So Daniel sent us this one — he's asking us to look at the Israel-UAE relationship five years after the Abraham Accords, and whether it's actually produced something different from the cold peace we've seen with Egypt and Jordan. He points out that the initial Israeli euphoria met with pretty tepid Emirati public support, and he wants to know how the implementation has actually evolved. And the bigger question — what lessons does this hold for Saudi Arabia and other potential normalization tracks?
That flight statistic is the kind of change you can measure in concrete numbers. But numbers only tell part of the story. The real question is whether we're looking at a warm peace or just a busier cold one.
Which is exactly the tension Daniel's getting at. You have over sixty weekly flights between Tel Aviv and Dubai and Abu Dhabi now. That's more than Tel Aviv to London. And you compare that to maybe twenty-five weekly flights to Cairo, about ten to Amman — and those peace treaties have been in place for decades.
The aviation comparison is almost the perfect proxy for the whole thing. Egypt signed in seventy-nine, Jordan in ninety-four, and in both cases the air routes exist but they're thin. You can get there, but it's not exactly a bustling corridor. The UAE route went from zero to sixty-plus flights a week in about three years. That's not incremental — that's a structural break. I mean, think about what that actually looks like on the ground. You've got multiple carriers competing on the route — El Al, Emirates, flydubai, Israir. When you have low-cost carriers entering a market that didn't exist three years ago, that's a signal that someone sees sustained demand, not just a diplomatic novelty.
And it's worth remembering why the Abraham Accords were supposed to be different in the first place. The old model was security-first, land-for-peace — you make a territorial concession, you get a treaty, and the relationship lives at the government level. The Accords flipped that. These were explicitly trade-and-tech-first agreements. The bet was that economic integration would create a constituency for peace that didn't depend on solving the Palestinian question first.
Right — and the UAE was the test case. First bilateral relationship forged under this new framework. If it worked, you'd have a blueprint for Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and eventually the big prize, Saudi Arabia. If it produced just another cold peace with better flight connections, the whole model would look like a repackaging of the old one.
So let's start with the numbers that do exist, because they reveal something surprising about where this relationship is actually deep versus where it's still shallow. The headline trade figure gets cited constantly — bilateral non-oil trade hit about two and a half billion dollars in twenty twenty-three, up from essentially zero in twenty nineteen. That's a real number.
It is, but you have to dig into the composition. It's heavily concentrated in diamonds, electronics, and machinery. The Dubai diamond trade in particular — Israel has been a major diamond hub forever, and Dubai wanted a piece of that. So a lot of what's moving is high-value, low-volume goods that were already being traded, just through intermediaries. The promise was diversified knowledge-economy integration — healthcare AI, agtech, water tech, cybersecurity. That's happening, but it's not what's driving the two and a half billion.
Can I push on that a little? Because I think the diamond trade is actually more interesting than it sounds. Before the Accords, Israeli diamond traders were routing through Antwerp or Mumbai to get stones into Dubai. There was a whole shadow architecture of intermediaries taking their cut. The Accords made that direct. So yes, the goods were already moving, but the efficiency gain is real, and the relationships that form around a direct trade corridor are different from the ones you get through intermediaries. You get joint ventures, co-investments, shared participation in auctions. That's not nothing.
That's a fair push. The direct corridor matters. But my point is that it's still a narrow base. If you're trying to build a whole bilateral relationship on two and a half billion in trade, you want that trade spread across twenty sectors employing thousands of people, not three sectors employing a few hundred specialists. The diamond trade in particular is famously insular — it's a small community on both sides, and the economic benefits don't exactly trickle down to the broader population in either country.
The e-commerce angle Daniel mentioned is actually one of the more interesting structural shifts. Dubai has become a logistics consolidation hub for Israeli e-commerce. Israeli consumers buying from Chinese platforms — a lot of those goods now route through UAE free zones. It created a concrete economic dependency that didn't exist before the Accords. If the relationship soured tomorrow, you'd have supply chain disruptions that would hit Israeli consumers directly.
