Six Ministers in the Desert: The Negev Summit
In March 2022 the foreign ministers of Israel, the United States, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt met at Sde Boker, near Ben-Gurion’s grave, and agreed to keep meeting.
On the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth of March 2022, Israel's foreign minister Yair Lapid hosted his counterparts from the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt at Sde Boker, the desert kibbutz where David Ben-Gurion is buried. No meeting of Arab and Israeli foreign ministers on this scale had been held in Israel before.
The summit produced no treaty. What it produced was a habit. The ministers agreed to make the meeting a permanent forum for regional cooperation, which later became the Negev Forum, with working groups on subjects from energy, water and food security to health, education and tourism.
"We are here in the Negev to be a force working for peace." Nasser Bourita, Foreign Minister of Morocco, 28 March 2022.
Why it matters
Peace treaties are signed once; neighbourliness has to be practised every year. The Negev Summit was the moment the Abraham Accords began to look less like a ceremony and more like a neighbourhood. The joint statements are in the Archive.
Written by
Editorial desk
Contributor, Abrahamic Ambassadors
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