LONG READ
October 19, 2026
By Dr. Mohamed Chtatou
Key Takeaways:
The essay argues that Morocco–Israel relations form a six-tier structure—history, conviviality, religious complicity, sincerity, mutual interest, and the Abraham Accords—whose lower layers of long-term Jewish presence and shared life give the 2020 normalization and 2026 embassy upgrade a depth that has allowed the relationship to survive repeated crises.
It identifies the core vulnerability as an asymmetry: the upper tiers that carry the greatest strategic weight, especially the Accords and defense cooperation, enjoy the weakest popular legitimacy, as Arab Barometer data show support for normalization falling to 13 percent after October 2023.
The author concludes that the relationship’s resilience depends on protecting the socially embedded lower tiers while converting elite strategic benefits into broader societal gains and keeping the Palestinian question visible.
This essay analyzes the relationship between Morocco and Israel as a stratified structure of six interlocking tiers: history, conviviality, religious complicity, sincerity, mutual interest and well-being, and the Abraham Accords. Rather than treating the diplomatic normalization of December 2020 as the origin of the relationship, the essay situates it at the summit of a deeper edifice whose lower tiers—two and a half millennia of Jewish presence in the Maghrib, shared urban and rural life, intertwined devotional practice, and a royal discourse of protection—supply the symbolic and social capital on which the upper tiers draw. Drawing on historiography, anthropology, constitutional texts, diplomatic documents, public-opinion data, and developments through October 2026, including the upgrade to full embassies announced in September 2026 and Israel’s first national pavilion at the Marrakech Air Show, the essay advances a “layered resilience” thesis: the relationship has survived ruptures because its tiers operate on different temporalities and carry different legitimacies. It also identifies the relationship’s principal vulnerability, an asymmetry between the tier with the greatest strategic weight, which has the weakest popular legitimacy, and the tiers with the deepest social legitimacy, which are the least institutionalized.
Introduction
The proposition that Morocco and Israel share an unbroken relationship of two and a half thousand years is at once a historical claim, a political slogan, and an invitation to analysis. As history, it compresses a long and discontinuous record of Jewish presence in the western Maghrib, attested archaeologically in the Roman period and traditionally traced to Phoenician-era commerce (Gottreich, 2020; Hirschberg, 1974; Laskier, 1994). As slogan, it has been mobilized by the Moroccan monarchy, by Israeli diplomats, and by the Moroccan Jewish diaspora to present the diplomatic normalization announced on 10 December 2020 not as a novelty but as a restoration (Ben-Layashi & Maddy-Weitzman, 2010; Gulf News, 2020). As an invitation to analysis, it raises a question the slogan leaves open: of what, exactly, is the relationship composed, and why has it survived circumstances—colonial domination, mass emigration, successive Arab–Israeli wars, the closure of the liaison offices in 2000, and the devastation of Gaza after October 2023—that have ended lesser ties?
This essay answers that question by proposing that the relationship is not a single bond but a stack of six tiers, each with its own carriers, its own temporality, and its own source of legitimacy. The first tier is history: the long presence of Jews in Morocco and the political arrangements that governed it. The second is conviviality: the daily practice of shared space, language, commerce, and sociability between Muslims and Jews. The third is religious complicity, by which is meant the affinity, and at times the genuine collusion, between Moroccan Muslim and Jewish religiosity, expressed in shared saints, shared pilgrimage, and a common Abrahamic grammar. The fourth is sincerity: the extent to which the professed attachments of the monarchy, of Moroccan Jews at home and abroad, of Moroccan Muslim society, and of Israel are authentic rather than instrumental. The fifth is mutual interest and well-being: the security, economic, technological, and societal benefits that both states expect from cooperation. The sixth and uppermost is the Abraham Accords, the legal-diplomatic framework within which the relationship was resumed in December 2020 and is being institutionalized in 2026.
The argument developed here is that the six tiers differ in what Fernand Braudel (1958) called their duration. The lower tiers belong to the long term; the upper tiers belong to the conjuncture and the event. Because the lower tiers change slowly, they have repeatedly absorbed shocks that would otherwise have severed the relationship, and they furnish the Moroccan state with a vocabulary of continuity that makes each diplomatic step—liaison offices in 1994, normalization in 2020, embassies in 2026—appear as a return rather than a rupture (Chtatou, 2021c; Pennell, 2000). This is the thesis of layered resilience. Its corollary is a warning: the upper tiers carry the greatest strategic weight but the thinnest popular legitimacy, as survey evidence collected by the Arab Barometer since 2021 shows (Hespress English, 2025; Morocco World News, 2022). The tiers with the deepest social legitimacy, by contrast, are the least institutionalized and the most exposed to demographic erosion, since the Jewish population of Morocco has fallen from a quarter of a million in the late 1940s to a few thousand today (Laskier, 1994).
The essay is analytical and interpretive. It triangulates three bodies of evidence: the historiography of Moroccan Jewry and of Moroccan–Israeli diplomacy; anthropological and memory studies of Muslim–Jewish coexistence; and primary and contemporary documentary sources, including the 2011 Constitution, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2797 (2025), diplomatic communiqués, and polling data (Kingdom of Morocco, 2011; United Nations Security Council, 2025). It privileges the Moroccan vantage point without neglecting Israeli and American perspectives, and it extends to developments of September and October 2026. Each of the six sections that follow defines its tier, reviews the evidence, and identifies the tier’s contribution to the whole and its characteristic fragility. A discussion section then examines the interaction among the tiers, and a conclusion draws out implications for scholarship and policy.
Conceptual Framework: Why Tiers, and What the Tiers Are Not
A stratified model is preferable to a linear narrative for three reasons. First, the evidence for Moroccan–Jewish history is discontinuous: golden ages and persecutions, protection and humiliation, intimacy and segregation coexisted, sometimes in the same city and the same decade (Cohen, 1994; Lewis, 1984; Stillman, 1979). A linear account must choose between nostalgia and grievance; a stratified account can hold both, assigning each to the tier where it belongs. Second, the relationship involves actors of different kinds—sultans and kings, rabbis and marabouts, merchants and peasants, ministries and defense firms—whose interactions unfold at different speeds. Third, the model allows legitimacy to be disaggregated. A diplomatic act may be popular for one reason (it affirms a long coexistence) and unpopular for another (it appears to condone the occupation of Palestinian land), and only a layered analysis can register this ambivalence.