Which is exactly the kind of interdependence the architects of the Accords were hoping to build. It's not glamorous — nobody holds a press conference about warehouse logistics — but it's stickier than a government memorandum of understanding. The Dubai Multi Commodities Centre set up a dedicated Israel desk in twenty twenty-one. That's an institutional mechanism. It doesn't go away because of a bad news cycle. And here's the thing about logistics infrastructure — once you've built the warehousing, the routing agreements, the customs harmonization, you've sunk real costs into the relationship. Both sides have an incentive to protect that investment.
And then you look at tourism. Roughly two hundred fifty thousand Israelis visited the UAE in twenty twenty-three. Emirati visitors to Israel — about thirty thousand. That asymmetry tells you something about who has more appetite for the relationship.
It's almost eight to one. And the Israeli visitors are going for leisure, business, transit connections. Dubai positioned itself as a destination. For Emiratis, Israel isn't yet a destination in the same way. Some of that is practical — Israel's tourism infrastructure isn't built around Gulf travelers. No Arabic-language tourism marketing at scale, limited halal tourism options outside of Jerusalem and the north. But some of it is sentiment.
The halal tourism point is worth pausing on, because it's a concrete example of how infrastructure and sentiment interact. If you're an Emirati family considering a vacation, you're looking for halal dining options, prayer facilities, hotels that don't serve alcohol in the lobby. Israel has some of that in Jerusalem and the Galilee, but Tel Aviv? Not really. And Tel Aviv is where most of the business and cultural energy is. So even an Emirati who's curious about Israel faces practical friction. The question is whether that friction is accidental — just nobody thought to build the infrastructure — or whether it reflects a deeper ambivalence about being seen vacationing in Israel.
I think it's both, and the two reinforce each other. The infrastructure doesn't get built because the demand signal is weak, and the demand signal is weak partly because the infrastructure isn't there. It's a chicken-and-egg problem that takes active government intervention to solve. The UAE government could subsidize halal tourism infrastructure in Israel as part of the normalization package. They haven't done that at scale. Israel could invest in Arabic-language marketing and halal certification for its hospitality sector. They haven't done that either. Both sides seem content to let Israelis flood into Dubai and not worry too much about the reverse flow.
Which brings us to the polling. Daniel mentioned the initial numbers — only about forty-seven percent of Emiratis supported normalization in twenty twenty. And here's the thing that should worry proponents of the Accords — more recent polling from twenty twenty-four and twenty twenty-five shows that support has actually declined slightly, not increased. The Abraham Accords Peace Institute tracks something they call a warmth index, and it's been trending down since twenty twenty-three.
And that's despite all the economic activity we just described. Flights are packed, trade is growing, and public sentiment is moving in the opposite direction. That's the core puzzle. Normally, you'd expect economic integration to build familiarity, and familiarity to build warmth. That's the contact hypothesis — people who do business together, who visit each other's countries, who have personal relationships across the border, they tend to develop more positive views. But here, the contact is happening and the warmth is declining. Something is short-circuiting the normal mechanism.
The Gaza war is the obvious explanation. October seventh and the military campaign that followed put enormous strain on public sentiment across the Arab world. The UAE government publicly condemned Hamas — that's significant — but it also criticized Israeli military operations. The relationship survived at the government level, but the images coming out of Gaza made it harder for ordinary Emiratis to feel warmly toward normalization.
This is the elite-versus-street divide, and it's not unique to the UAE. You see it in Morocco too. Business and government elites are deeply engaged — they see the economic upside, the technology transfer, the security cooperation. The broader population is more skeptical, and that skepticism is tied to the Palestinian issue in ways the Accords' architects may have underestimated.
