Bombarded by requests for personal assistance from startup executives hoping to launch operations in the United Arab Emirates, Israeli Ambassador Amir Hayek has developed a technique for identifying the winners and being candid with the rest.

“In one hour, I meet 11 companies,” said Hayek, Israel’s first ambassador to the oil-pumping Gulf state, whose first encounters often take place through a Zoom screen. “It’s speed-dating. Some I tell not to come, some I say if you make a little switch in your approach, you can meet Emirati needs, and some I say, run, because we are looking for the technology you’ve got.”

While the silver-haired, 58-year-old diplomat escorts Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and other Israeli officials in Abu Dhabi when they meet Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who acceded last month to become president of the UAE, it’s the business side of the job that lights him up. Since the Abraham Accords were signed on the White House lawn in September 2020, normalizing ties with the UAE and Bahrain, the Gulf states have become some of Israel’s biggest trade partners.

Hayek ticks off several reasons why the UAE offers a unique opportunity for Israeli companies: access to capital from some of the world’s biggest investment funds; a diverse expatriate workforce; its position as an international shipping and logistics hub; a government-led “infrastructure for innovation” that includes grants and tax incentives; and the country’s willingness to serve as a beachhead to markets in Arab and Islamic states that Israelis haven’t been able to reach before.

“You might find each and every one of these in another country, but combined, you can find them only in the UAE,” he said from Abu Dhabi in a Zoom interview with The Circuit.

Israel and the UAE signed a free-trade agreement in May that will eliminate customs duties from both countries on some 96 percent of goods, including food, agricultural products, cosmetics, medications and medical equipment. Last week, the Dubai International Chamber announced it will open a Tel Aviv office to help connect Emirati and Israeli businesses. Bilateral trade is projected to increase from $1 billion to $10 billion over the next five years.

Hayek, whose fluent Arabic comes from growing up in an Iraqi Jewish family that fled persecution in Baghdad in the 1950s, says the precarious state of Israel’s current coalition government won’t keep trade with the Gulf from growing. In April, Bennett lost his majority in the 120-seat parliament, and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is gathering strength to make a comeback.

“Any Israeli government will support the Abraham Accords,” Hayek said. “Even if the government falls, you won’t see any gap.”

Similarly, he sees little chance that the UAE will pull out of the U.S.-brokered normalization deal it signed alongside Bahrain. Morocco and Sudan joined  soon after. Hayek said he wasn’t ruffled when he was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Abu Dhabi last month to hear the UAE’s official protest against Israel’s response to clashes with Palestinians at holy sites in Jerusalem.

“We had a good conversation,” he said. “You can tell one thing about the Emiratis – they don’t watch the movie from the middle. They play the movie from the beginning to the end. I trust that the Emiratis see the whole picture and understand what happened on the Temple Mount. No one wants anything bad to happen there and Israel is doing its best to keep the status quo. I hope we will not see those scenes again.”

The Palestinian Authority opposed the Abraham Accords and argues that Arab countries should reject normalization until a just solution is found to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Saudi Arabia, the biggest Arab economy, maintains that fairly addressing Palestinian concerns must precede establishing official ties with Israel. U.S. President Joe Biden is planning a Mideast trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia in July that may include a meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

By the end of 2022, the UAE-Israel Business Council expects that close to 1,000 Israeli companies will be operating inside the UAE – or through it to manage activities in the Middle East and Asia. The largest deal between the two countries was the 22% stake that Mubadala Petroleum bought in Israel’s offshore Tamar gas field from Delek Drilling for $1 billion in 2020. It may soon sell half of that to an Israeli investor.

The giant energy company is controlled by Mubadala Investment Co., an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, which has more than $230 billion in assets under management and has invested about $100 million in Israeli venture capital firms. OurCrowd, a Jerusalem-based funding platform for startups with multiple investments in the Gulf, was the first Israeli VC to open an office in the UAE that is licensed to operate in the Abu Dhabi Global Market financial center.

Hayek, a father of four, grew up in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikvah and graduated with an accounting degree from Tel Aviv University. He has held a series of senior positions in the Israeli government, including director-general of the Industry and Trade Ministry. Hayek was also at various points chief of the Israeli Export Institute, the Israel Manufacturers Association and the Israel Hotel Association.

“He’s a talented connector,” said Shalom Lipner, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, who recalled that Hayek was invaluable when the Washington-based think tank organized its N7 conference in the Abu Dhabi desert last year, attracting senior officials from all the Arab countries that have official ties with Israel, including Egypt and Jordan.

“With his track record in business and government, Hayek has the right skill-set to manage the delicate details of bringing Arabs and Israelis together,” said Lipner, who was a policy advisor and strategist during his government career for seven Israeli prime ministers.

