TEL AVIV, Israel – Fighting computer crime together has helped reinforce ties between the United Arab Emirates and Israel since they signed a normalization agreement almost three years ago, the UAE’s head of cybersecurity, Mohamed Al Kuwaiti said.

Visiting Tel Aviv last week for the annual Cyber Week conference, Al Kuwait introduced the “Crystal Ball” project, a digital platform for detecting and repelling computer attacks. Microsoft, Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Abu Dhabi-based CPX are providing the technological backbone, and an unspecified number of countries will also participate.

“Cyberthreats do not distinguish between nations, do not distinguish between entities or people,” Al Kuwaiti said on Tuesday at Tel Aviv University gathering. “That is why we need to unite against those threats, and the Crystal Ball, that we are aiming for the whole community, will be the first step toward that.”

Al Kuwaiti, who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday as part of a group of national cyber directors attending the conference, said the platform will enable partner countries to “easily and seamlessly share information.” The collaborative international effort will be strengthened by the combination of abilities, processing power and volume of data, he said.

The mission is to “design, deploy and enable regional intelligence enhancement” through collaboration and knowledge-sharing to combat national-level cyberthreats, according to a slide Al Kuwaiti showed during his presentation. He said the value of cooperation between the two countries was demonstrated recently when they worked together to ward off a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on their networks.

The UAE and Israel normalized diplomatic relations as part of the September 2020 Abraham Accords, leading to the bolstering of both commercial and strategic ties between the countries. Al Kuwaiti said the connection with Israeli tech companies has been especially helpful in his country’s transition to a digital economy.

Amid the high-level meetings, two networking organizations for information security  professionals in the UAE and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding to promote collaboration. UAE-based EliteCISOs and Israel’s Cyber Together said in a statement that they would cooperate on knowledge-sharing, professional training and cybersecurity workshops to help confront emerging threats to both countries.

The meeting with Netanyahu was held at the headquarters of the Israel Security Agency, or Shin Bet, whose director, Ronen Bar, spoke at the Cyber Week conference about the agency’s increasing use of artificial intelligence.

“The ISA and AI have one thing in common,” Bar said. “We both make a living by looking for patterns and anomalies.” He said the agency has also developed its own Generative AI tool that can be used like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Another AI innovation being tested by the ISA is an airport security system that he said would “dramatically change” the screening process before flight check-in.

“Maybe one day we will abandon the traditional favorite question for all of you: Did you pack by yourself,” he said.

Bar said the ISA is setting up a technology incubator to help startups develop generative AI products to address security and intelligence needs. He said AI will help the agency in several areas: prioritizing information; boosting intelligence capabilities by identifying patterns and deviations from patterns; becoming a tool in the decision-making process; and helping to forecast trends and the likelihood of their realization.For the agency, he said, generative AI will be a “partner” at the decision-making table, but not a “decision-maker.”

Speaking at the conference on Monday, a former Pentagon official warned that both government and business aren’t paying enough attention to AI’s potential dangers.

“I think that Israel should be very concerned about what algorithms Iran may be trying to develop or acquire overseas,” said Ezra Cohen, the former acting under secretary of defense for intelligence and security who is now vice president for corporate strategy at Oracle Corp.

“Now I’m not saying that we should be treating AI today like a nuclear weapon or anything like that, but there should be certain procedures that are put in place and I think a lot of these companies are really very juicy targets for the adversary,” Cohen said.

TEL AVIV, Israel – Airwallex, a digital payment platform that aims to disrupt the way businesses move money around the world, is building up its new office in Israel and aiming to expand its reach to the Arab Gulf states.

Founded in 2015  in Melbourne, Australia, Airwallex opened a branch in Tel Aviv in May, hiring Or Liban, a former Google executive, to run operations and expand in the region, Pranav Sood, general manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told The Circuit.

“Across the Middle East, you see young, growing populations – populations that have lots of disposable income and people who are looking to spend online for e-commerce – also to travel and to buy and sell things around the world,” Sood said in an interview from London. “All of those factors mean that the Middle East is a region that we’re very excited about and looking to invest in.”