Three clarifications are necessary at the outset. The first concerns the figure of two and a half thousand years. It is best read as a shorthand for deep antiquity rather than as an exact chronology. The earliest secure evidence of Jewish life in Morocco is epigraphic and archaeological and belongs to the Roman centuries, while the older traditions linking Jewish settlers to Phoenician navigation and to the aftermath of the destruction of the First Temple are plausible but poorly documented (Gottreich, 2020; Hirschberg, 1974). The adjective “unbroken” also requires qualification. Jewish presence in Morocco has been continuous, though its demography collapsed after 1948; but the relationship in the sense of state-to-state diplomacy has been intermittent, covert for long periods, and formalized only in 1994, in 2020, and in 2026 (Black & Morris, 1991; Shlaim, 2000).
The second clarification concerns terminology. For most of its history the relationship was one between Morocco and its own Jewish subjects, and between Morocco and the wider Jewish and Sephardic world, not between Morocco and a Jewish state. The State of Israel dates from 1948, and its relationship to Moroccan Jews has been complex: Israel became the destination of the majority of Moroccan Jewish emigrants, and Israelis of Moroccan descent are now among the largest components of its Mizrahi population, but they migrated into a society that frequently devalued their culture (Laskier, 1994; Shenhav, 2006; Shohat, 1999). The essay therefore distinguishes consistently among Moroccan Jews, Israeli citizens of Moroccan origin, and the Israeli state. To conflate these categories is both analytically careless and politically hazardous, because it invites the identification of Moroccan Jewish citizens with the policies of a government in which they have no part.
The third clarification concerns the verb “regulate.” The framing under discussion holds that the tiers regulate the relationship. In the sense used here, regulation means that each tier sets limits and provides resources to the others: the lower tiers legitimate and constrain the upper ones, and the upper ones in turn finance and protect the lower ones through state patronage of Jewish heritage, funding for synagogues and cemeteries, and the diplomatic cover that allows diaspora communities to visit and invest (Boum, 2013; Chtatou, 2023c). The model is neither deterministic nor teleological. Nothing in it implies that the tiers must reinforce one another; on the contrary, the discussion section argues that the tiers can come into conflict, and that the principal risk to the relationship in 2026 is precisely such a conflict between the sixth tier and the rest.
Tier One: History
Antiquity and the Islamic Foundations
The first tier is the deepest and the most contested. Its raw material is a sequence of encounters between the western Maghrib and the Jewish world stretching from antiquity to the present. Jewish communities are attested in Roman Mauretania Tingitana, notably at Volubilis, where inscriptions and objects bearing Jewish symbols date from the first centuries of the Common Era (Gottreich, 2020; Hirschberg, 1974). Medieval chroniclers and later historians also preserve the tradition of Judaized Amazigh tribes, of which the best known is the Jarawa confederation of the Aurès and its queen, remembered in Arabic sources as al-Kahina, who resisted the Arab conquest in the seventh century (Brett & Fentress, 1996; Ibn Khaldun, 1925–1956). Whatever the weight of this evidence, it fixes a foundational idea in Moroccan memory: that Jews are native to the land and that their presence predates the arrival of Islam, a status that few Jewish communities in the Muslim world have enjoyed (Chtatou, 2023c; Laroui, 1977).
The Islamic centuries added a juridical framework. Jews, like Christians, were ahl al-dhimma, protected subjects who paid a poll tax in return for security of person, property, and worship, and who accepted a lower civil status (Cohen, 1994; Lewis, 1984; Stillman, 1979). The framework was not uniform in application. Where the central authority was strong, it protected Jewish life; where it weakened, as during the Almohad ascendancy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which imposed forced conversion on Jews and Christians, it could threaten it (Hirschberg, 1974; Laskier, 1994). The philosopher Moses Maimonides, who fled Almohad Córdoba and spent several years in Fez before moving eastward, is the most famous witness to this precariousness and, paradoxically, to the intellectual vitality of the Maghribi Jewish world (Davidson, 2005; Kraemer, 2008). Under the Marinids, who founded the Jewish quarter of Fez Jdid, the mellah, in 1438, the pattern of royal protection and spatial concentration took the form that would endure until the twentieth century (Gerber, 1980; Gottreich, 2007).
The Sephardic Arrival and the Early Modern Order
The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1496–1497 transformed Moroccan Jewry. Tens of thousands of refugees reached Moroccan ports and cities, and although exact figures are, in the cautious phrase of the historian Haim Zafrani, a matter of approximations, a figure of some forty thousand arrivals is often retained (Zafrani, 2003, as cited in Chtatou, 2023a). The Wattasid sultan Muhammad al-Shaykh (1472–1505) is remembered in Jewish chronicles as a just ruler who received the exiles with compassion, notably at Fez (Chtatou, 2023a). The encounter produced a durable internal division between the newcomers, the megorashim, and the established Arabic- and Amazigh-speaking Jews, the toshavim; the former brought Iberian liturgy, Judeo-Spanish speech in the form of Haketia in the northern cities, and commercial connections across the Mediterranean, while the latter remained rooted in local languages and customs (Abitbol, 1993; Gerber, 1992). Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the two groups gradually merged, and their fusion created what later generations would call Moroccan Judaism, simultaneously Sephardic and Maghribi (Deshen, 1989; Gerber, 1980).
Under the Saadians and especially the Alawites, Jews acquired economic roles that bound them closely to the sovereign. They served as bankers, as caravan guides and traders in the Saharan commerce, as translators and diplomatic intermediaries, and as the merchants of the sultan in the Atlantic ports, most notably in Essaouira, which Sultan Sidi Muhammad ibn Abdallah developed in the later eighteenth century and where the tujjar al-sultan formed a Jewish commercial elite (Schroeter, 1988, 2002). The bond between the sultan and his Jewish subjects therefore acquired a distinctive logic: protection in exchange for services, and the periodic extortion that is its shadow. The relationship was also a spatial one. The mellah, usually regarded as a ghetto, was in Moroccan practice more ambiguous; often established near the royal palace, it protected Jews at the same time as it confined them, and its boundaries were permeable in daily commerce (Gottreich, 2007).
Colonial Intrusion and the Politics of Protection
The nineteenth century introduced external actors who altered the terms of the relationship. European consuls extended the system of protection (himaya) to Moroccan Jewish merchants, thereby removing them from the sultan’s jurisdiction and creating a resentment that colored Muslim perceptions of Jews as agents of foreign powers (Laskier, 1983; Schroeter, 1988). The Alliance Israélite Universelle opened its first school in Tetouan in 1862 and spread a network of francophone schools that modernized Jewish education and orientated it toward France (Laskier, 1983). The British philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore visited Morocco in 1863, and his mission was followed by a decree of the sultan in 1864 reaffirming the equality of Jews before the law, a document that Moroccan and Jewish historians alike regard as a landmark, though its practical effect was uneven (Laskier, 1983; Stillman, 1991). Within this period also appear the earliest movements of Moroccan Jews toward the Land of Israel, motivated by religious attachment rather than political Zionism, a theme that recent scholarship has examined through the connection between place and faith (Chetrit et al., 2021).
