Diplomatic historians may remember the Abraham Accords for the photographs: leaders shaking hands, flags behind them, and ceremonies announcing a new era in the Middle East. But perhaps the more important story happened afterward, not in presidential palaces or foreign ministries, but in conference rooms, laboratories, farms, universities, and startup offices. In Casablanca, Moroccan and Israeli institutions signed more than a dozen agreements focused on innovation and high technology, spanning areas including water management, logistics, and sustainable agriculture. At first glance, these agreements might look like the technical aftermath of the 2020 normalization agreement. Read differently, they point to something bigger: the emergence of a different way of thinking about coexistence, one in which innovation itself becomes an infrastructure for cooperation.
Traditional Middle East diplomacy has largely been built around security: deterrence, defense agreements, intelligence cooperation, and threat management. All remain essential. But economic cooperation introduces another mechanism. A Moroccan agricultural company working with an Israeli technology company to reduce water consumption is no longer participating in a relationship defined only by the political mood between their governments. Their relationship depends on whether the technology works, whether farmers save water, whether the company makes money, and whether the partnership creates value. If it does, both sides have a reason to continue. Coexistence becomes useful.
Trade has long been understood as a potential force for peace because countries that trade with one another have more to lose from conflict. Innovation cooperation takes this logic further. Buying a product creates a transaction; building something together creates a relationship. Joint research, shared intellectual property, investors, engineers, distribution networks, and customers create forms of interdependence that are harder to unwind. This is particularly relevant in sectors such as water, agriculture, energy, and logistics. Morocco faces significant water stress, while Israel has spent decades developing expertise in desalination, irrigation, and precision agriculture. The relationship is therefore not based simply on diplomatic symbolism. Both sides have something the other needs. One has a problem; the other has technology and expertise that can help solve it.
This distinction matters because normalization is a political act, while interdependence is an economic reality. A treaty can be signed in a day. Meaningful economic integration takes years. Governments can change, public opinion can shift, and regional crises can reshape foreign policy. But companies that have invested years developing products together have customers, contracts, employees, intellectual property, and capital to protect. That does not eliminate political disagreements, but it raises the cost of abandoning cooperation. The long-term test of normalization, therefore, may not be whether governments remain aligned, but whether enough real-world relationships develop that returning to the old status quo becomes economically irrational.
There is, however, a serious limitation. Innovation partnerships often begin among a relatively narrow group: founders, investors, engineers, researchers, and government officials. Economic integration can therefore move faster than public sentiment. The question is whether these relationships eventually translate into broader social benefits and greater openness between societies. If citizens see better water management, new jobs, stronger businesses, and tangible economic opportunity, cooperation may acquire a constituency of its own.
If not, the model remains vulnerable to political shocks. Innovation diplomacy cannot replace politics; its promise is that it can gradually change the incentives surrounding politics and create more everyday connections between people who might otherwise remain distant.
That is why the Morocco-Israel relationship matters beyond the two countries. If the model works, it offers a broader blueprint for regional cooperation: countries do not necessarily need to agree politically before they can solve problems together. Water scarcity, food security, climate change, energy, logistics, and technology create challenges that cross borders regardless of diplomatic disagreements. Sometimes, countries do not need shared ideology to build cooperation. They simply need a shared problem.
The Abraham Accords were signed by governments. Their longer-term meaning may ultimately be determined by the relationships built afterward — between companies, researchers, investors, universities, entrepreneurs, and communities. The most durable form of coexistence may therefore be the kind that becomes embedded in everyday life: not an abstract promise, but a practical relationship that creates value for both sides.
Perhaps that is the deeper opportunity of innovation diplomacy. Technology will not resolve the region’s political conflicts, nor can economic cooperation erase difficult histories. But when people build, invest, research, and solve problems together, coexistence becomes more than an aspiration. It becomes something people have a practical reason to sustain.