Airwallex, which processes more than $50 billion in transactions a year, is one of the fastest growing financial technology companies and carries a market value of $5.5 billion. The company raised $902 million from investors that include Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, MasterCard, Tencent and Lone Pine Capital.

Sood will be in Israel on Monday to attend the Calcalist conference on financial innovation, which is being co-sponsored by Airwallex. Liban is scheduled to speak on a panel about the relationship between banks and fintech companies.

In Israel, the company’s customers include Papaya Global, which helps businesses manage payroll and payments, and OurCrowd, a Jerusalem-based venture capital investing platform. Airwallex has about 1,300 employees in 20 offices, including San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo. The company is currently recruiting a staff of about 10 employees for its new office in Tel Aviv and is looking at potential acquisitions in Israel in the field of cybersecurity.

“Israel is a market where we are already present and we have customers,” said Sood, 33, who was hired a year ago and visits Israel every two or three months. “When we look at the UAE, we also see opportunity to expand our coverage. Many of our customers want access to the UAE because it’s a strong economy and there’s a lot of international trade that comes out of it.”

Airwallex’s creation story involves a coffee shop the company’s four founders opened as students at the University of Melbourne and “came to the conclusion that it is very, very painful and expensive to buy and sell things around the world,” Sood said. Jack Zhang, now the CEO, had a background in foreign exchange and had written trading algorithms for a number of investment banks, Sood said.

Eight years later, Airwallex is challenging the biggest players in the international payments market, led by the Brussels-based Swift network, which Sood says is too slow.  Airwallex’s proprietary technology revolves around a digital wallet that customers pay into and can use to make payments to countries where it is connected with local banking networks. The company has also focused on developing a “deep regulatory and licensing backbone” around the world, he said. It has managed to carve out a loyal customer base by focusing on small businesses and making it less complicated and expensive for them to pay bills and receive payments across national borders.

Airwallex’s founders “basically thought, ‘you know what, let’s use this experience and expertise and build something that fundamentally changes the way that people move money around the world,’” Sood said.

TEL AVIV, Israel – PureHealth, the largest healthcare company in the United Arab Emirates, and Israel’s Sheba Medical Center signed an agreement last week to conduct joint research, collaborate on staff training and combine efforts to promote medical tourism.

The two institutions approved a memorandum of understanding outlining their intention to work together across a range of medical fields. Israel’s ambassador to the UAE, Amir Hayek, told The Circuit that the preliminary agreement demonstrates a growing momentum for the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between the two countries in 2020.

“We are talking to each other about everything,” Hayek said in an interview from Abu Dhabi. “We are open about everything and we are past the point of no return.”

The agreement follows a visit to Sheba, near Tel Aviv, and other Israeli health facilities last week by top executives and doctors from the Emirati organization, Hayek said. PureHealth is a $5 billion subsidiary of Abu Dhabi’s ADQ sovereign wealth fund that was formed last year to consolidate the UAE’s major health institutions, including Abu Dhabi Health Services Co., The National Health Insurance Co., Tamouh Healthcare and the Abu Dhabi Stem Cell Center. PureHealth operates 25 hospitals and 100 clinics across the Gulf state.

“This collaboration marks a major milestone in our efforts to drive healthcare innovation and improve patient outcomes,” Rashid Al Qubaisi, PureHealth’s group chief corporate officer, said in a statement. “By combining our expertise and resources, we aim to foster breakthrough research, advance medical education, and establish a robust framework for clinical services coordination.”

Since the signing of the U.S.-backed Accords at the White House in September 2020, trade between the UAE and Israel has exceeded $3.8 billion and the two countries expect commercial activity to reach $10 billion by the end of 2026. ADQ reached an agreement in December to buy control of Phoenix Holdings, Israel’s biggest insurer, for about $675 million. The deal is under regulatory review in Israel.

In another agreement last week, Abu Dhabi’s G42 technology company and Israel’s Viola Ventures investment firm launched a joint business aimed at providing computer engineers and other skilled employees to businesses in both countries and around the world.

