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.”

CASABLANCA, Morocco – A planeload of Israeli executives who landed here this week drew government ministers, corporate leaders and a senior royal adviser seeking their advice on developing a startup business culture.

The Israelis, representing technology companies largely involved in agriculture, water conservation, health systems and sustainable energy, are spending three days at a conference in the North African kingdom, mixing with potential Moroccan investors and looking to make deals.

“Our goal is to build a startup ecosystem,” Morocco’s minister for digital transformation, Ghita Mezzour, told The Circuit after addressing the conference’s opening session on Monday. “We’re looking at Israel’s expertise in how to build the components and how to make them interact.”

Also greeting some 150 executives and government officials from the two countries in the Sofitel Casablanca ballroom were Moroccan Transportation Minister Mohammed Abdeljalil, Commerce and Industry Minister Ryad Mezzour, and Andre Azoulay, a longtime adviser to King Mohammed VI and his father, King Hassan II. Azoulay is often described as the country’s most influential Jewish citizen.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog sent a recorded video address hailing the diplomatic ties between the two countries that emerged from the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords in September 2020. He said he hoped business cooperation will “promote progress and peace throughout the Middle East, Africa and beyond.”

The conference, billed as the “Morocco-Israel Connect to Innovate Forum” was organized by Start-Up Nation Central, a nonprofit group based in Tel Aviv that promotes Israeli business through what it describes as technology diplomacy. The group’s CEO, Avi Hasson, the Israeli government’s former chief scientist, said he hopes Morocco can serve as a beachhead for Israeli companies seeking to do business throughout Africa.

“We believe that Morocco, under the leadership of His Majesty Mohammed VI, is uniquely suited to partner with Israel in blazing a trail to a new MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region, one that is connected by a genuine desire for peace and prosperity,” Hasson said.

The conference ends on Wednesday with Israel’s science, technology and innovation minister, Orit Farkash-Hacohen, scheduled to deliver an address. At least 13 Israeli-Moroccan memorandums of understanding between business and government entities are being signed at the gathering. 

Among the agreements, Israel’s Watergen, whose technology extracts water from air, signed a distribution deal with Morocco’s Waman Solutions. Israel’s Mehadrin formed a partnership with Adolam under the name “Global Farming Morocco” to grow and export avocados, and Israel’s Alma Lasers signed with Casablanca-based Guess Clinic to bring Alma’s aesthetic surgery devices to the Moroccan market.

Azoulay said it was critical that normalization with Arab countries be extended to include the Palestinians and bring “serenity” to the region. He said his remarks reflect popular consensus in Morocco that peace with Israel lead to an overall solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The May 11 death of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh in the course of a firefight between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank city of Jenin has heightened tensions across the Arab world and led to increased security for the Israeli-Moroccan conference.

Israel and Morocco maintained low-key business and diplomatic ties until agreeing to normalize their relations under the Abraham Accords in December 2020, partly due to the many Israelis who come from Moroccan descent and are estimated to number close to 1 million. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid visited the Moroccan capital of Rabat to open a diplomatic office last August and Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourista came to Israel for the Negev Summit in March that brought together the top diplomatic officials who were party to the Abraham Accords with U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken.

The Circuit was invited to the conference as a guest of Start-Up Nation Central.

Venture capitalist Elie Wurtman looks to the Gulf Arab states as a potential savior for Israeli tech startups that can’t find enough qualified engineers to hire. First, though, they’ve got to weather the global market crisis that threatens to dry up funding.

“I don’t think it’s doomsday across the board, but companies that require substantial capital may be challenged,” Wurtman, the American-born co-founder and managing partner of Jerusalem-based Pico Venture Partners, said in an interview with The Circuit. “This is a good time to be more prudent with expense management.”

As the Nasdaq Composite stock index has plunged almost 30 percent this year, many of Israel’s biggest tech companies trading on the technology-heavy New York exchange have seen their market values sink. In turn, investors in the country’s more than 6,000 startup companies, which range from anti-hacker cybersecurity firms to telehealth services for pet cats and dogs, are cutting back.

That means a rough period is in store for the country’s high-flying tech culture, which has inflated both salaries and housing prices, said Alex Zabezhinsky, chief economist at Israel’s Meitav Investment House. “The slowing economy and rising interest rates, especially after such big valuations in the past, will surely bring worse times for technology companies and make it harder to raise money,” he said.

Wurtman, 52, whose interests include Vroom, an online platform for selling used cars in the U.S. that trades on the Nasdaq, says his ups and downs over three decades in venture financing have given him tools to coach PICO’s nearly two dozen startups. “Most of these companies will be able to get through it,” he said.