The establishment of the French and Spanish protectorates in 1912 deepened the transformation. The Jewish elites were drawn into the colonial economy, French citizenship was extended to Algerian but not Moroccan Jews, and communal fissures widened between a modernizing urban bourgeoisie and impoverished mellah dwellers (Kenbib, 1994; Laskier, 1994). The Fez riots of April 1912 killed dozens of Jews and revealed the fragility of the older order of protection (Laskier, 1994; Stillman, 1991). The Second World War then posed the test that the Moroccan national memory has most carefully curated. After the fall of France, the Vichy authorities in Morocco imposed anti-Jewish legislation in 1940 and 1941. Sultan Muhammad V, according to a long-circulating account, refused to implement the most drastic measures and affirmed that his Jewish subjects were Moroccans under his protection. Historians have nuanced the account, showing that the sultan was constrained, that discriminatory dahirs were promulgated under his seal, and that the protective posture was real but partial (Abitbol, 1983; Kenbib, 1994). The nuance does not diminish the symbolic weight of the episode, which has become the founding reference of the Moroccan monarchy’s claim to be the protector of Jews (Boum, 2013; Ben-Layashi & Maddy-Weitzman, 2010).
Exodus, Secret Diplomacy, and the Long Road to Resumption
The creation of Israel in 1948 marked the end of the Moroccan Jewish world as a demographic reality. Of roughly a quarter of a million Jews in Morocco around 1948, about ninety thousand had left by the time of independence in 1956, in waves shaped by the 1948 riots at Oujda and Jerada, by Zionist emissaries, and by the apprehension that accompanied decolonization (Laskier, 1994). After independence, Moroccan authorities first restricted emigration and then, after the sinking of the clandestine emigrant vessel Egoz in January 1961, which killed more than forty people, quietly permitted a large-scale departure that took place between 1961 and 1964 under the name Operation Yachin and brought roughly ninety thousand additional Jews to Israel (Black & Morris, 1991; Laskier, 1994). Later emigration, especially after 1967, led to France, Canada, and Israel, and by the end of the twentieth century only a few thousand Jews remained in Morocco, a community whose members are citizens, whose institutions are recognized by the state, and whose symbolic importance far exceeds its size (Boum, 2013; Gottreich, 2020).
Strikingly, the demographic rupture coincided with the beginning of a clandestine diplomatic relationship. King Hassan II, who succeeded his father in 1961, saw in the Moroccan Jewish diaspora, and in Israel as the principal home of that diaspora, a channel for connecting Morocco to Washington and to Western intelligence circles. Israeli services reportedly benefited from the monarchy’s facilitation of the 1965 Arab League summit in Casablanca, and from contacts that continued in the following decades, while the Moroccan monarchy obtained intelligence and security cooperation of its own (Black & Morris, 1991; Shlaim, 2000). Moroccan forces took part in the 1973 war on the Syrian front, which illustrated the monarchy’s dual positioning: it fulfilled its Arab obligations while maintaining quiet channels to the adversary (Pennell, 2000; Waterbury, 1970). The monarch hosted Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres at Ifrane in July 1986, in an unprecedented public gesture, and he is widely credited with facilitating the diplomatic preparation for Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977 (Shlaim, 2000). In September 1994, following the Oslo agreement, Morocco and Israel opened liaison offices in Rabat and Tel Aviv; they were closed in October 2000 after the outbreak of the second intifada (Gulf News, 2020; Shlaim, 2000). These pre-2020 phases demonstrate the underlying pattern: the relationship moved forward in periods of Palestinian–Israeli diplomatic progress and receded in periods of violence, but it never wholly disappeared.
Assessment of the First Tier
History contributes three things to the whole. It provides the narrative of continuity on which the Moroccan state relies when it describes normalization as a resumption, a formula Rabat has maintained since December 2020 (Gulf News, 2020; Palestine Chronicle, 2026). It supplies the human infrastructure of the relationship, since the several hundred thousand Israelis of Moroccan descent constitute a constituency with Moroccan attachments and a source of Moroccan soft power in Israel (Laskier, 1994; Shohat, 1999). And it furnishes a repertoire of positive images, from the sultan who sheltered the Sephardic exiles to the king who refused to deliver his Jews to Vichy, that frames the contemporary political discourse (Chtatou, 2021c, 2023a). Its characteristic fragility is that the narrative is selective. The historiography records pogroms, discriminatory regimes, and episodes of humiliation alongside protection (Cohen, 1994; Stillman, 1991), and a relationship built on an idealized past is vulnerable to the exposure of the past’s shadows. The strength of the first tier therefore lies not in its idyllic quality but in its density, in the sheer accumulation of shared experience that makes the relationship more than a transaction.
Tier Two: Conviviality
The Anthropology of Neighborliness
Conviviality, the second tier, belongs to the domain of social practice. It refers to what the Spanish historians called convivencia and what Moroccans express through the idea of l-‘aysh al-mushtarak, shared living, in the markets, the streets, and the countryside. The foundational anthropological studies of Moroccan society, among them the Sefrou project directed by Clifford Geertz and his collaborators, demonstrated that Jews in the interior town of Sefrou were inseparable from the commercial and social fabric of the place: they were financiers of the caravan trade, brokers between Amazigh peasants and Arab townsmen, and participants in the market’s norms of bargaining and credit (Geertz et al., 1979; Rosen, 1984). In the description of one observer, the Jews of Sefrou combined two types of economic function, the sedentary banker and the itinerant guide who negotiated safe passage through tribal territory, and they were at once successful traders and agents of social harmony (Chtatou, 2023a). The suq and its codes of trust thus created a practical coexistence that the legal categories of dhimma could neither fully capture nor fully control (Chtatou, 2020a; Geertz et al., 1979).
The same pattern appears across the country. Gottreich’s (2007) study of the mellah of Marrakesh shows a space in which Muslim and Jewish residents transacted daily, in which Muslim customers entered the Jewish quarter to buy goods and services, and in which spatial boundaries were repeatedly crossed. In the Atlas and the south, Jews spoke Tamazight, wore dress similar to that of their neighbors, and participated in the same ritual cycles of the agricultural year, a reality documented in the ethnography of Akka and neighboring oases, where Muslim villagers now remember their vanished Jewish neighbors with a nostalgia whose ambivalences Boum (2013) analyzes carefully. In the cities, Judeo-Arabic was close to the Moroccan Arabic of the Muslim majority, and Jewish musicians were central to the Andalusian and popular repertoires, while culinary traditions such as the Sabbath stew and the post-Passover Mimouna celebration, in which Muslim neighbors traditionally brought flour, milk, and honey to their Jewish friends, bound the two communities in an economy of reciprocal gifts (Boum, 2013; Chetrit et al., 2021; Deshen, 1989).
