the Accords, the ministry’s U.S. operation has conducted webinars with hundreds of travel agents in North America and held in-person events in New York and Toronto. In November, the ministry will participate in the annual conference of the United States Tour Operators Association, where it will hold a joint event with representatives from Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

Barda told The Circuit that while the financial investment in developing tourism options with the UAE was high, it was not “solely about the money” or the return on investment. Working together with a country that until two years ago had no diplomatic ties with Israel and promoting this new partnership was important for diplomatic reasons too, he said.

Strengthening Israel’s new ties with the UAE notwithstanding, Barda also said the concept of a joint Israeli-UAE tourism package would be valuable for the American Jewish community.

“With evangelical Christians, their focus is on the Bible and Israel, but when you go to a liberal Jewish audience, the coexistence, the cooperation and the establishment of a relationship between what was just a fantasy a few years ago, is very appealing,” he said. “If you’ve already decided to cross the Atlantic, then you are probably going to opt for a longer vacation, so how about combining it together with a trip that will allow you to see the strong relations that have been developing between the UAE and Israel?”

Eyal Carlin, who serves as Israel’s tourism commissioner to North America and who has overseen the development of the Israel-UAE travel package since its inception, said, however, that it had been well-received by both Jewish and non-Jewish groups in the U.S. 

“I know of operators who sell Israel as a destination for Christian groups and who have now added the UAE to their trips,” he told The Circuit. Although he said he could not provide exact figures of how many people this past summer had opted for the two-country trek, overall tourism from the U.S. to Israel increased by 4% in July, compared to 2019 – the last figures before the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Carlin said the idea to market Israel and the UAE as a joint travel destination arose not long after the Accords, but the implementation of the marketing plan was slowed due to COVID-19 restrictions on travel.

“Once the agreements were signed, the Emirates were very eager to work together with us,” he said, explaining how, based on its success so far, Israel would also begin exploring similar options with other regional countries, including Morocco and Bahrain, as well as Cyprus and Greece.

Weekly Circuit: Electric vehicle pioneer drives growth of startups + Turkey reconciles with Israel

GOING PLACES

An electric vehicle pioneer drives growth of Mideast transportation startups

Michael Granoff, whose $160 million venture capital fund invests in companies that expand the way people get from one place to another, hates driving the family car to work. Granoff, founder and managing partner of Maniv Mobility, generally commutes to his Tel Aviv office from a northern suburb by train, bus, taxi or riding with a neighbor. For a meeting across town, he often hops on one of the motorized rental scooters clustered on city sidewalks. “I prefer anything than having to sit in traffic and not be productive and be frustrated and then having to park,” Granoff, 53, toldThe Circuit’s Jonathan Ferziger. “It actually doesn’t cost me more.”

Self-driving cars: Granoff is not just trying to save money. He’s an evangelist and battle-scarred veteran in the global revolution to widen vehicular choices. To date, Maniv has made investments in 37 companies spread across eight countries. The businesses range from designing sensors in Israel for self-driving cars and running a Tesla ride-sharing service in Manhattan to unleashing electric scooters on the United Arab Emirates.

Gulf ventures: It’s the Gulf that gets him jazzed these days. Just a week after the UAE and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords with Israel at the White House on Sept. 15, 2020, Granoff jumped on a plane. He was soon introduced to the founders of Fenix, which runs the Emirati scooter fleet, and made his first investment — $3.8 million — in the company. “Dubai is becoming a bit of a technology magnet for the Arab world in a similar way that the [San Francisco] Bay Area is, and the government there is committed to nurturing the tech sector and entrepreneurship,” Granoff said. “I think there will be lots more opportunity over time.”

Better Place burns: Granoff grew up in New York City, the son of clothing maker and philanthropist Martin Granoff, who is also a champion horse breeder. Among the younger Granoff’s biggest investments was Better Place, an ambitious effort in Israel at building a charging network for electronic vehicles, or EVs. Founded by charismatic entrepreneur Shai Agassi, the company enchanted investors including Israel’s Idan Ofer, France’s Groupe Renault, HSBC and Morgan Stanley. Better Place burned through $1 billion in capital before going bankrupt in 2013.

Back in business: Around that time, Granoff moved to Israel with his wife and four children, where he established Maniv Mobility in an effort to find alternatives to gasoline-fueled engines. EV purchases have soared by 70% in Israel over the past year with more than 10,000 new vehicles on the road. Granoff’s resilience after Better Place’s demise has established him as an important investor today for early-stage mobility companies, said Brian Blum, author of Totaled: The Billion-Dollar Crash of the Startup that Took on Big Auto, Big Oil and The World. “It was a real blow to have this thing that he believed in so much fall apart,” Blum told The Circuit. “The thing is it didn’t stop him from continuing on his mission of investing in the future of mobility and technology. You know, he just jumped right back into it.”

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