Vroom, whose market capitalization rocketed to $5.5 billion shortly after its March 2020 initial public offering, sank to a value of $200 million last week, trading at $1.45 a share. In June 2020, Nasdaq-traded cloud services company NetApp bought Spot.io, another PICO-funded start-up, for $450 million.

Among his projects today, Wurtman is looking at Israel’s deepening ties in the Gulf to help solve the chronic shortage of software developers and computer engineers that plagues the burgeoning tech industry in the small country of 9.5 million.

Pro-business policies in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, including tax-free income and liberal visa policies to fuel their expat-driven, oil-pumping economies, should draw Israeli companies to set up remote operations in the two small countries that normalized ties with the Jewish state through the Abraham Accords in 2020, he said. Rather than trying to navigate the tricky labor and social environment for foreign workers in Israel, companies can use their talents while they live in Dubai.

A report released in April 2021 by the Israel Innovation Authority and Start-Up Nation Central found that 60% of Israeli startups were having trouble recruiting for their research and development teams. The Israeli government has announced plans to give out more visas to foreigners who seek to work in tech. Programs have cropped up across the country to train Arab Israelis and Haredi Orthodox Jews in coding and other technology-related skills.

“What does the Gulf represent to me? It represents a very immigration-friendly environment, local subsidies, good infrastructure. You get a work visa if you’re going to be a productive member of society. You can come live there and work there, tax-free,” Wurtman said.

“Within several years, you’ll have dozens, or even hundreds of Israeli companies with satellite development offices in the Gulf,” Wurtman said.

The ability of companies to manage their workforces across national borders was underlined this week when Google moved most of its Russian employees out of the country, according  to The Wall Street Journal. As the Ukraine war grinds on, most of Google’s employees in Russia chose to work for the company abroad, the Journal said, adding that many have moved to Google’s hub in Dubai.

Another solution proposed to fill Israel’s tech needs is hiring talent in Africa. Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, a Nigerian general partner at the venture capital firm Future Africa, founded a startup called Andela, which teaches tech skills that help Africans get jobs around the world. Aboyeji told The Circuit in March that he wants the company to be used as a pipeline for Israeli companies.

These days, Wurtman says his passion is the firm’s 10-year-old PICO Kids initiative that seeks to bolster science, math and entrepreneurial skills among students in Jerusalem schools. Last year, the program flew a select group of those young people for a week of touring and study in Dubai, where they spent time with Emirati youngsters and worked together on projects addressing the issue of water scarcity.

“Bringing the kids together in Dubai was obviously magical in the sense that there was hesitation, especially on the other side, but I would say also here [in Israel] as well,” Wurtman said.

“The thing I always hear from kids that go to these programs is understanding that in spite of where we live… we’re actually very similar and we have a lot in common,” he said. “And that together we can come up with interesting solutions that can benefit people across the region.”

A first-of-its-kind multifaith gathering that took place last week in Saudi Arabia and openly included a delegation of Jewish religious leaders was an extremely positive step, one of the participating rabbis told Jewish Insider, but should not be seen as a sign that the kingdom will soon enter into any sort of normalization agreement with Israel.

The two-day Forum on Common Values among Religious Followers kicked off in Riyadh last Wednesday – the day a Palestinian-American journalist was shot dead during clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants. Hosted by the Muslim World League, the event also included leadership from the Catholic Church, Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate, evangelical Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as religious leaders from other countries across the Muslim world.

Rabbi David Rosen, the director of international interreligious relations at the American Jewish Committee, who was the only rabbi from Israel in attendance, called the meeting “historic,” saying it was a significant milestone for a country that portrays itself as the bedrock of Islam.

However, he also told JI that the unprecedented gathering in the heart of the Muslim world was more about changes taking place internally in Saudi Arabia — rather than about the diplomatic process taking place in the region that was sparked by the signing of a normalization agreement between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in September 2020. Morocco and Sudan inked their own agreements with the Jewish state in the following months.

“What they are doing is for itself and its own future,” said Rosen, who has been involved in interfaith relations for decades and has visited Saudi Arabia in the past. The Saudi leadership, he added, “would love to have a normal relationship with Israel, but unless there is movement on the Palestinian front or at least a show towards a solution, there is no chance of them joining.”

Tensions between Israelis and Palestinians reached a new high last week after Shireen Abu Akleh, a veteran Al Jazeera journalist, was killed while reporting for the channel in the Palestinian city of Jenin. The Palestinian Authority and the channel have blamed Israel for Abu Akleh’s death. Israel has expressed sorrow at her death but also cast doubt on its culpability and called for an investigation into the incident. 

However, images of Israeli police attacking mourners as Abu Akleh was laid to rest on Friday afternoon also sparked anger and drew worldwide condemnation from governments, including the U.S. administration.