The Contested Memory of Coexistence
Conviviality is also the tier most vulnerable to romanticization, and the scholarly literature has become increasingly careful about it. Studies of Jewish–Muslim relations in Morocco emphasize that interaction was asymmetrical, that it occurred within a legal order that subordinated Jews, and that moments of tension, from the Fez riots of 1912 to the violence of 1948, are as much a part of the record as moments of harmony (Chetrit et al., 2021; Laskier, 1994). The historian Daniel Schroeter has argued, in work cited by many students of the subject, that the near-unanimous scholarly view of the Moroccanness of Moroccan Jews does not resolve the debate about whether relations were harmonious or fraught, and that the idealizing portrait of the Moroccan monarch as the benevolent protector of Jews obscures the actual complexity of relations among Jews, French Jewish organizations, the Alawite sultans, and, after 1912, the protectorate authorities (Chetrit et al., 2021; Schroeter, 2002). The appropriate scholarly stance is therefore neither nostalgia nor denunciation but a recognition that conviviality coexisted with hierarchy, and that its endurance in memory, whatever its imperfections, testifies to its depth (Boum, 2013).
It is the memory of conviviality, in fact, that has the greatest political significance. The sense of loss expressed by many Moroccan Jewish emigrants, who describe the departure to Israel, France, or Canada as an open wound or a sweet wound, finds an echo in the nostalgia of Muslims for their absent Jewish neighbors, which has been documented in oral testimony and in cultural production (Boum, 2013; Chtatou, 2023a). This reciprocal nostalgia is a political resource. It offers Moroccan society a model of interfaith relations that does not depend on the state, and it offers Moroccan Jews in the diaspora a reason to remain connected to a homeland they left but did not renounce. The Moroccan identity known as Tamaghrabit, Moroccanness, to which many Moroccan Jews and Muslims alike appeal, is the cultural expression of this shared belonging, and the persistent strength of Jewish attachment to Moroccan identity has been described by Schroeter and other scholars as perhaps unparalleled among Jews of the Muslim world (Chtatou, 2023a; Schroeter, 2002).
Language and music offer further evidence of the depth of shared life. Moroccan Jews spoke Judeo-Arabic dialects that differed from Muslim speech chiefly in a small stock of Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords and in liturgical registers, and in the Atlas and the south many spoke Tamazight, so that linguistic boundaries between the communities were porous (Brett & Fentress, 1996; Chetrit et al., 2021). Jewish musicians occupied a central place in the Andalusian tradition and in the popular repertoire, performing at Muslim weddings and festivals, and the distinction between a Jewish and a Muslim musical culture was, for much of the twentieth century, weaker than the distinction between urban and rural, or between the court and the street (Chetrit et al., 2021; Deshen, 1989). The Moroccan Amazigh cultural revival of recent decades, which has recovered the memory of Jewish participation in Amazigh life and which the 2011 Constitution acknowledged by making Tamazight an official language alongside Arabic, has reinforced this recognition by presenting Jews as among the historic components of the Moroccan mosaic (Chtatou, 2020a; Maddy-Weitzman, 2011).
Assessment of the Second Tier
The contribution of conviviality to the relationship is twofold. It supplies the affective texture without which diplomacy would be a bare calculation: the pilgrims who return to Moroccan towns, the former neighbors who meet again, and the Israeli visitors of Moroccan origin who speak Moroccan Arabic or Judeo-Arabic in the streets of Marrakesh and Essaouira. And it supplies the moral argument that distinguishes the Moroccan case from other normalizations: because Moroccans and Jews lived together, so the argument runs, reconnection is a restoration rather than a transaction (Chtatou, 2021c; Ben-Layashi & Maddy-Weitzman, 2010). The tier’s characteristic fragility is twofold as well. Its human carriers are aging and few, as the Jewish population of Morocco has dwindled and the generation of Muslims who knew Jewish neighbors is passing (Boum, 2013; Laskier, 1994). And it is a social reality that can be turned against its own premises, because conviviality with Jews, as Moroccans emphasize, does not entail endorsement of the policies of the State of Israel. The Arab Barometer’s finding that support for normalization among Moroccans fell from 31 percent in 2022 to 13 percent after October 2023 is consistent with this distinction (Hespress English, 2025; Morocco World News, 2022): the same society that cherishes the memory of its Jewish neighbors can reject a diplomatic framework it associates with the suffering of Palestinians.
Tier Three: Religious Complicity
Shared Sanctity and the Economy of Baraka
The third tier concerns the religious domain, and the word complicity is used here in its etymological sense of folding together, of a convergence between two religious worlds so intimate that it often exceeded the boundaries the legal and theological traditions drew between them. The clearest evidence is the veneration of saints. Westermarck (1926), the pioneering ethnographer of Moroccan belief, recorded that Muslims sought the baraka of Jewish holy men and women, and that Jews honored Muslim saints, in a system of mutual reliance in which the power of the holy was understood to be accessible to all who approached it with respect. Ben-Ami’s (1998) systematic study of Jewish–Muslim saint cults and pilgrimages confirms the pattern and shows that dozens of shrines drew both communities, with Jews organizing the annual commemorations known as hillulot and Muslims attending, bringing offerings, or serving as guardians. Examples recorded in the literature include the shrines of Rabbi Amram Ben Diwan near Ouazzane, of Setti Fadma in the Ourika valley, and of the cave sanctuary of Kaf al-Mumin near Sefrou, venerated by Muslims and Jews and attributed by oral history to a saint belonging to both hagiographies (Ben-Ami, 1998; Chtatou, 2020b, 2023a).
This is not merely folk religion at the margins. It rests on a structural affinity between North African Sufism and the Jewish mystical tradition, in which both communities conceive the holy man as an intercessor whose tomb is a locus of divine presence, and in which the pilgrimage to the tomb is an act that heals and renews (Bilu, 2000; Westermarck, 1926). It also rests on a shared grammar of the Abrahamic: the figure of Abraham, whom the Qur’an calls the friend of God and whom the Hebrew Bible calls father of a multitude, provides a common ancestor and a shared vocabulary for moral argument. Moroccan scholars and Muslim jurists have long cited the Qur’anic category of the People of the Book to justify respectful relations with Jews, and the Moroccan collective memory has retained an image of the Jew as a protected neighbor and as a custodian of a revelation anterior to Islam (Chtatou, 2023c; Cohen, 1994). The practice of mutual blessing at weddings, funerals, and festivals, and the use of Jewish ritual specialists by Muslims and vice versa for healing, protection, and divination, extended this complicity into the everyday sphere (Ben-Ami, 1998; Chtatou, 2020b).