Well, and this is where the strategic bet of the Accords gets tested. The whole premise was that you could delink normalization from Palestinian statehood. The old model said you had to solve the Palestinian question first — land for peace, the Oslo framework. The Accords said no, we can build economic bridges now and the Palestinian track can proceed separately. October seventh basically stress-tested whether that delinking holds under extreme pressure.
And the answer is — it holds at the government level, but it frays at the popular level. The Emirati embassy in Tel Aviv stayed open. The Israeli embassy in Abu Dhabi and the consulate in Dubai stayed open, though they've faced protests — small but symbolically significant. Flights continued. Trade continued. The infrastructure held. But the warmth — the sense that this is a genuine people-to-people peace — took a hit. And here's the question I keep coming back to: is that a temporary dip that reverses when the Gaza war recedes from the headlines, or is it a permanent reset to a lower baseline?
I think it depends on what happens next in Gaza. If there's a credible reconstruction process and some movement on Palestinian governance, the warmth index probably recovers. If it's just a ceasefire followed by the same status quo, the damage might be lasting. The Emirati public has now seen what normalization looks like during a major Israeli military operation in Palestinian territories. That's a data point they didn't have in twenty twenty. You can't un-see it.
Let's talk about the security dimension, because this is where the relationship is arguably deepest and also least visible. Intelligence cooperation between Israel and the UAE has been substantial. Military coordination, counterterrorism, cyber defense. These are the areas where the relationship is most institutionalized and most durable — and also the areas that generate zero public goodwill, because nobody knows about them.
And when I say nobody knows about them, I mean that literally. These aren't things that get announced. You don't issue a joint communiqué after a cyber defense exercise. Maybe you get a leaked report two years later. So you have this strange dynamic where the most robust pillar of the relationship is invisible to the populations on both sides. An Emirati citizen who's skeptical of normalization might be benefiting from Israeli intelligence on a security threat and have no idea.
That's the paradox. The most successful parts of the relationship are the least visible, so they don't build public support. A joint cybersecurity exercise doesn't make the evening news in Abu Dhabi. A shared intelligence assessment doesn't generate tourism. And meanwhile, the visible parts — trade delegations, business conferences — can look like elite networking that doesn't benefit ordinary citizens. If the only thing the average Emirati sees from normalization is Israeli tourists at the Dubai mall and businesspeople at conferences, and the security benefits are classified, the cost-benefit calculus in their mind is going to skew negative.
So if you're sitting in Riyadh looking at this, what conclusions do you draw? The Saudi track has been frozen since October twenty twenty-three. Before that, there was real momentum — the Biden administration was pushing hard, the framework was taking shape. The UAE experience offers some pretty clear lessons.
The first lesson is that economic integration alone cannot generate popular legitimacy. It builds interdependence, which is valuable — it makes the relationship harder to break — but it doesn't build affection. If Saudi Arabia normalizes, the deal has to include a substantial public diplomacy and cultural exchange component from day one. Educational exchanges, Arabic-language Israeli media, visible benefits for ordinary Saudis, not just business elites and defense establishments.
The second lesson is about the Palestinian track. The UAE model explicitly delinked normalization from Palestinian statehood, and that may have been a strategic mistake for long-term legitimacy. When the Gaza war erupted, there was no Palestinian progress to point to as a counterweight. If Saudi Arabia is going to move, there will almost certainly need to be a credible Palestinian component — not necessarily a full two-state solution on day one, but something tangible that allows the Saudi leadership to say this isn't abandonment.
And the Saudi leadership knows this. Mohammed bin Salman has been explicit that Palestinian statehood remains a requirement. The question is whether that's a maximalist opening position or a genuine red line. The UAE experience suggests it should be treated as genuine. If the Emiratis are taking heat for normalization without Palestinian progress, imagine the heat on the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. The Saudi position on Palestine isn't just foreign policy — it's wrapped up in the monarchy's religious legitimacy.