In Saudi Arabia, however, Rosen said the conference was “a transformation” in terms of Muslim-Jewish relations, adding that such a gathering in the kingdom would have been “unimaginable in the past.”

“That such a multifaith conference was hosted by Saudi Arabia, which has seen itself as a kind of Muslim Vatican and which until recently viewed any presence of other religions to be undesirable, is truly a sign of new times,” Rosen said. 

He added, “the fact that the Muslim World League, the traditional tool for exporting exclusive extremist Wahabi ideology, was the organizer of this multifaith gathering, shows how dramatically things have changed.”

He said that the delegation of Jewish faith leaders, which included liberal and Orthodox Jewish streams from the United States and Europe, was well-received, with the Muslim World League taking extra steps to ensure they had access to kosher food. The food, he said, was provided by Rabbi Jacob Herzog, who touts himself as the chief rabbi of the Kingdom Saudi Arabia and provides religious services to Jewish tourists and those there on business.  

Also present at the conference, said Rosen, were three U.S. ambassadors for religious freedom, including the current one, Rashad Hussein, who called on all religious leaders to take steps to combat the rise of antisemitism. Hussein, added Rosen, also referred to a visit made by Muslim World League’s Secretary-General Dr. Mohammad Al-Issa to Auschwitz two years ago.

Overall, Rosen said there was “a very strong sense articulated widely at the conference that this was a major breakthrough of enormous consequence for Saudi Arabia, the Muslim world and consequentially globally.”

“The atmosphere at this event had the character of a momentous celebration, which was far more important than the content of the speeches,” he noted, adding that the pluralistic sentiment of the final declaration, which called on spiritual leaders to leverage common principles and work to advance tolerance and peace, was remarkable precisely because it was issued from Saudi Arabia.

Over the coming months, investors would do well to pay attention to the impending food shortages caused by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, particularly the drying up of the wheat supply in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. That’s the advice from Ghanem Nuseibeh, founder of Cornerstone Global Associates, a London-based consulting firm that specializes in risk management in the MENA region.

“Basically you’re talking about potential riots, with collapsing economies, collapsing politics and collapsing societies,” Nuseibeh said in an interview with The Circuit. “Bread is the main food staple. If countries run out of wheat, food becomes more expensive and people have less to eat. We haven’t reached the point of famine, but in a couple of months it could easily get there.” Nuseibeh said Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states that can afford the price spikes will have to subsidize Egypt’s wheat supply.

Nuseibeh, 45, was born in Jerusalem to a prominent Palestinian family whose history has been intertwined for centuries with the city revered by Muslims, Jews and Christians. He lived in the U.K. as a teenager, earned a Master’s degree in civil engineering from London’s Imperial College and spent much of the next two decades working in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in the Gulf.

Among his relatives are Zaki Nusseibeh, a close adviser to Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Zayed al Nahyan, the UAE’s de facto leader, and a former cabinet minister; the UAE’s ambassador to the United Nations, Lana Nusseibeh, Zaki’s daughter; and Sari Nusseibeh, the veteran Palestinian leader and scholar. (Ghanem spells his family name with one ‘s.’)

Surveying regional trends, Nuseibeh said investors must recognize the effect that global efforts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels are having on oil-producing nations. Though prices have risen because of the Ukraine conflict, any strategic advantage over Western economies that Saudi Arabia may feel will gradually diminish, he said.

“What does the Gulf have to offer after the decoupling happens?” Nuseibeh said. “The Saudis realize that they are really part of the ‘western’ Middle East. Russia and China are in no way capable of replacing the relationship with the U.S. It’s a matter of just a few years before they become less strategically important to the West.”

In the financial realm, Nuseibeh said a strong regulatory environment is critical if Dubai pushes forward with its blueprint to become a global hub for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and NFTs (non-fungible tokens). He warned any perception that the UAE is lax in exercising financial controls will attract corrupt traders looking to cheat the system.

Apart from his business activities, Nuseibeh has taken great interest in the development of the Jewish community in Dubai and is founding chairman of London-based Muslims Against Antisemitism. He has tangled for years with Qatar since writing a report warning of the political risk associated with the Gulf state’s hosting of soccer’s 2022 World Cup. The event is set to take place in November.

Nuseibeh said addressing food insecurity and renewable energy have become key areas for cooperation between the UAE and Israel since they normalized relations in 2020. He added that both countries have worked diligently to prevent their new alliance from being derailed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which threatened to erupt again last month in East Jerusalem.

“The opportunities are there and many people are starting to look at Israel as just another country in the region,” Nuseibeh said.

LOS ANGELES — Gideon Friedmann, the acting chief scientist at Israel’s Ministry of Energy detailed on Wednesday how the country plans to transition to renewable energy and urged private investors to fund research in the field. Government support is important, said Friedmann, but investors will need to more forcefully enter the market if countries hope to work toward net-zero emissions.