The Monarchy, the Commander of the Faithful, and Institutional Religion
The institutional dimension of the third tier lies in the office of the Moroccan sovereign as Amir al-Mu’minin, Commander of the Faithful. The sovereign’s religious legitimacy rests on descent from the Prophet and on the allegiance (bay’a) of the community, and it has traditionally included the duty to protect the dhimmi communities, a duty that Moroccan monarchs of the twentieth century reinterpreted for the nation-state as the protection of all Moroccans irrespective of faith (Pennell, 2000; Waterbury, 1970). The 2011 Constitution fixes this reinterpretation in text. Its preamble describes the Moroccan identity as nourished by Arab-Islamic, Amazigh, and Saharan-Hassani components and enriched by African, Andalusian, Hebraic, and Mediterranean influences, and Article 3 guarantees to all the free exercise of beliefs, while the Commander of the Faithful is charged under Article 41 with protecting Islam and the free exercise of religious practice (Kingdom of Morocco, 2011). The explicit inclusion of the Hebraic influence in the constitutional definition of the nation is exceptional in the Arab world, and it makes of Judaism not a foreign element but a constituent of Moroccan identity (Chtatou, 2023c; Maddy-Weitzman, 2011).
The institutional reality is reinforced by state practice. The restoration of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries across the kingdom, the maintenance of the Museum of Moroccan Judaism in Casablanca, the only museum of its kind in the Arab world, and the introduction of Jewish history into educational curricula are widely cited as evidence that the monarchy treats Judaism as part of the national patrimony (Boum, 2013; Gottreich, 2020). The pilgrimages of Jews of Moroccan origin to the tombs of their saints, which draw participants from Israel, France, and North America, are facilitated by the Moroccan state and regularly welcomed by Muslim local authorities and neighbors, thereby giving religious complicity a visible public face (Ben-Ami, 1998; Chtatou, 2020b).
Assessment of the Third Tier
Religious complicity contributes a theological and cultural legitimation that the other tiers lack. It allows the Moroccan state to present the relationship with Jews, and by extension with Israel, in the language of the sacred rather than that of strategy, and it equips the monarchy, whose legitimacy is religious, with a theologically grounded response to opponents who denounce normalization as betrayal of Islamic solidarity (Pennell, 2000; Waterbury, 1970). It also protects Moroccan Jews within Morocco against the identification of their community with Israeli policy, since the monarchy’s protective duty is formulated in religious terms (Boum, 2013). Its fragility is, however, considerable. The religious conception of Jerusalem and of Palestine is a powerful countervailing sentiment in Moroccan Islam: the King chairs the Al-Quds Committee of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, a role created under Hassan II, and the Moroccan Islamic establishment, like the Moroccan public, regards the fate of Jerusalem as a religious as well as political question (Pennell, 2000). The same religion that gives the relationship its depth therefore also imposes its limit, which is the Palestinian question. Moreover, the shared-saint complex is a rural and traditional phenomenon that is receding under the pressure of urbanization, reformist Islam, and the departure of Jewish communities (Ben-Ami, 1998; Bilu, 2000).
Tier Four: Sincerity
Four Sincerities
The fourth tier, sincerity, asks whether the sentiments expressed in the relationship are authentic. It is the most delicate to treat, because sincerity is not directly observable, and because the same actions may be at once sincere and strategic. A useful approach is to distinguish four loci of sincerity: that of the Moroccan monarchy, that of Moroccan Jews, that of Moroccan Muslim society, and that of Israel and Israelis. The question is not whether each is wholly sincere, but what evidence there is for sincerity and where it is contradicted by evidence of instrumentality (Ben-Layashi & Maddy-Weitzman, 2010).
The monarchy’s sincerity is best evidenced by consistency over time and by costs borne. Its protection of Jewish life persisted at moments, such as the 1960s and 1970s, when it brought no diplomatic reward and attracted criticism from Arab nationalists (Black & Morris, 1991; Laskier, 1994). Its inclusion of the Hebraic component in the 2011 Constitution, adopted in the wake of the Arab Spring and therefore at a time when the monarchy had every reason to avoid controversy, suggests a conviction that the Jewish dimension is intrinsic to national identity (Kingdom of Morocco, 2011). Royal appointments, among them the long service of the Jewish adviser André Azoulay to Hassan II and Mohammed VI, express the same orientation (Boum, 2013; Gottreich, 2020). At the same time, the scholarship of Ben-Layashi and Maddy-Weitzman (2010) on the interplay of myth, history, and realpolitik in the Moroccan treatment of its Jewish community cautions that the discourse of protection has also served the monarchy’s interests, by building ties with Jewish and Israeli networks that could be mobilized in Washington on behalf of Moroccan causes, and above all the Sahara. The two aspects are not alternatives. A sincerity that is useful is not thereby rendered insincere, and the discourse’s repeated deployment at moments of diplomatic need does not prove that it is merely instrumental (Ben-Layashi & Maddy-Weitzman, 2010; Chtatou, 2021c).
The sincerity of Moroccan Jews takes the form of an attachment to Morocco that has been described as unusually tenacious among the Jews of the Muslim world (Schroeter, 2002). In Israel, Moroccan-origin communities have preserved their liturgical traditions, their pilgrimage customs, their music, and the Mimouna, which has become a national Israeli event attended by politicians, and diaspora associations in France, Canada, and the United States maintain links with Moroccan institutions (Chetrit et al., 2021; Deshen, 1989). Yet this attachment has been shaped by ambivalence. The Mizrahi critique, developed by Shohat (1999) and Shenhav (2006), argues that Jews from Arab lands were pressed upon arrival in Israel to abandon their Arab culture, so that their nostalgia for Morocco is also an expression of grievance against the Israeli state. Moroccan-origin Israelis are thus both Israel’s most Moroccan citizens and, in a sense, its most ambivalent ones, which gives them an exceptional capacity to serve as bridge and an exceptional claim to be heard on both sides (Shenhav, 2006).