The UAE can weather public discontent because it's a small, wealthy, authoritarian state with a tiny citizen population and a massive expatriate workforce. The government doesn't need to worry about public opinion in the same way a larger, more populous country does. Saudi Arabia has a population of over thirty million citizens. Public opinion matters more there, not because it's a democracy — it's not — but because the scale makes discontent harder to manage. The Saudi leadership has to bring the street along in a way the Emiratis could afford to neglect.
There's a third lesson that I think gets less attention — the asymmetry problem. The UAE-Israel relationship has been heavily driven by Israeli enthusiasm and Emirati elite calculation. Israelis wanted this deeply — Daniel mentioned that yearning for normalization in Israeli society, and he's right. For Emiratis, it was more of a government decision. That asymmetry shows up in the tourism numbers, in the business engagement patterns, in the cultural exchange. A Saudi deal would need to find ways to make the enthusiasm more mutual.
Part of that is about what Israel brings to the table beyond technology and security. Israelis have been eager consumers of what the UAE offers — tourism, logistics, business opportunities. What do ordinary Saudis get? Vision twenty thirty is already transforming the Saudi economy. The question for Saudi planners is whether Israeli technology and investment accelerates that transformation in ways that are visible to the Saudi street, or whether it's another elite deal. If the only Saudis who benefit are the ones already connected to the royal court and the big conglomerates, you're replicating the UAE pattern where the visible benefits flow to a narrow slice of the population.
And Vision twenty thirty actually makes this harder in an interesting way. The UAE didn't have a massive economic transformation narrative when the Accords were signed — Dubai was already Dubai. Saudi Arabia is in the middle of this hugely ambitious national project. If Israeli partnerships are seen as accelerating Vision twenty thirty — creating jobs, building industries, transferring skills — that could generate genuine popular buy-in. But if they're seen as a side deal that benefits the usual suspects, it could actually undermine the Vision's credibility. You'd have people asking, wait, we're supposed to be building a self-sufficient diversified economy, and now we're importing Israeli technology instead of developing our own?
Let me push back on something, though. The cold peace with Egypt and Jordan — we've been using that as the foil here, the thing we're trying to improve on. But those treaties have lasted. Egypt's held for over forty years, Jordan's for over thirty. They prevented major wars. In a region where everything falls apart, cold peace that endures is not nothing. If the UAE relationship settles into something warmer than Cairo but cooler than the early hype suggested — is that actually a failure?
That's fair. The misconception is that cold peace is failure. It's not. It's a floor. The UAE model is trying to build something above that floor — a warm peace with genuine economic and cultural integration. The risk is that by aiming higher, you create expectations you can't meet, and the disappointment is sharper than if you'd never promised warmth in the first place. The Egypt peace treaty was sold to Egyptians as a strategic necessity, not a blossoming friendship. Nobody in Cairo in nineteen seventy-nine thought they were about to start vacationing in Tel Aviv. The expectations were calibrated to reality. The Abraham Accords, by contrast, were sold with a lot of talk about a new Middle East, about shared innovation, about people-to-people connection. The gap between that rhetoric and the polling numbers is what creates the sense of underperformance.
The warmth index decline is interesting in that light. If you'd told Egyptian or Jordanian leaders in the early years of their treaties that their public support for normalization would be low, they'd have said, sure, we know, that's not what this is. The Abraham Accords promised something different, so the metric is different. You're judged by the standard you set for yourself.
And to be clear, the UAE relationship is categorically warmer than Egypt or Jordan. Sixty flights a week versus ten or twenty-five. Two hundred fifty thousand Israeli tourists versus a trickle to Cairo or Amman. Joint business ventures, technology partnerships, the DMCC Israel desk. This is not a cold peace. It's a lukewarm peace — warmer at the top than at the bottom, warmer in business than in culture, but not frozen. If you'd described this relationship to an Israeli diplomat in twenty eighteen, they'd have been thrilled. The disappointment is relative to the hype, not relative to the alternative.
