The accounting behind the Abraham Accords

The Abraham Accords are usually described as peace agreements. That framing is not wrong, but it is incomplete in a way that hides how they work.

They were, in the plainest terms, a set of transactions. Countries normalised relations with Israel and received something in exchange. What each party received is a matter of public record, and following those exchanges forward explains several events that otherwise appear to have nothing to do with each other.

The architect, and what he did next

Jared Kushner was the senior White House adviser who led the negotiations. That is not in dispute; it was the public basis of his role.

In February 2024, some years after leaving office, Kushner spoke at Harvard about Gaza. He said Gaza’s “waterfront property could be very valuable,” and added that “from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” The remarks were recorded and widely reported at the time, and resurfaced again in 2026 as plans for post-war Gaza were discussed.

It is worth being precise about what is objectionable here. The claim is not that a private citizen holds views about property development. It is that the person who negotiated the region’s diplomatic architecture described the forced removal of a population as a step towards realising real-estate value — in public, on the record, apparently without expecting controversy.

After leaving the White House, Kushner founded a private equity firm, Affinity Partners. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund invested $2 billion in it, at the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The UAE and Qatar each invested a further $200 million. A financial disclosure filed in March showed roughly 99% of the firm’s capital came from foreign investors.

None of that is alleged. It is disclosed. What it means is a separate question — Kushner has consistently denied that his government service and his subsequent fundraising are connected, and no finding of wrongdoing has been made against him. But the sequence is documented: negotiate the agreements, leave office, raise capital almost entirely from the governments on the other side of them.

Sudan: what the money actually bought

Sudan was brought into the normalisation framework in 2020, under a transitional government, in exchange for removal from the US state sponsors of terrorism list.

Three years later that transitional government was gone, deposed by the two generals who had shared power with it, and those generals were at war with each other. What has happened since is instructive about who the region’s partnerships actually serve.

The Rapid Support Forces are backed principally by the United Arab Emirates. UN panel findings and a Sunday Times investigation have traced Emirati weapons routes into Darfur. Sudan’s central bank data shows the UAE took roughly 90% of the country’s official gold exports in the first half of 2025 — gold largely mined in RSF-held territory and moved out through Chad. Sudan has filed a case at the International Court of Justice alleging Emirati complicity in crimes against humanity. The UAE denies supplying arms to any party.

The Sudanese Armed Forces are backed substantially by Turkey. Reporting indicates Turkey has supplied over $120 million in military equipment to the Sudanese army, including Bayraktar TB2 and Akinci drones, warheads and command systems, with transfers reported via Egypt. Those drones have been used in operations across Gezira, Khartoum and North Kordofan states. In July 2026 an Akinci was used to shoot down an RSF-operated Chinese-made drone near El Obeid.

So Sudan is being fought over with Emirati money and Turkish drones, by two factions with no popular mandate, in a war a UN fact-finding mission has concluded includes genocide in Darfur.

One thing this site will not claim. It is sometimes said that Israel is running a proxy war in Sudan. We looked for evidence of that and did not find it. Israel’s involvement with Sudan has been normalisation diplomacy, conducted with both Burhan and, at various points, contacts with the RSF. That is a real thing to criticise, and it is not the same as arming a side. The UAE and Turkey are arming sides. Saying otherwise would be easier and would be false.

Morocco, Western Sahara, and a fence in Ceuta

This is the exchange that shows the mechanism most clearly.

Morocco normalised relations with Israel in December 2020. In return, the United States recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara — a territory Morocco has occupied since 1975, whose status the UN still classifies as unresolved and whose Sahrawi population has never been permitted the referendum they were promised.

That recognition is the thing Morocco wanted, and it is the thing Morocco has spent the years since defending.

In May 2021, roughly 8,000 people crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in a single day, after Moroccan border forces stood aside. Spain said openly that Morocco had relaxed its controls deliberately, in retaliation for Spanish criticism of the Western Sahara recognition. It worked. In 2022 Spain reversed a fifty-year position and endorsed Morocco’s autonomy plan for the territory, and Morocco undertook to prevent further incursions.

In late July 2026 it happened again, at far greater scale — an estimated 80,000 irregular entries into Ceuta, most returned to Morocco within days. Again the dispute in the background is Western Sahara.

The 2021 episode received a few days of coverage and then disappeared. That is the pattern worth naming: it had happened before, at smaller scale, and almost nobody outside Spain was paying attention until the numbers became impossible to ignore.

Again, precision matters. Israel is not opening that border. Morocco is, and Morocco is doing it for its own reasons. But the reason Morocco holds a US recognition worth defending this hard is the normalisation agreement, and the people paying for that arrangement are Sahrawis who never had a say and migrants used as a pressure tactic against Spain.

What the ledger shows

Read as transactions rather than as peace, the agreements resolve into something legible:

  • The UAE received advanced US weapons systems and diplomatic cover, and is now the principal external backer of a force a UN mission has found committed genocide.
  • Morocco received US recognition of its claim over an occupied territory, and has twice used human beings as leverage to keep it.
  • Sudan’s civilian government received removal from a sanctions list, and was overthrown by its own generals within a year.
  • Saudi Arabia, which never signed, nonetheless placed $2 billion with the firm of the man who wrote the agreements.
  • Palestinians, whose situation the agreements were meant to improve, were not party to them, and the man who negotiated them later described their removal from Gaza as a route to unlocking property value.

Every item on that list is documented. What connects them is not a conspiracy — it is an accounting method, in which normalisation is the currency and the costs are charged to populations who were not in the room.

Sources

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