Muslim Society and the Israeli State
The sincerity of Moroccan Muslim society presents a paradox that the survey record only partly resolves. On the one hand, nostalgia for Moroccan Jews is real and widespread, and many Moroccans express positive feelings toward Jewish compatriots (Boum, 2013). On the other hand, Moroccan public opinion is strongly critical of Israel as a state. Arab Barometer data show a fall in support for normalization from 41 percent in 2021 to 31 percent in 2022 and to 13 percent after October 2023, with only 9 percent support among those who described Israeli action in Gaza as genocide, and with 48 percent of respondents seeing a two-state solution as the best path (Hespress English, 2025; Morocco World News, 2022, 2023). Demonstrations outside the Moroccan Parliament in October 2026 under slogans rejecting normalization, held as Rabat prepared to upgrade diplomatic representation, confirm that the opposition has not abated (Palestine Chronicle, 2026). The resolution of the paradox lies in the distinction, which Moroccans consistently draw, between Jews as compatriots and Israel as a state. Sincere affection for the former is compatible with sincere hostility to the latter’s policies, and the success of the relationship depends on keeping this distinction intact (Hespress English, 2025; Chtatou, 2021a).
The sincerity of Israel is the object of Moroccan appreciation and of Moroccan suspicion. Israeli leaders have consistently praised Morocco’s treatment of its Jews and have celebrated the Moroccan heritage of Israeli citizens (Gulf News, 2020). But Moroccan observers remark that Israeli interest in Morocco is also driven by the search for legitimacy in the Arab world, a motive Chtatou (2023b) identifies in the case of the Negev Forum, and that Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza contradict the language of coexistence. The Israeli decision to link its recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara to Morocco’s hosting of the Negev Forum, reported in 2023, demonstrated that Israel also viewed the relationship as transactional (Lerman, 2023; The Media Line, 2023).
Assessment of the Fourth Tier
Sincerity is the tier that mediates between culture and politics. Its contribution to the whole is to convert the cultural capital of the lower tiers into political credibility: because the monarchy’s attachment to its Jews is credible, its decision to resume relations with Israel is received, even by many critics, as something other than cynical opportunism. Its fragility lies in the very ambivalence that gives it authenticity. A relationship that is both sincere and strategic is vulnerable to the accusation that sincerity is a cover for strategy, an accusation that opponents of normalization have made, and to the opposite charge from Israeli and Western audiences that Moroccan hostility to Israeli policy reveals insincerity about the relationship (Ben-Layashi & Maddy-Weitzman, 2010; Palestine Chronicle, 2026). The way out of this bind is to demonstrate sincerity through costly actions: protecting heritage, safeguarding Jewish citizens independently of the course of diplomacy, and maintaining a clear voice on Palestinian rights.
Tier Five: Mutual Interest and Well-Being
The Strategic Bargain
The fifth tier is where sentiment meets calculation. The relationship benefits both states in concrete and measurable ways, and these benefits constitute a powerful stabilizer that does not depend on sentiment. For Morocco, the central benefit has been international support for its position on the Western Sahara. On 10 December 2020, the United States recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the territory in the same announcement that Morocco would resume relations with Israel, and Washington subsequently maintained and extended this position (Gulf News, 2020; Chtatou, 2026a). Israel followed in July 2023 by recognizing Moroccan sovereignty, after a period in which Rabat made clear that its expectations on this point conditioned the pace of the relationship (Lerman, 2023). The strategic environment evolved further with the adoption on 31 October 2025 of Security Coucil Resolution 2797, which extended the mandate of the United Nations mission in the territory and took Morocco’s 2007 autonomy proposal as the basis for negotiations, a change widely read as a vindication of Moroccan diplomacy (United Nations Security Council, 2025). The Moroccan interest in the Israeli relationship is therefore intertwined with the interest in the territorial question, though it is not reducible to it.
Security, Defense, and Industry
The defense dimension has become the most visible expression of mutual interest. A defense cooperation memorandum signed on 24 November 2021 created an institutional channel for exchanges on intelligence, training, and technology (Chtatou, 2026a). In July 2022 the chief of the Israeli general staff visited Morocco, and an Israeli military delegation had made a first quiet visit in March of that year, developments that marked the passage from secrecy to acknowledgment (Chtatou, 2023b). Israel’s participation in the Marrakech Air Show, held from 7 to 10 October 2026 at a Royal Moroccan Air Force base, with a national pavilion organized by the Israeli Ministry of Defense’s international cooperation directorate and the presence of Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael, and five other firms, gave the cooperation an unprecedented public form (Chtatou, 2026a). Figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for 2020–2024, as summarized in that analysis, indicate that Israel supplied about 11 percent of Moroccan major arms imports, behind the United States at 64 percent and France at 15 percent, and that Israeli systems were prominent in the missile category (Chtatou, 2026a). A Moroccan defense manufacturer linked in press reports to Elbit Systems is also expected to deliver armored-vehicle turrets to the Moroccan army from March 2027, an indication that cooperation is moving from procurement toward local production (Chtatou, 2026a). A recent analysis summarizing work by the International Institute for Strategic Studies puts Israeli defense exports to the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Bahrain at 8.8 billion dollars between 2021 and 2025 (Abraham Accords defense cooperation continues to thrive, 2026).
The strategic logic of this cooperation is dual. Morocco seeks to diversify its sources of technology, to modernize its forces in an environment marked by rivalry with Algeria, and to build national industrial capacity, but it must guard against technological dependence, supply risks, and the political costs of association (Chtatou, 2026a). The rupture of Moroccan relations with Iran in 2018, on the grounds of Iranian and Hezbollah assistance to the Polisario, added a common adversary to the bilateral relationship, and the regional war of 2026 following the American and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February sharpened the convergence on threat perception (Chtatou, 2026b; Lerman, 2023). The idea of a regional security architecture linking Israel and Arab states, which one analysis described as moving from fiction to fact, reflects the same convergence (Chtatou, 2022). Israel, for its part, gains a defense-export market, a platform in North Africa, and a partner whose strategic autonomy and relations with Washington enhance the value of the connection (Chtatou, 2026a).
Economy, Technology, and the Welfare of Peoples
Beyond defense, the relationship offers economic and societal benefits whose realization has been slower. Direct flights between the two countries, which operated after 2020 and were disrupted by regional conflict, are expected to resume promptly under the September 2026 declaration, and the two governments have undertaken to conclude agreements on investment protection and the avoidance of double taxation by the end of 2026 (i24NEWS, 2026; The National, 2026). These instruments, typically regarded as preconditions for sustained private investment, are potentially more important than the headline diplomatic upgrade. Areas identified in the literature and in official statements as promising include agricultural technology and water management, renewable energy, cybersecurity, digital services, and tourism, including heritage tourism by Israelis and diaspora Jews of Moroccan origin (Chtatou, 2023b; Lachter, 2026). The Negev Forum, launched in March 2022 and bringing together Israel, the United States, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, was conceived as a multilateral platform for such cooperation, and Morocco’s offer to host a summit placed the kingdom at the center of the architecture before the summit was postponed and then withdrawn in 2023 over Israeli settlement policy (Chtatou, 2023b; The Media Line, 2023).