Hayek’s small staff in the UAE, supplemented by temporary personnel sent from Jerusalem, will grow this year to house one of the largest commercial delegations of any Israeli embassy in the world, he said. Among possible joint ventures are proposals for Emirati investment in Israeli energy exploration, rail projects, airports and seaports, he said. Israeli technology companies with the best chances of success in the UAE are involved with water conservation, energy, telemedicine, medical devices, agrotech, foodtech and fintech, according to Hayek. He also said he’s in frequent touch with his counterpart, Mohamed Al Khaja, the UAE ambassador to Israel.

“We didn’t come here for a 200-meter sprint and neither did the Emiratis,” he said. “We came to run the marathon. We came to build this right, to build the infrastructure, to let people get to know each other, to know each other’s manners, habits, way of doing business, and it takes time. We started very quickly and we are running faster every day.”

As an early investor in WeWork, Michael Eisenberg says he doesn’t let the inevitable ups and downs of a young, disruptive company shake his faith when he strongly believes in its product.

Similarly, the co-founder of Tel Aviv-based venture capital fund Aleph is confident in Israel’s budding relationship with the Arab Gulf states and excited about the prospects the ties present for the more than 40 companies in his investment portfolio. Ongoing conflict with the Palestinians and lingering hostility even in countries such as Egypt and Jordan that signed peace treaties, he said, are unlikely to derail the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel’s ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.

“The Emiratis are relationship people and they believe in long-term relationships,” said Eisenberg, 51, a native New Yorker who immigrated to Israel after college and whose fund has about $850 million under management. “It will last if we build trust.”

Aleph’s stable of startups has proven attractive to Gulf investors. Freightos, an online marketplace that helps businesses find favorable sea and air cargo shipping rates, said last week that Qatar Airways is among its investors — together with FedEx and several airlines in Europe and Latin America. The disclosure came as Freightos agreed to merge with Tel Aviv-based Gesher, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that will give it a Nasdaq listing and a pro forma enterprise value of about $435 million. Freightos is registered in the Cayman Islands. It has offices in Jerusalem; Hong Kong; Barcelona, Spain; Miami, Florida; and Ramallah, in the West Bank.

Aleph itself was one of six funds chosen by Mubadala, the $250 billion sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, to distribute $100 million in investment to Israeli startups, according to the Wall Street Journal. Eisenberg declined to confirm the report, though he said Mubadala executives recently came to visit his team at Aleph’s airy downtown Tel Aviv office, which is in a restored century-old hotel on Rothschild Boulevard.

“I’m super bullish about the Emirates serving not only as a target market, not only as a place for joint ventures, but also as a gateway to Asia,” Eisenberg said. Saudi Arabia, which has many business ties with Israeli companies but has resisted the normalization drive, will come to terms with Israel eventually, he said. President Joe Biden is mulling plans to visit both Israel and Saudi Arabia next month.

The other funds distributing Mubadala Investment Co.’s money to Israeli technology companies are Mangrove Capital Partners, Entrée Capital, Viola Ventures, Pitango and MizMaa, according to the Journal.

Eisenberg stuck with WeWork in the shared-office space business even as other investors pulled out when a planned IPO was scrapped in October 2019. That sent the company’s market valuation plummeting from $47 billion to $8 billion and forced CEO Adam Neumann to resign. Neumann, a former Israeli Navy officer who acquired U.S. citizenship, raised billions of dollars from Japan’s Softbank Vision Fund, whose primary investors were Mubadala and the $600 billion Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. WeWork finally went public through a SPAC merger in October 2021 and is currently worth roughly $4.5 billion, down 18 percent since the end of last year.

“Very few people could have transformed the real estate market the way he did and if you walk into any office now, they’re all designed like WeWork,” Eisenberg said, noting that the company sells $3 billion in services annually. “You know, it takes a little bit of crazy to be an entrepreneur and be told ‘no’ all the time and be abused by the press all the time. And you know, God bless [Neumann] and God bless [new CEO] Sandeep Mathrani for taking it over.”

Eisenberg, an Orthodox Jew and Yeshiva University graduate who covers his head with a yarmulke and lives in Jerusalem, has eight children and writes books in Hebrew applying biblical wisdom to investing. His The Tree of Life and Prosperity: 21^st Century Business Principles from the Book of Genesis was published in English last year. His latest book, Milk, Honey and Uncertainty, hasn’t yet come out in translation. He said regular visits to the Gulf has given him a better appreciation of Islam and reinforced the belief he describes in his books as “respectful tribalism.”

Besides Freightos, Aleph’s interests include Windward, a favorite of risk managers that uses online mapping and artificial intelligence to track maritime traffic around the world. It trades on the London Stock Exchange and Eisenberg says the company has benefited from the global breakdown in shipping logistics.