“The private sector is not doing very well, because everyone here wants to get their return, and [a] high return. And it’s not easy to get a high return on infrastructure,” or a quick return, Friedmann told attendees at a panel at the Milken Institute Global Conference. According to Friedmann, it takes up to 15 years to build a power line, for instance, so any kind of fast returns would be impossible. 

At several sustainability-focused panels at Milken, environmental experts and financial professionals urged investors to consider putting more money into the research and development of technologies such as carbon capturing and bringing deep geothermal heat out of the ground. 

Developing new technologies may yield smaller returns in the short-term, Friedmann argued, but it will pay dividends as more countries move away from fossil fuels. 

“The money’s there,” Friedmann said, referring to private investments in established renewable companies focused on solar. “But it’s not, of course, geared towards research and development.” 

Israel is looking at the transportation and electricity sectors — responsible for 85% of emissions in Israel — as the key areas to reduce emissions, said Friedmann. 

Israel is a small country, “and so the way we think about innovation is that we are not going to set the trends. Trends are going to come from the outside,” noted Friedmann. Instead, Israel — due to its size — can be early to adopt new technologies and trends. 

Israel discovered natural gas reserves off its coast more than a decade ago, and natural gas is now used “as a bridge” in the transition to sustainable energy “because it’s much less polluting” than oil, explained Friedmann. “So natural gas is a solution, but we want also to convert the natural gas to something cleaner. We want to invest in R&D to do that.” 

Other investment into research and development can come from the government, Friedmann added. “It’s so important to have government investment in these areas,” he said. Last year the Israeli government invested $60 million in research and development, but the bulk of the investments will need to come from private capital.

“We also work on international collaboration,” Friedmann said. Israel is now collaborating with the United Arab Emirates, with which it normalized ties in late 2020, on a number of climate-related projects.

“There’s a lot of activity going on between the UAE and Israel,” Friedmann said. “It’s not in my area particularly. There’s a lot of discussion as well on R&D but nothing particularly yet. But I think in the near future there will be.”

TEL AVIV –— As President Joe Biden assembles the agenda for his first Middle East visit since taking office, his administration is trying to coax at least one more Arab nation to join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel, U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides said on Tuesday.

“My job personally is to go deeper with the countries we have, and the [job of the] White House is to go wider and bring more countries into the forum,” Biden’s envoy to Israel said in a webcast from Jerusalem organized by the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, and the Jeffrey M. Talpins Foundation.

Nides dodged questions on an Axios report that Biden will fly to Israel in late June and convene a meeting of regional leaders to strengthen and expand the 2020 agreements mediated by the Trump administration in which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco established diplomatic ties with the Jewish state. But Nides indicated that the prospect of brokering new Arab-Israeli relationships is tantalizing for the 79-year-old Biden, who often boasts that he’s met with every Israeli prime minister since his 1973 encounter as a freshman senator with Golda Meir.

“Wouldn’t it be great if Saudi Arabia had normalized relationships with Israel, and Kuwait and the whole region,” said Nides in an interview with Dan Shapiro, the former ambassador to Israel under the Obama administration. Shapiro was recently named a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council to work on the “N7” project that was started with Talpins’ sponsorship last year to promote normalization. “You’ve got to create the momentum. Every one of these is difficult to do. Our view is, the more the merrier.”

Nides, who left his post as vice chairman of Morgan Stanley to take over the top job at the embassy in Jerusalem, said dates are still unsettled while advisers grapple with how to make the maiden presidential trip to the Middle East a success. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced after a phone conversation that Biden has accepted his invitation to visit in the coming months.

“Each of these countries wants something from us and we want something from them, and they want something from the Israelis,” Nides said. “This little maneuver is not for the faint-hearted, but I think it’s well worth the time and the energy.”

Nides, a longtime Democratic fundraiser, said he has no hesitation in giving credit to former President Donald Trump for engineering the Abraham Accords. In following up on the previous administration’s achievements, he said Israel’s recent summit in the Negev desert created a “phenomenal opportunity” by bringing together the foreign ministers of the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt, as well as U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken.

Among his greatest challenges, Nides said, were violent confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli police last month on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, the sacred site revered by Muslims and Jews. He said the rare confluence of the Jewish festival of Passover, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and the Christian holiday of Easter focused attention on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and required intense diplomacy to ensure there was no repeat of last year’s violence that led to a missile conflict in May between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Nides credited both Bennett and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for preventing the situation from getting out of control.

“To be honest, we were pretty nervous,” Nides said. “We spent a lot of time trying to keep things calm, keeping the Temple Mount calm.”