The well-being dimension also has a societal side that is easily overlooked. The Moroccan Jewish diaspora, and Israelis of Moroccan origin, are potential investors, tourists, and cultural intermediaries, and their presence adds a human dimension to economic exchange (Gottreich, 2020; Laskier, 1994). The Moroccan Jewish community, whose members are Moroccan citizens, benefits from the reinforced protection that the diplomatic relationship may encourage, provided that the relationship does not expose it to hostility (Boum, 2013).
Africa, the Atlantic, and the Wider Geography of Interest
Mutual interest also has a geographic dimension that is specific to Morocco. The kingdom has built, since the 2010s, an African policy based on investment, banking, telecommunications, and religious diplomacy, and it presents itself as a gateway between Europe, Africa, and the Atlantic (Chtatou, 2023b; Pennell, 2000). Israel, which has long sought a greater presence on the African continent, sees in Morocco a platform for such an opening, and Moroccan officials see in Israeli agricultural, water, and cyber expertise a resource for their African partnerships. The Atlantic initiative that Morocco promotes, with its ports at Dakhla and Tangier Med, adds a maritime and logistical dimension in which Israeli technology and capital could play a part (Chtatou, 2026a; Lachter, 2026). These prospects are, for the moment, more declaratory than realized, but they illustrate how the fifth tier extends the relationship beyond the bilateral frame and ties it to Morocco’s strategy of becoming a regional hub.
The same geography exposes the limits of interest-based cooperation. Morocco’s relationships with the European Union, the Gulf states, and sub-Saharan partners impose constraints, since each partner has its own sensitivities regarding Israel and the Palestinians, and since the kingdom’s diplomatic capital depends on its reputation as a balanced and reliable intermediary (Chtatou, 2021a; Lerman, 2023). Morocco’s rivalry with Algeria, which has criticized the Israeli connection and which Moroccan commentary links to Israeli and Iranian dynamics, adds a regional security dilemma that requires careful management (Chtatou, 2026a; Lerman, 2023). A prudent reading of mutual interest therefore recognizes that the benefits of cooperation with Israel are real but bounded, and that the maintenance of a wider network of partnerships is itself a Moroccan interest.
Assessment of the Fifth Tier
Mutual interest contributes the stability of calculation. Because both governments gain from cooperation in security, in diplomacy, and potentially in the economy, each has strong reasons to preserve the relationship through crises, as the continuation of cooperation after October 2023 shows (Chtatou, 2026a; Lachter, 2026). The tier’s fragility is that its benefits are unevenly perceived. The strategic benefits accrue chiefly to the state, while the costs, in terms of public opinion and Arab solidarity, are borne by the society. An interest-based relationship also tends to be asymmetrical in dependence, as the Moroccan analysis of procurement stresses, and it can be reversed if interests change (Chtatou, 2026a; Lerman, 2023). Economic well-being, finally, remains largely prospective, and the promise of tangible benefits for ordinary Moroccans is the missing element that could convert elite calculation into popular acceptance.
Tier Six: The Abraham Accords
From Declaration to Resumption
The sixth tier is the juridical and diplomatic shell within which the relationship now operates. The Abraham Accords were signed in September 2020 by Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, and Morocco joined the process in December 2020, followed by Sudan in January 2021 (Lachter, 2026). The Moroccan path had its own features. The announcement of 10 December 2020 coupled the Moroccan decision with American recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara, and a joint declaration signed by Morocco, Israel, and the United States on 22 December 2020 restored official relations, with the Moroccan royal cabinet speaking of a resumption of relations with minimal delay and affirming the kingdom’s attachment to its Jewish community (Chtatou, 2026a; Gulf News, 2020). Rabat has continued to describe the step as a resumption of relations rather than as formal accession to the Accords as such, a semantic choice that preserves the distinction between Morocco’s bilateral policy and the broader normalization project and that allows the kingdom to maintain its Palestinian position (Palestine Chronicle, 2026). The formula also matters domestically. The head of government who signed the declaration belonged to the Islamist Justice and Development Party, which paid a heavy electoral price in September 2021 when it lost power to a coalition led by the businessman Aziz Akhannouch (Chtatou, 2021b).
The Accords added to the earlier phases a distinctive feature: openness. Previous contacts had been clandestine or, as in 1994, limited and reversible. The new framework permitted the opening of liaison offices in 2021, the signing of agreements on aviation, trade, culture, and security, and the establishment of regular ministerial and military contacts (Chtatou, 2021c, 2026a). It also embedded Morocco in a regional network that includes the Negev Forum, which met for the first time in March 2022, and which Moroccan analysts viewed as an arena in which the kingdom could expand its economic ties and its regional influence (Chtatou, 2023b).
Stress Tests: The Negev Forum, the Sahara, and Gaza
The first stress test came in 2023, when the planned Negev Forum summit in Morocco was repeatedly postponed and then abandoned. The Israeli government’s expansion of West Bank settlements, together with a new government’s hard-line posture, made it impossible for Rabat to host the event without domestic cost (Lerman, 2023; The Media Line, 2023). Israel linked its pending recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara to the hosting of the forum, but recognition came in July 2023 notwithstanding (Lerman, 2023). The episode revealed two features of the Accords as applied to Morocco: that the relationship is conditional on movement on the Palestinian front, and that the Sahara question is its transactional core.
The second and more severe test followed the attack of 7 October 2023 and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. Moroccan public opinion shifted dramatically, as the Arab Barometer documented: support for normalization fell to 13 percent, and Arab Barometer analysts concluded that Moroccans were by then no more favorable to normalization than Iraqis or Lebanese and that a warm peace appeared elusive absent an independent Palestinian state (Hespress English, 2025). Mass demonstrations followed, and public demands to cancel the 2020 agreement have continued into October 2026 (Palestine Chronicle, 2026). Yet the Moroccan state did not break relations. It continued to voice its attachment to the Palestinian cause and to a negotiated settlement while preserving its channels with Israel, in keeping with the position it had long articulated (Chtatou, 2021a; Chtatou, 2023b). That the Accords survived this test is the strongest evidence for the layered resilience thesis: the sixth tier, the weakest in popular legitimacy, held because it rested on the lower tiers and on the interests of the fifth (Chtatou, 2026a).
