Slow process: Official ties “will take time,” Gurfein told The Circuit’s Jonathan Ferziger, speaking last Thursday over WhatsApp from a Starbucks in the northwestern Saudi city of Tabuk. He didn’t so much as get pulled over by Saudi police for a speeding ticket on the entire trip. Throughout the journey, he took to Twitter to describe his trek to Israel through Saudi territory. Starting in the UAE, Gurfein traveled through Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the West Bank before reaching Jerusalem. No speeding: To demonstrate that the Saudis are open to informal connections with Israel, Gurfein drove his Nissan Armada SUV last week on a 2,800-mile (4,500-km.) desert odyssey across the Arabian Peninsula. Operating from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, the 45-year-old New Yorker brokered indirect Arab-Israeli deals well before the 2020 Abraham Accords normalized Israel’s ties with the UAE and Bahrain. Why wait for diplomatic relations when there’s plenty of room to do business in the gray areas that prevail between Saudi Arabia and Israel? That’s the approach taken by Bruce Gurfein, a Jewish-American entrepreneur who has lived in the Gulf for 25 years. Read on for the stories, deals and players at the top of the news. Welcome to The Weekly Circuit, where we cover the Middle East through a business and cultural lens. According to the report, the funds are using a fair share of the gains to invest in solar, wind, hydrogen and other alternative energy sources, preparing for the inevitable future when they can’t depend on fossil fuels. A report by London-based Preqin showed that the eight biggest sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East, led by ADIA, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, have amassed more than $3 trillion in assets. In contrast to declines on Wall Street that have dented the value of some of Israel’s highest-flying startups, investors in the Gulf are reaping the rewards of high oil prices. Israel is also hopeful that warming relations with Chad, alongside its new alliance with Morocco, will lead to further diplomatic progress in Africa. In the meantime, The Circuit reports this week, investors are finding novel ventures for bringing Israelis and Saudis together, while Indonesia says it won’t interfere with private initiatives aimed at facilitating business between the two countries, though a diplomatic breakthrough appears far off. That was part of President Joe Biden’s objective in visiting both Israel and Saudi Arabia last month, flying directly between Tel Aviv and Jeddah to underline his desire to deliver a peace dividend. What hasn’t materialized, though, are the expectations that more Arab and Islamic nations would join the Accords and take the region on a quieter and more productive path that might include progress in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Investors from Gulf sovereign wealth funds have grown familiar with Tel Aviv’s tree-shaded Rothschild Boulevard, the heart of Israel’s finance sector, where they scrutinize startups with some of Israel’s top venture capital firms. With hundreds of thousands of Israelis now having visited the UAE and a free-trade agreement concluded in May, financial projections point to $10 billion in trade between the former adversaries over the next five years. Soon after, Morocco and Sudan had signed their own normalization pacts. The Abraham Accords, signed a month later at the White House by Israel, the UAE and Bahrain, radically altered views of what could be possible in the strife-filled Middle East. It’s been two years since former President Donald Trump gathered aides around his desk in the Oval Office and delivered the stunning news that the United Arab Emirates had agreed to normalize relations with Israel.
👋 Good Monday morning in the Middle East!
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