“Business is good because whenever there are sanctions, you want to know what’s really happening on the seas,” he said. “Not just that, but at the same time we’ve had these COVID-19 lockdowns in China and the supply chain is all snarled up. People want to know, where are my goods?”

Other standouts in Eisenberg’s portfolio include empathy.com, an online platform that helps relatives handle the details of death, such as dealing with probate court, funeral arrangements and settling finances. Healthy.io, which developed a telemedicine app that enables patients with chronic kidney failure to take a urine test at home and deliver the data to a lab by smartphone for analysis, is another Aleph investment.

For Israel, much of the value of normalization with the Gulf is its geographical position and longtime experience as a platform to reach the most dynamic nations and business centers in Southeast Asia, including India and Indonesia, Eisenberg said.

“This whole Eastern Rim opens up to Israel via the Emirates, and it’s going to be very meaningful because Asia is ascendant,” Eisenberg said. “I think you’re going to see alignment between the ascendant nations going forward. Israel and the Emirates are a big part of that.”

The free-trade agreement signed yesterday between the United Arab Emirates and Israel is generating interest among investors in Saudi Arabia who are patiently making plans for the possibility their own government will soon normalize relations with the Israelis, an Emirati venture capitalist said.

“I would expect that Saudi businessmen are just going to watch, learn and try to position themselves for if and when anything opens up” with Israel, said Sabah al-Binali, executive chairman of OurCrowd Arabia, a UAE-based unit of Israel’s OurCrowd venture capital platform.

Al-Binali spoke to reporters following a ceremony yesterday in Dubai in which Israeli Minister of Economy and Industry Orna Barbivai and Emirati Minister of State for Foreign Trade Thani Al Zeyoudi signed the agreement. Some 96 percent of goods traded between the two countries, including food, agricultural products, cosmetics, medications and medical equipment, will be exempt from customs duty under the pact.

The effort to tear down trade barriers between Israel and the UAE comes nearly two years after the two nations and the Gulf state of Bahrain signed the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between the former Middle East adversaries. U.S. President Joe Biden is preparing a visit to the Jewish state in late June amid indications that his administration is pressing the Saudis to allow more open business relations with Israel.

Those include a report in the Israeli business publication Globes that dozens of Israeli executives have been allowed to enter Saudi Arabia recently using their Israeli passports, instead of being required to use second passports from other countries, as has long been the practice. Two senior Biden administration officials, meanwhile, traveled to Riyadh last month to discuss a possible agreement between Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt that would increase oil production in the region, according to Axios. The White House is also pressing for an agreement finalizing the transfer of two Red Sea islands from Egyptian to Saudi sovereignty, which would facilitate the oil deal.

As Arabs and Israelis grow more comfortable with each other, Al-Binali said it’s time to start work on a more comprehensive regional framework for the holdouts to the Abraham Accords: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman. The pact signed in Dubai covers regulatory enforcement, customs regulations, government procurement, protection of intellectual property rights and e-commerce.

“It’s one thing to go do six bilateral free-trade agreements,” Al-Binali said in the discussion with reporters by Zoom. “The interesting question is can Israel end up at some point in the future doing a single, bilateral, free-trade agreement with the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] itself? Let’s not forget that the GCC is its own economic and political bloc.”

Trade between the UAE and Israel is expected to reach $5 billion in the “upcoming few years,” Al Zeyoudi said last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He said trade volume between the two countries since the Abraham Accords were signed has already exceeded $2.5 billion and will probably exceed $2 billion in 2022.

A private-equity fund run by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald Trump who led negotiations on the Abraham Accords, has arranged a deal to invest millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in Israeli startups, the Wall Street Journal reported last month. Jerusalem-based OurCrowd, which invests in some 340 companies through its crowdfunding platform and is the first Israeli venture capital firm licensed in the UAE through the Abu Dhabi Global Market, hired Al-Binali to run its operations in the Gulf.

Al-Binali minimized concern that the UAE might retreat from its growing ties with Israel because of recurring friction with the Palestinians, including clashes in East Jerusalem and the death of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh during a firefight between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank city of Jenin.

“The Emirati culture is one that, yes, you can sit there and say we don’t like this or we like that and so on, but you know, we stay on course,” Al-Binali said, noting that the relationship was already “stress-tested” by the Israel-Hamas missile battles in Gaza in May 2021. Emiratis “spend a lot of time thinking about these things, and I believe that we will see a lot of resilience.”

CASABLANCA, Morocco – From the Arab Gulf states to northern Africa, Israel is trying to sew up the normalization pacts it signed nearly two years ago by sharing its pioneering answers to drought, desertification and fossil-fuel replacement.

