Abraham Accords

The Abraham Accords are a set of United States-facilitated agreements and declarations through which Israel and some Arab states agreed to normalise relations. They began in 2020 with Israel’s agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and the term is also used for later normalisation-related arrangements involving Morocco and Sudan. In substance, they convert relations from non-recognition or limited informal contact into open diplomatic, economic, technological and people-to-people engagement.

Constitutional / legal basis

Not an Indian constitutional concept. Its legal basis lies in international diplomatic instruments, especially the Abraham Accords Declaration signed on 15 September 2020 and the accompanying Israel-UAE Treaty of Peace, Diplomatic Relations and Full Normalization and Israel-Bahrain Declaration of Peace, Cooperation, and Constructive Diplomatic and Friendly Relations.

Key points

• They marked the first formal normalisation agreements between Israel and Arab states after Israel’s earlier peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, thereby widening Israel’s recognised diplomatic space in the Arab world.
• The UAE became the first Gulf Arab state to normalise relations with Israel, giving the accords special importance for Gulf geopolitics.
• The accords provide for practical normalisation such as diplomatic relations, embassies, trade, investment, aviation links, tourism, technology cooperation and other sectoral cooperation.
• They showed that some Arab states were willing to normalise with Israel without waiting for a final settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which was a major shift in earlier regional diplomatic sequencing.
• They did not resolve the Palestinian question, nor did they amount to collective Arab recognition of Israel; normalisation remains state-by-state and politically contested.
• For the wider region, the accords encouraged issue-based alignments among Israel and some Arab states around commerce, technology and security, while also reshaping the diplomatic balance in West Asia.
• For India, a more open Israel-Gulf interface can ease simultaneous engagement with Israel and Gulf Arab partners, though India’s position on Palestine remains a separate element of its West Asia policy.

How UPSC asks this