So if the UAE experience has taught us anything, it's that building a warm peace requires more than trade deals. Here's what that means for three different audiences. For policymakers — the UAE-Israel relationship proves that trade-and-tech-first normalization can work at the government level and create durable infrastructure. But it cannot substitute for a public legitimacy strategy. Any future Saudi deal must include a substantial public diplomacy and cultural exchange component from day one. Not as an afterthought, not as phase two — baked into the agreement itself.
For investors and businesses — the UAE-Israel corridor is real and durable. The flights, the trade routes, the banking relationships, the institutional mechanisms like the DMCC desk — these will persist regardless of political headwinds. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, though. Diamonds, electronics, machinery — those sectors are mature. The next phase requires deeper integration in healthcare AI, water tech, agtech, renewable energy. That's harder, slower, and less glamorous, but it's where the durable value lies. And I'd add — the investors who do best here will be the ones who understand that they're not just entering a market, they're building a relationship. The Emirati partners who signed deals in twenty twenty-one are now looking at their Israeli counterparts and asking: are you still here? Did you stick around when the news got bad? That's a reputational filter that matters.
And for observers — don't mistake government-to-government warmth for people-to-people warmth. The Abraham Accords created a framework, not a feeling. The feelings may take a generation. The polling numbers are what they are, but you're also seeing Emirati students studying in Israeli universities now, joint academic research, cultural exchanges that didn't exist five years ago. Those are seeds. They don't show up in quarterly trade data, but they're the things that might actually shift public sentiment over time. A twenty-two-year-old Emirati who spends a semester at Tel Aviv University and goes home with Israeli friends — that person's view of the relationship in twenty years is going to be fundamentally different from someone whose only exposure is Al Jazeera coverage of Gaza. But you need hundreds of those people, then thousands, and that takes time.
The question Daniel's really asking, I think, is whether this model can be replicated at scale. Saudi Arabia is a different beast — larger population, more religious significance, more regional weight, more domestic sensitivity on Palestine. The UAE was the easy case in some ways — small population, already cosmopolitan, already positioning itself as a global hub. If the model shows strain even there, what does that tell you about Saudi Arabia?
It tells you the model needs modification, not abandonment. The core insight of the Accords — that economic integration creates constituencies for peace — is still valid. The modification is that economic integration alone isn't enough. You need visible cultural exchange, educational programs, media normalization, and some kind of Palestinian progress. The UAE experience surfaced those requirements. Saudi negotiators have been watching closely.
And there's a timing question. The next twelve months are critical. If the Gaza war winds down and the Saudi track resumes, the UAE model will be the template — modified, hopefully, with the lessons we've been discussing. If the Saudi track stays frozen, the UAE experience may be remembered as a high-water mark rather than a beginning. And the window won't stay open forever. The Biden administration put enormous political capital into the Saudi track. A different administration might have different priorities. The region might look very different in two years.
The one thing I keep coming back to is this — the Abraham Accords proved that peace can be built on trade. The infrastructure is real, the economic interdependence is real, the institutional mechanisms are real. None of that existed five years ago. The next challenge is proving it can be built on trust. And trust is slower, messier, and doesn't show up in a quarterly report.
Which is why the aviation number still matters as a metaphor. Sixty flights a week means thousands of people are moving between these countries every day. Businesspeople, tourists, families, students. Every flight is a small bet on normalcy. The cumulative effect of those small bets, over years and decades — that's what turns a framework into a relationship. And I think sometimes we get so focused on the macro picture — the trade figures, the polling, the diplomatic statements — that we miss the micro story. Some Israeli entrepreneur flying to Dubai for the fourth time this year, who now has a favorite restaurant there and an Emirati business partner she texts with regularly. That's the atomic unit of normalization. You need millions of those atoms to form a compound.