Sheba, Israel’s largest hospital, is already working with Bahrain’s King Hamad American Mission Hospital, sharing advanced medical capabilities that are based on artificial intelligence, virtual reality and digital health care management. The UAE agreement “is of the utmost importance in creating a strategy whereby we will work to share our knowledge in the areas of research, clinical trials, and medical training,” said Yoel Har-Even, director of Sheba’s international division.

The UAE’s ambassador to Israel, Mohamed Al Khaja, who was present at the signing of the agreement, said it expressed the need to “find and focus on the real benefits of peace, which improve people’s health, lives and standards of living.”

Recognizing that memorandums of understanding don’t always get implemented, Hayek said the two governments are determined to help Sheba and PureHealth develop their collaboration.

“This MOU needs to be turned into a business plan,” Hayek said. “We will do everything needed to help them, but I think that from this stage… they need to cooperate between themselves and take it forward. We will follow up just to make sure that it happened.”

Sheba held a 75th anniversary fundraising dinner this month at which Mohamed Alabbar, founder of Dubai-based Emaar Properties and builder of the Burj Khalifa tower, the world’s tallest, addressed the crowd about the value of medical cooperation in advancing peace.

TEL AVIV – A government-owned technology company in the United Arab Emirates and Israel’s largest private investor in tech firms launched Thursday a joint venture aimed at providing computer engineers and other skilled employees to businesses around the world.

The new company, Global Valley, will be based in Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s capital, and address an international shortage of programming talent. It’s the product of collaboration between Abu Dhabi’s G42, which has interests ranging from biotechnology to artificial intelligence, the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) and Israel’s Viola Ventures, which has $5 billion in assets under management, they said in a statement.

Global Valley is also a banner project for the Abraham Accords, which normalized ties between the UAE and Israel in September 2020 and has generated $3.8 billion of trade volume between the two countries. G42 is controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the UAE’s national security adviser and younger brother of UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed, ruler of Abu Dhabi.

The new company will strengthen Abu Dhabi as a “dynamic hub for technological advancement and business prowess,” G42 Group Chief Executive Peng Xiao said in a statement on Thursday. Avi Zeevi, a co-founder and general partner of Viola, said Global Valley “will provide tech companies, in Israel and globally, with the best-of-class tech talent to fuel their future growth and support their activities in the region.”

While the ongoing global economic slowdown has led to layoffs that increased the supply of tech workers, the industry expects the employee shortage to grow. A study by the consulting firm Korn Ferry predicts a global talent gap by 2030 of some 85 million employees in the telecommunications, media and technology sector.

Since the normalization agreements, ADIO has also collaborated with OurCrowd, a Jerusalem-based venture capital that established an AI development center in Abu Dhabi, and Liquidity Group, a Tel Aviv-based lender specializing in fintech companies that opened an R&D center in the UAE capital. In December, Abu Dhabi’s ADQ investment firm agreed to buy control of Phoenix Holdings, Israel’s biggest insurer, for about $675 million. The deal is under regulatory review in Israel.

Global Valley “builds on the enthusiasm generated by the Abraham Accords, which continues to create important collaborations in sectors focused on innovation and advanced technology,” said ADIO Director General Abdulla Abdul Aziz AlShamsi.

Since Mobileye Global, the Israeli developer of self-driving car technology, sold shares last year in an IPO, its stock price has doubled. Now Intel Corp. is planning a secondary offering to carve some profit from the pioneering automotive startup it bought six years ago for more than $15 billion.

Intel, one of the largest computer chipmakers, will sell 35 million shares in its Jerusalem-based subsidiary, a stake worth about $1.5 billion, with an option to sell another 5.25 million shares, Mobileye said in a June 5 filing with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are managing the sale, which will leave Intel solidly in control with more than 88% of the shares.

Mobileye is a world leader in creating software, semiconductor chips, cameras and sensory arrays to enable the development of self-driving vehicles. BMW, Volkswagen and Nissan are among its clients. Senior auto executives regularly make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to meet with Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua.