That’s what brought Orit Farkash-Hacohen, Israel’s minister of innovation, science and technology, to Morocco this week with a cohort of startup companies focused on addressing the region’s climate and energy nightmares.

“I’m here to say that Israel’s innovation, talent, our people and our minds can and should be a partner,” Farkash-Hacohen told an Israel-Moroccan business conference in Casablanca on Wednesday. “We are committed for this cooperation to succeed.” The conference was sponsored by Start-Up Nation Central, a nonprofit group that promotes Israeli technology companies.

The Israeli cabinet minister, a member of the Blue & White party in Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s governing coalition, is scheduled to be in the capital city of Rabat on Thursday to sign a memorandum of understanding with her Moroccan counterpart, Abdellatif Miraoui, minister of higher education, scientific research and innovation. The broad agreement will cover cooperative efforts in agricultural technologies, water management, water desalination, renewable energy and artificial intelligence, Farkash-Hacohen said.

Her visit to Morocco follows a similar trip to the United Arab Emirates in October 2021 that covered joint activities in the realms of climate and energy, but also focused on cooperation between the two countries on space exploration, including Israel’s Beresheet 2 unmanned lunar landing mission.

“I hope this will echo a more moderate voice in the Middle East and in Africa,” Farkash-Hacohen told The Circuit in a brief interview on the sidelines of the conference. “We are facing a lot of extremists in our neighborhood. This is an alliance of the moderate countries.”

The 51-year-old minister, former chairwoman of the Israel Electric Authority, a regulatory body, and previously minister of strategic affairs, acknowledged that much of Israel’s new business ties with Arab countries follow years of defense cooperation.

“It’s no secret that a lot of the Israeli high-tech industry’s success stems from the army and the technology assets that we have,” Farkash-Hacohen said in the interview. “Our security industries have produced a lot of great ideas that transfer to commercial industry. We see that in space and telecommunications. We see that in cyber. I think that now we should share that expertise with our friends.”

Moroccan officials agreed that Israel’s technological prowess is attractive to them. Three cabinet ministers attended the first day of the Casablanca conference; Morocco’s former energy minister, Amina Benkhadra, said the two countries should make good partners.“We are facing the same challenges of desertification, water security and climate change impact,” said Benkhadra, now director of the National Office of Hydrocarbons and Mines. “We are aware that Israel has a lot of capabilities in many sectors so I think this partnership can be very fruitful,” she told The Circuit, adding, “You have to seize opportunities in this world of crisis.”

The Circuit attended the conference as a guest of Start-Up Nation Central.

Trade between the United Arab Emirates and Israel is expected to reach $5 billion in the “upcoming few years,” Emirati Minister of State for Foreign Trade Thani Ahmed Al Zeyoudi predicted at the 2022 Davos World Economic Forum.

Al Zeyoudi detailed the economic benefit from the Abraham Accords at a Davos session titled “The Future of the Abraham Accords” alongside co-panelists Dorit Dor, the chief product and technology officer at Check Point Software Technologies Ltd; Stuart Eizenstat, the State Department’s special adviser on Holocaust issues and partner at Covington & Burling law firm, who currently serves as the State Department’s Special Advisor on Holocaust Issues; and Khalid Bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, an advisor to Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.

Less than two years since the signing of the historic normalization agreements, the trade volume between Israel and the UAE has eclipsed $2.5 billion, leading Al Zeyoudi to forecast that bilateral trade between Israel and the UAE will exceed $2 billion this  year and that 1,000 Israeli companies will operate in his country by year’s end.

Al Zeyoudi also noted both countries share common challenges — water scarcity, agriculture, and energy diversification — and referenced past areas of cooperation, including the creation of a water research institute, Israel’s sale to the UAE of stakes in its Tamar gas field and the two countries’ collaboration on launching the Beresheet 2 space mission.

The panel also touched on long-standing obstacles in the Middle East, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran and relations between the Gulf states and Turkey.

Al Khalifa reiterated that his country remains committed to the Arab Peace Initiative, a proposal to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and claimed the 2002 document was a tacit acknowledgement of Israel’s legitimacy by the Arab world.

“It’s a de facto acceptance by every Arab country of the State of Israel in the region,” he said.

Sounding a note of optimism, Eizenstat expressed confidence that Israel’s relationship with Abraham Accords countries could deepen, and proposed the U.S. create “Qualified Industrial Zones,” regions in which the U.S. allows free trade on products manufactured with Israeli help, in Abraham Accords countries. 

“As much as we’ve had remarkable change for the good in a little over a year, there is room for enormous expansion if we do the right things and we continue down this path,” Eizenstat said.

Asked about the possibility of promoting peace between other Middle Eastern countries, Al Khalifa stressed the importance of patience, but said, “We will need to work harder and harder and harder to make that go at a faster pace.”