Over the past year, Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip has fundamentally upended the Jewish state’s regional relationships—and brought down the curtain, at least temporarily, on Jerusalem’s previously vibrant ties to the countries of the Abraham Accords. That, however, appears to be changing.
This past November, the Kingdom of Morocco became the first Abraham Accords country to officially reaffirm its diplomatic ties with Israel, citing its Jewish heritage as justification. The announcement was a hopeful sign that the wave of normalization between Israel and the Muslim world, officially kicked off in 2020, has begun to show new signs of life.
A great deal of this renewed momentum has to do with Israel’s recent strategic advances. The October 7 terror campaign carried out by Hamas in 2023 dealt a body blow to Israel’s regional standing, denting Jerusalem’s prior aura of military invulnerability and dragging it into a protracted and costly urban conflict. Thereafter, the Abraham Accords process more or less ground to a halt, as Arab publics rallied to the Palestinian cause while their leaders sought some sort of balance between quiet engagement with Jerusalem and official censure of it.
But a lot has changed in recent months. The expansion of Israel’s war to include a northern front against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon has netted rapid, dramatic results—from the incapacitation of thousands of the Shi’a militia’s cadres to the destruction of most of its vast stockpile of short- and long-range ballistic missiles. Arguably more significant was Israel’s late-October military strike on Hezbollah’s patron state, Iran, which eliminated the Islamic Republic’s air defense architecture and temporarily crippled its ability to produce ballistic missiles. And in Syria, the rapid December 2024 collapse of the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad has removed one of Iran’s key regional partners. As a result, the state’s much-vaunted “axis of resistance” is now in profound disarray, and the country’s clerical regime finds itself at its weakest point in decades.
That’s obviously good news for Israel, which is now preoccupied with dismantling the “ring of fire” that Iran has succeeded in building around the Jewish state in recent years. But it’s also a decidedly positive development for the Sunni states of the Persian Gulf, which have long worried about Iran’s ability to make regional mischief—and which, in the absence of a robust U.S. Mideast policy, have progressively sought some sort of accommodation with the ayatollahs. For those nations, Iran’s recent setbacks have demonstrated that bending the knee to Tehran isn’t the only possible path to regional stability.
The brightening prospects for regional normalization are also a function of American politics. Back in 2020, the Trump administration helped midwife the Accords by drawing the long-standing (albeit quiet) economic and political contacts between Israel and the Arab world out into the open. Now, a returning President Trump is sure to elevate the issue once more on the American strategic agenda.
What might that mean? In practical terms, the biggest prize would undoubtedly be some sort of normalization pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Before October 7, Riyadh and Jerusalem were reportedly just weeks away from such a diplomatic breakthrough. Today, that objective seems much further away, owing to the ongoing war in Gaza and the Kingdom’s strident support for Palestinian statehood. Still, renewed momentum on the Israel-Saudi track isn’t out of the question, because at bottom Riyadh’s position is driven by the need for greater regional security and economic prosperity—and the United States is in a position to help with the former, while Israel can assuredly assist with the latter.
Saudi Arabia, though, is not the only potential future partner for Israel. Prior to October 7, Jerusalem was quietly advancing its contacts with a number of other nations, including Indonesia and even Pakistan. Those lines of communication, currently blocked by the Israel-Hamas conflict, could find themselves restored as the war in Gaza winds down. Meanwhile, given the transactional nature of Middle Eastern politics, other regional states can be counted on to inch toward normalization with Israel as a way of engaging the new American administration more deeply. Potential candidates include Oman, Tunisia and even Qatar, whose officials have quietly intimated that, should a Saudi-Israeli thaw materialize, Doha would invariably follow suit.
Of course, a great deal still depends on what Israel itself does. Internal political developments there—from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal troubles to the maximalist positions of the most extreme members of his ruling coalition—have the potential to arrest, or at the very least complicate, this forward momentum. Harmful, too, is Netanyahu’s steadfast refusal to even consider a long-range plan for the Palestinians, something that represents an ongoing irritant for both current and potential partners.
Even so, the evidence suggests that, slowly but surely, Muslim states are starting to remember why normalization with Israel is a good bet. Chances are, more and more will.
Ilan Berman is senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.