The company raised some $860 million in its IPO at the end of October, giving it a market value of about $21 billion after the first day of trading. That was well short of the $50 billion Intel had earlier expected as it was making preparations for the initial offering. Since then the stock price has nearly doubled from $21 a share to $41.77 at the end of last week as its market cap surged to $34 billion. The sale will give Intel cash at a time that it has announced plans to invest in artificial intelligence, vying with upstart competitors such as Nvidia.

Mobileye shares are likely to reach $50 a share over the 12 months, according to Canaccord Genuity, a Toronto-based investment bank, which initiated coverage of the company last week with a “buy” rating. In an analyst note, Canaccord described autonomous driving as  “one of the highest value-creating technologies to be deployed. Ever.”

Noting Mobileye’s “impressive growth indicators and long-term potential within its category,” the investment bank said the company has a “dominant” 70% share in the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) market, adding that “its advantageous position in the emerging full self-driving market further strengthens its prospects.”

In a two-day dash through the Middle East, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman invited audiences in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan and Israel to explore the benefits of artificial intelligence and help guard against the “existential risk” it presents.

“I am hopeful that the region can play a central role in this global conversation,” Altman said on Tuesday in the UAE’s capital of Abu Dhabi. On Wednesday, he traveled to India and wrapped up the week in South Korea.

At all his Mideast stops, Altman radiated enthusiasm for both OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT product and the technology’s expanding abilities in language, business tasks, science and software development. As he did testifying in Congress last month and meeting with European leaders last week, Altman cautioned about the disruptions AI is expected to cause, such as broad job losses in fields where humans can be replaced by machines.

“We face serious risk. We face existential risk,” Altman said during a question-and-answer session at Hub 71, an Abu Dhabi business park teeming with software startups. “The challenge that the world has is how we’re going to manage those risks and make sure we still get to enjoy those tremendous benefits. No one wants to destroy the world.”

After touring Europe last week, Altman, 38, skipped through the Middle East at a pace of two countries a day. He spoke to Israeli audiences on Monday morning in Tel Aviv and then to Jordanians in Amman in the late afternoon. On Tuesday, he appeared for a morning seminar in Doha, Qatar, and caught a short flight to the UAE for the afternoon session.

Altman, whose appearance was also webcast, praised the UAE’s early embrace of AI, noting the high level of investment in the technology by both government and private interests.

“I think there’s been discussion about AI… in Abu Dhabi in particular, before it was cool,” he said. “You know, now, like everybody’s on the AI bandwagon, which we’re excited about, but we have… special appreciation for the people that were… talking about this when everyone thought AI was not going to happen.”

In Israel on Monday, Altman met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, visited the  R&D center of Microsoft Corp. and appeared onstage in a packed auditorium at Tel Aviv University.

“The rate at which the tech and startup community in Israel is embracing AI is incredible to watch,” Altman said in a meeting with  Herzog. “I am sure Israel will play a huge role.”

While Altman didn’t meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the two spoke by phone. Netanyahu later tweeted that he plans to “convene policy teams to discuss a national artificial intelligence policy in both the civilian and the security spheres.” He said he consulted with both Altman and billionaire Elon Musk, who was one of the original investors in OpenAI.

At Tel Aviv University, Altman and Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist, spoke to an audience of 1,200 students, researchers, business executives and investors. Among them were Gil Schwed, CEO and co-founder of Check Point Software Technologies; Chemi Peres, managing partner and co-founder of the Pitango venture capital firm; and Adi Soffer-Teeni, general manager in Israel of Meta, the owner of Facebook.

Having changed from the dark suit he wore to the meeting with Herzog, Altman showed up on campus dressed more casually — like a software executive — in a gray, long-sleeved T-shirt with white trousers. He told the crowd he was impressed with Israel’s “talent density” and the “relentlessness, drive, ambition level of Israeli entrepreneurs.” 

Altman said the excitement generated by AI means now is a great time to create a startup.

