On September 15, 2020, on the South Lawn of the White House, the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed normalization agreements with Israel — the first new Israel-Arab normalization agreements in twenty-six years (Egypt-Israel 1979; Jordan-Israel 1994 had been the prior normalizations). Sudan announced normalization with Israel in October 2020 (with the formal arrangement evolving through subsequent years), and Morocco followed in December 2020. Together, the four agreements became known as the Abraham Accords, named after the shared Abrahamic religious heritage of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The Accords were widely regarded as substantively shifting the regional architecture: formally establishing diplomatic and commercial relations between Israel and major Gulf states (UAE in particular, with substantial commercial, tourism, and technology ties developing rapidly across the following years), embedding specific U.S. policy commitments to the signatory Arab states (advanced weapons sales to UAE; U.

S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara), and creating the architecture within which a subsequent Saudi-Israeli normalization could plausibly be negotiated.