On September 15, 2026, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain marked six years since three governments did something the region’s pessimists had insisted, for a generation, could not be done: they chose each other. What began in the late summer of 2020 as a carefully hedged diplomatic gamble has become something sturdier and far less fashionable to doubt — a working, trading, defending, and increasingly trusting partnership that has outlasted war, recession, and no small amount of regional turbulence.

The Abraham Accords were signed at the White House on September 15, 2020, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, bringing Israel together with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in agreements rooted, by name and by intent, in the shared inheritance of the Abrahamic faiths. Morocco and Sudan joined the circle soon after. In the years since, the framework has kept moving rather than settling: Kazakhstan’s accession in 2025 pulled the Accords into Central Asia for the first time, and quieter engagement with Somaliland has hinted at where the map may stretch next.

Six years is not a long time in the life of a region that measures its grievances in centuries. But it has been long enough to answer the question that hung over the Accords at their signing: would this be another paper agreement, or would it change how people actually live, trade, and defend one another? The evidence, six years on, points firmly toward the latter.

From Handshake to Balance Sheet

Diplomacy is usually judged in speeches. The Abraham Accords are unusual in that they can also be judged in customs data — and the customs data tells a genuinely striking story.

Trade between the UAE and Israel was, in practical terms, close to nonexistent before normalization in September 2020. By 2025, it had reached $3.209 billion, according to figures reported by the UAE Embassy in Israel, and early figures for 2026 show the relationship still accelerating rather than plateauing, with first-quarter trade up 4.8% year-on-year against an already-elevated 2025 base (VJM Global).

The engine behind that climb has a name: CEPA, the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement signed within two years of normalization — the first free trade agreement Israel has ever concluded with an Arab state. CEPA removed or lowered tariffs across more than 96% of tariff lines, covering roughly 99% of the trade value flowing between the two countries, and it is that structural change, more than any single ribbon-cutting, that analysts credit for turning a diplomatic opening into a durable commercial relationship (Gulf Daily News).

The early numbers back up the story of a relationship that accelerated almost as soon as the ink dried. Non-oil trade in the first quarter of 2022 alone reached $1.06 billion — five times the equivalent figure from the first quarter of 2021 — and by March 2022, cumulative non-oil trade since the Accords had already crossed $2.5 billion in under eighteen months (Gulf Daily News). The Carnegie Endowment later cited $2.5 billion as the benchmark full-year figure for 2022, and the UAE was, by that point, already a standout driver of Israel’s overall export growth (IsraelFact; Emirates Wire).

Year-by-year growth, 2020–2026

In short: what was a diplomatic novelty in September 2020 has become a multi-billion-dollar trade corridor in six years, and officials now speak of it clearing $10 billion within five years of CEPA’s signing — a target that once would have sounded like wishful thinking, and now sounds, on the current trajectory, like arithmetic (Gulf Daily News).

What Is Actually Driving the Surge

What the Accords Are Not Made Of: Fair-Weather Friendship

Every peace agreement gets its real test not at the signing table but in the worst weeks that follow it. For the Abraham Accords, that test arrived on October 7, 2023, and in the grinding years of conflict that followed — the kind of period diplomats privately expect to unravel a young agreement built more on optimism than on institutions.

It didn’t unravel. Every one of the relationships forged since 2020 endured. No partner walked away. Trade continued to grow rather than collapse. Security cooperation deepened rather than paused. Embassies stayed open. Officials from Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain used the sixth anniversary to make exactly this point: that the Accords’ real achievement was not the signing ceremony in 2020, but the fact that the relationships survived the years since.

“We surprised the world once… with the right leadership, focus, patience and courage, I believe we can do it again.” — Jared Kushner, a key architect of the Abraham Accords, reflecting on the sixth anniversary

“Just the beginning.” — Israeli President Isaac Herzog, marking six years of the Accords and calling for the circle of peace to expand further

Security and Strategy: Friendship With Teeth

The Accords were never purely commercial, and their security dimension has arguably matured the fastest. Partner states now coordinate on air and missile defense, share intelligence, and conduct joint military planning in ways that were unthinkable before 2020. Morocco and Israel have signed multi-year military work plans, and defense cooperation across the bloc has expanded to the point that it now functions as a genuine coalition against shared threats rather than a loose set of bilateral understandings. That architecture was arguably what allowed the diplomatic relationships to survive the pressure of 2023–2025 in the first place: partners who already trusted each other on security matters had a foundation the purely commercial relationships did not.

Innovation, Medicine, and the Quiet Work of Peace

Away from headlines about trade balances and troop coordination, the Accords have also produced something harder to put a dollar figure on: a functioning scientific and medical network spanning neonatal care, diabetes research, water recycling, and artificial intelligence. Educational exchanges and interfaith initiatives have moved the relationship from government-to-government to person-to-person — embassies open, direct flights running, and a steady current of researchers, students, and entrepreneurs moving between countries that, six years ago, had no formal channel for any of it to happen at all.

The Circle Widens

Momentum is not standing still in 2026. Kazakhstan’s 2025 accession opened the Accords’ first real door into Central Asia. Israel’s Ambassador to the UAE, Yossi Shelley, has said he is optimistic that another nation — Kuwait has been mentioned specifically — could join within months. President Trump and regional leaders continue to press for broader expansion, with attention turning toward Saudi Arabia as the next, and by far the most consequential, potential signatory. Early discussions involving Syria and Lebanon point toward possibilities that would have seemed unthinkable even three years ago, and new frameworks covering economic security, medical cooperation, and defense integration are already being drafted to extend the benefits partners currently enjoy.

Whether Saudi Arabia ultimately joins remains the single biggest open question hanging over the Accords’ next chapter — and the one every anniversary statement from Washington, Jerusalem, Abu Dhabi, and Manama is implicitly building toward.

A Living Foundation, Not a Finished Achievement

It would be easy, in a region as often defined by its failures as its successes, to treat six years of the Abraham Accords as simply a diplomatic accomplishment to be filed away and celebrated once a year. The people who built the Accords insist that would be the wrong reading of what has happened. The Accords have rewritten the map of the Middle East, proven that pragmatism can outlast decades of distrust, and delivered tangible jobs, security, and innovation to the people living under them. And unlike so many peace frameworks that came before, they are still growing — in trade volume, in security depth, and in membership — six years after the ribbon was cut.

The future the Accords point toward is not guaranteed. Saudi Arabia has not signed. Syria and Lebanon remain, at best, early conversations. But the record of the last six years — a trade relationship that grew from nothing to $3.2 billion, a security coalition that held together through war, and a circle of nations that keeps adding members rather than losing them — gives the optimists in this story more to point to than the skeptics ever expected they would have.

Sources cited in this report:

• VJM Global — “Start a Business: Israel–UAE”
• Gulf Daily News — “UAE, Israel seal CEPA deal, eye $10bn bilateral trade in 5 years”
• IsraelFact — “Israel and the Emirates”
• Emirates Wire — “The UAE at the Edge of Its Next Decade”
• The Washington Times — “Expand Abraham Accords, Iran, Trump reshape Middle East”

Editor’s note: Faith & Freedom News does not have live web-search access while producing this page. Figures, quotations, and dates above were provided by the author and cross-referenced against the linked sources; readers are encouraged to verify against the original outlets before citing this article further.