“You have an incredible new, fast-moving technological wave, and [that] is when startups win… when the incumbents screw up and get displaced. The ground is shaking right now, that is what you want as a startup… The opportunity to build value with a new approach doesn’t come along very often. And this is the big one, so every entrepreneur is a summer child right now. And it is a super cool time.”

AI technology, he said, “is unstoppable,” and the world just needs to “figure out how to manage the risk.” 

In Amman, Jordan, Altman made similar remarks to a crowd of about 500 at Al-Hussein Technical University. Fouad Jeryes, co-founder of the Jordanian cloud communications firm Maqsam and host of the event, told the audience that tickets were sold out “100 seconds” after they were put online.

TEL AVIV, Israel — Israeli technology companies, the country’s economic engine and branding platform for three decades, are scraping for cash and trying to protect what they’ve raised by moving funds abroad.

While the government has temporarily paused its proposed judicial overhaul that led to a downgrade by Moody’s Investors Service of Israel’s economic outlook, startup founders are making contingency plans that include transferring key employee teams to other countries and shifting money from domestic accounts.

The concerns were reflected in a survey published this month by a nonprofit organization that has spent years cheerleading for Israel’s tech industry and promoting its potential value to new markets such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. Banking data from the first quarter of 2023 showed a 71% decline in startup investment from the same period last year.

“To move your capital outside Israel takes a phone call,” Avi Hasson, CEO of Start-Up Nation Central, which commissioned the survey, told The Circuit. “But if you’re moving projects or people outside of Israel, that’s a whole different ball game, both in the investment and effort needed to do it as well as the investment and effort needed to bring it back.”

The fact that some 90% of investment in Israeli tech startups comes from foreign sources indicates the pressure under which the company executives operate, said Hasson, formerly Israel’s chief scientist at the Ministry of Economy.

“The foreign capital is neither Zionist nor anti-Zionist,” he said. “It came to Israel based on the unique ideas, talent and ecosystem that are here and it will equally move out if it doesn’t feel that it has the conditions to generate exceptional returns.”

In its April 15 statement, Moody’s said downgrading the credit outlook “reflects a deterioration of Israel’s governance” under the coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that won election in November. “While mass protests have led the government to pause the legislation and seek dialogue with the opposition, the manner in which the government has attempted to implement a wide-ranging reform without seeking broad consensus points to a weakening of institutional strength and policy predictability,” Moody’s said.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, has sought to provide assurances that his government won’t harm the investment climate, pointing to his record as an economic reformer whose policies played a large role in building Israel’s reputation as a technology powerhouse. He minimizes the impact on the economy of the mass street protests against his proposed changes to the court system.

“Look, here’s what I think,” Netanyahu said in an April 19 interview with CNBC. “I think the future… belongs to those who innovate. I think the momentary fluff, the momentary dust that is in the air is just that — dust. The fundamentals of the Israeli economy are very powerful.”

Based on 1,142 responses from companies, investment firms and multinational corporations, the survey, published on April 13, demonstrated how operating abroad is increasingly seen as an option. It was conducted in the last week of March before Moody’s changed its outlook from “positive” to “stable” and warned that its credit rating may be cut if government policy becomes more unpredictable.

Among the findings, 46% of companies that responded are planning to move cash reserves outside of Israel, and 58% of those plan to transfer more than 50% of their money. About a quarter of the companies are considering plans to relocate employees out of Israel, and 42% are looking into changing their registration to another country.

Regarding current sentiment, 84% of investors and 80% of startups said they believe the judicial changes will have a negative effect on them and their portfolio companies. Similarly, 84% of investors expect the changes to have a negative effect on the ability of companies to raise capital from abroad, and  77% of companies believe it will be difficult to raise capital from foreign investors. Some  65% of the multinational companies polled expect a negative impact on their interest in piloting, buying or commercializing Israeli technology products.

Hasson expressed satisfaction with the pause in government efforts to push its judicial plan through the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and said he hopes negotiations underway with opposition leaders will lead to a compromise that doesn’t deter investment.

“People are still developing products and selling them and so on,” he said. “I think the recovery capabilities of the ecosystem are really, really strong.”

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.