The Negev Forum at Four: Bilateral Substance After the Multilateral Stall

The Negev Forum turned four in March 2026. There is no fifth ministerial scheduled. There has been no fourth, no third, no second. The second ministerial — the one promised in Morocco for the spring of 2023 — has never happened.

The diplomatic framework that grew out of the 2020 Abraham Accords and the March 2022 Sde Boker summit, bringing together Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Egypt, and the United States, has not formally ministerially convened since its founding meeting. As a forum, in the strict sense, it is dormant.

As an economic and security architecture, the picture is materially different.

The framework as designed

The Negev Forum was structured around six working groups — regional security; food and water security; energy; tourism; education and tolerance; and health — supported by a steering committee that met three times a year and an annual ministerial. The working groups met in person once, in Abu Dhabi in January 2023. Approximately 150 officials attended. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it the largest gathering between Israel and its regional partners since the 1991 Madrid Conference.

Morocco was to host the second ministerial in the spring of 2023. The Israeli government's announcement of expanded West Bank settlement activity in June 2023 led Rabat to cancel. The October 2023 Hamas attack and the ensuing Gaza war froze any near-term rescheduling. Three subsequent attempts to convene a ministerial — in late 2023, mid-2024, and early 2025 — were each shelved before any date was confirmed.

What kept moving underneath

The diplomatic stall did not translate into an economic stall. Bilateral commerce between Israel and the UAE has grown every year since 2020. Non-oil trade between the two countries exceeded $3.2 billion in 2024 and is on track to clear $4 billion in 2026 under the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement that took effect in 2023. The agreement was negotiated bilaterally, outside the Negev Forum framework, but reflects the same political opening that produced it.

Defense trade has expanded faster. UAE acquisitions of Israeli defense systems — air defense, counter-UAS, drones, cyber — have risen from a near-zero base to roughly 12 percent of Israeli defense exports as of 2025. The bilateral architecture supporting these flows operates through Israel's Ministry of Defense and the UAE Tawazun Council, with U.S. Foreign Military Sales overlay where applicable. None of it is administered through the Negev Forum.

Agriculture and water — the working group co-chaired by Israel and Morocco — produced a five-year bilateral agriculture and food-security agreement between Israel and the UAE, a water-technology cooperation framework with Bahrain, and a desalination memorandum with Morocco. All three are bilateral instruments running on their own legal timetables.

The Jordan question

The forum's structural limitation has been the absence of Jordan, the Arab country with the longest peace treaty with Israel and the deepest existing economic ties. Amman declined to join the Negev Forum on the grounds that any framework excluding the Palestinian Authority at the table was politically unworkable. The PA, in turn, declined to participate without a framework anchored in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative — the Saudi-proposed pre-1967-lines settlement formula.

The result was a forum of five Arab states, three of which (UAE, Bahrain, Morocco) had only normalized relations with Israel in 2020 and a fourth (Egypt) whose own peace treaty predated the framework by 43 years. The fifth — Sudan, an original signatory of the Abraham Accords — was effectively absent from the forum after the 2023 Sudanese civil war began.

What four years has taught

The Negev Forum was designed as a multilateral architecture for a region that has, since 2023, predominantly conducted its Israel-Arab business bilaterally. The economic substance has survived. The political optics have not.

For analytical purposes, two things are worth separating. First, the multilateral framework is not dead in any formal sense — no member has withdrawn, the working group documentation remains active, and successive U.S. administrations have continued to reference the forum as a vehicle for future regional integration. Second, the practical regional architecture has migrated to bilateral channels — UAE-Israel CEPA, Morocco-Israel defense and agriculture, Bahrain-Israel finance and water — that do not require a ministerial summit to function.

The four-year mark is a reasonable moment to ask whether the Negev Forum is a framework that will be revived when conditions allow, or a structure that has been superseded by the bilateral relationships it was designed to coordinate.

On the current evidence, both readings are defensible. Neither requires the forum to convene to be true.