And that's the thing about the cold peace with Egypt and Jordan. It's lasted because it was built on security guarantees and government-to-government ties, and those are durable even when populations are indifferent or hostile. The UAE model is trying to build something that's durable even if governments change or security calculations shift. That's harder, and it's going to take longer to know if it worked. The Egypt treaty survived the Arab Spring, the Muslim Brotherhood winning an election, the counter-coup, a decade of political turbulence. It survived because it was anchored in strategic interests that didn't change with the political weather. The question for the UAE relationship is whether the economic interdependence is deep enough to serve the same anchoring function. We won't really know until it's tested.
Can the UAE-Israel relationship survive a prolonged regional crisis? The Gaza war is the first real test, and so far the answer is yes, but with visible strain. Flights kept operating. Trade kept flowing. Embassies stayed open. That's not nothing. But the warmth index declined, and public sentiment deteriorated. A longer crisis, or a broader regional escalation — the kind of thing that seems plausible given current tensions with Iran — would test the relationship more severely.
The Iran dimension is worth flagging, actually. One of the unspoken drivers of the Accords was shared concern about Iran. The UAE and Israel both see Tehran as a strategic threat. That alignment hasn't changed. If anything, the current escalation — US strikes on Iran, Hormuz tensions — reinforces it. Security cooperation is the quiet engine of the relationship, and it's probably the part least affected by public opinion.
Because it happens below the surface. The public doesn't see it, doesn't feel it, isn't asked to approve it. That's both its strength and its limitation. It keeps the relationship anchored when sentiment sours, but it doesn't build the kind of popular legitimacy that would make the relationship resilient if the security calculation ever changed. And security calculations can change. Iran is the threat now. What if, in fifteen years, the Iranian regime moderates or collapses, and the strategic rationale for the Israel-UAE axis weakens? If the relationship is only security and elite business ties, it could atrophy. If it's also got deep cultural and educational links, it survives the shift.
So where does that leave Daniel's question about lessons learned? I think there are three. One, build the infrastructure first — flights, trade routes, banking, institutional mechanisms. That part worked. Two, don't assume economic integration automatically generates popular support. It doesn't. You need a parallel track of cultural exchange and public diplomacy. Three, the Palestinian issue didn't go away just because the Accords delinked it. It reasserted itself, and any future normalization deal needs to account for that.
And the Saudi track, if and when it resumes, will be the test of whether those lessons were actually learned. The stakes are higher — Saudi Arabia is the big prize, the one that would genuinely reshape the region. If the UAE model, with modifications, can produce a warmer peace there, the Abraham Accords will be remembered as the beginning of something transformative. If it can't, they'll be remembered as a missed opportunity. The architects of the Accords took a real strategic gamble — that you could reverse the sequence, build the economic and security architecture first, and let the political and cultural dimensions catch up. Five years in, the jury is still out. But we have a lot more evidence than we did in twenty twenty, and the evidence is telling us that the sequence matters more than the architects hoped.
One final thought, and then I want to get to Hilbert's fact. The Abraham Accords proved that peace can be built on trade. The next challenge is proving it can be built on trust. And trust, unlike trade, doesn't compound quarterly. It compounds generationally. The real verdict on the UAE-Israel relationship won't come from the twenty twenty-five polling data. It'll come from what the Emirati students who studied in Tel Aviv tell their children about Israelis, twenty or thirty years from now. That's the long game, and nobody who signs a normalization agreement gets to be around for the final score.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The distinctively smoky, peppery flavor of grains of paradise — a spice from the ginger family native to West Africa — comes primarily from a compound called six-paradol. During the Cold War, Equatorial Guinea was one of the few places still exporting it in meaningful quantities to Europe, making its spice trade a surviving remnant of a medieval African trade route that had otherwise largely collapsed.
Grains of paradise. Sounds like something from my leaf medicine cabinet.
Equatorial Guinea and Cold War spice routes. I did not have that on my bingo card.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you want to send us a prompt like Daniel did, email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. We'll be back soon.
