One year after Abraham Accords, trade between Israel and UAE tops £416 million

A year into the Abraham Accords, some $570 million (£416 million) in business has been done between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, according to data from the Central Bureau of Statistics.

During 2020 and the first six months of 2021, Israel exported $197 million (£144 million) of goods and services to the UAE, and imported about $372 million (£272 million).

Trade could reach $1 billion (£731 million) for the whole of 2021, and could exceed $3 billion (£2.2 billion) within three years, according to the UAE-Israel Business Council, an organization connecting businesses in the two countries.

On August 13, then-US President Donald Trump announced that Israel and the United Arab Emirates had agreed to normalize relations. What has followed has been a whirlwind of follow-on peace deals with Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan that continues to reshape political alliances in the Middle East.

Since then, Israeli companies are starting to recognize the potential offered by the UAE’s economic ecosystem, said Dorian Barak, an investor and co-founder of the UAE-Israel Business Council.

“The Emirates are a place where people from all over the world come to engage in commerce, with unique advantages compared with other jurisdictions that make it a unique platform to reach the entire world,” Barak said.

“It is comparable to Hong Kong and Singapore in that they are not just markets to sell to, they are marketplaces for the entire world. That’s why the UAE is the business capital of the entire region. Every country has a presence there.”