Institutionalization in 2026
The developments of the autumn of 2026 mark a new phase. On 16 September 2026, at a trilateral meeting in New York on the margins of the anniversary of the Abraham Accords, the Israeli foreign minister, his Moroccan counterpart, and the American ambassador to the United Nations agreed to upgrade the diplomatic missions of the two countries to full embassies, to exchange ambassadors, to restore direct flights promptly, and to conclude agreements on investment protection and double taxation by the end of the year (i24NEWS, 2026; Lachter, 2026; The National, 2026). The joint statement, as reported, affirmed that full diplomatic, peaceful, and friendly relations were in the common interest of the two countries, and the American representative described the step as proof that the Accords had withstood every test (The National, 2026). Three weeks later Israel mounted its first national pavilion at the Marrakech Air Show, and Morocco’s defense officials spoke of a shift from importing capabilities to building national defense capacity (Chtatou, 2026a; Abraham Accords defense cooperation continues to thrive, 2026). The two events show a relationship moving from normalization toward institutionalization, characterized by embassies, treaties, and industrial partnerships.
The timing is not accidental. The kingdom’s diplomatic position has been strengthened by Resolution 2797, which reduces the leverage that the Sahara question once gave Israeli and American interlocutors, and the regional configuration has been transformed by the war against Iran, by the post-Gaza reordering of the region, and by the emergence of new security alignments (Chtatou, 2026b; United Nations Security Council, 2025). In this setting Morocco can negotiate as a partner rather than as a petitioner, and its decision to deepen the relationship in the same month as demonstrations denounce it suggests confidence in its ability to manage opinion (Palestine Chronicle, 2026).
Morocco in Comparative Perspective
The Moroccan case is frequently compared with the earlier peace treaties between Israel and Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994, and with the Emirati and Bahraini normalizations of 2020. The comparison is instructive. The Egyptian and Jordanian agreements ended states of war between neighbors and produced what is often called a cold peace, characterized by security cooperation at the level of the state and by public hostility at the level of society (Shlaim, 2000). The Emirati and Bahraini agreements, like the Moroccan one, were concluded between states that had never fought Israel, and they were intended from the outset to generate a warmer peace based on commerce, technology, and tourism. Morocco differs from both groups in one respect that this essay has emphasized: it brings to the relationship a domestic Jewish heritage and a demographic link, the diaspora of Moroccan origin in Israel, that no other Accords signatory possesses in comparable measure (Laskier, 1994; Shohat, 1999). It differs also in geography, since it is remote from the Levantine theater and has no border or water dispute with Israel, and in the character of its quid pro quo, which concerns territorial sovereignty over the Sahara rather than financial or arms-related incentives alone (Chtatou, 2026a; Lerman, 2023). This distinctive profile explains why Moroccan officials and commentators emphasize the specificity of their normalization and why they resist the notion that the kingdom has simply joined a regional bloc (Chtatou, 2021c; Palestine Chronicle, 2026).
The comparison also exposes the central dilemma. The Arab Barometer’s conclusion that Morocco, which once appeared as the most promising candidate for a warm peace, now offers a cautionary example for hopes of normalization elsewhere, is a reminder that popular acceptance cannot be purchased by diplomatic agreement alone (Hespress English, 2025). Whether the Moroccan case becomes a model or a warning depends on whether the lower tiers can be mobilized to rebuild popular legitimacy, a task that requires Israeli as well as Moroccan action.
Assessment of the Sixth Tier
The Accords contribute legal certainty, international visibility, American sponsorship, and a framework for multilateral cooperation. They convert what had been an informal and reversible relationship into an institutional one that is harder for any future government to undo (Chtatou, 2026a; Lachter, 2026). Their fragility is acute. They are associated with a particular American administration’s diplomacy and a particular moment in Israeli politics, with elections looming in Israel in the autumn of 2026, and they depend on a regional peace process that has made little progress (Lachter, 2026; Lerman, 2023). They carry the heaviest legitimacy deficit, since the Arab Barometer figures show that most Moroccans oppose normalization, and they invite the criticism that a relationship decided by elites and sponsored by a foreign power is imposed rather than chosen (Hespress English, 2025; Morocco World News, 2023). The Accords thus stand at the summit of the structure, supported by tiers below them but dependent on those tiers for the legitimacy they cannot generate themselves.
Discussion: The Interaction of the Tiers
Taken together, the six tiers exhibit a pattern of mutual dependence and asymmetry. The first three tiers, history, conviviality, and religious complicity, form the foundation: they are slow to change, socially embedded, and widely valued, but they are carried by dwindling constituencies and have no institutional means of defending themselves against political pressure (Boum, 2013; Laskier, 1994). The fourth tier, sincerity, is the connective tissue, converting the cultural capital of the foundation into political credibility (Ben-Layashi & Maddy-Weitzman, 2010). The fifth and sixth tiers form the superstructure, strategically weighty, institutionally robust, and popularly weak (Hespress English, 2025). The relationship’s resilience arises from the fact that each level can compensate for weakness at another: when the Accords lose popular legitimacy, history and conviviality supply it; when sentiment is challenged by events, interest sustains cooperation; when interest is questioned, the sincerity of the monarchy’s attachment to its Jews supplies a reason to remain engaged (Chtatou, 2021c, 2026a).
The same structure generates three principal risks. The first is inversion: the possibility that the upper tiers, by dominating the relationship, will drain the lower ones of authenticity, so that heritage becomes a tool of statecraft and conviviality a branding exercise. Heritage policy that is perceived as instrumental can provoke the backlash that it is meant to avert (Boum, 2013; Gottreich, 2020). The second is contamination: the risk that opposition to Israeli policy will spill over into hostility toward Jews, thereby damaging the lower tiers. The survey record suggests that Moroccans separate the two, but the separation is not self-sustaining and requires active maintenance by educators, clergy, and political leaders (Hespress English, 2025; Morocco World News, 2022). The third is erosion: the demographic and generational decline of the carriers of memory, which threatens the foundation unless it is renewed through education, tourism, and cultural production (Boum, 2013; Chetrit et al., 2021).
These risks suggest the principles of a prudent policy. The state should invest in the lower tiers for their own sake, as part of national heritage policy, rather than as accessories of diplomacy; it should keep the Palestinian question visibly on the diplomatic agenda, which is both a moral position and a source of legitimacy; it should distinguish with great care between Moroccan Jews and the Israeli state in public discourse; and it should seek to make the benefits of the fifth tier tangible for ordinary citizens, through employment, technology transfer, and trade, so that the case for the sixth tier acquires a popular as well as an elite constituency (Chtatou, 2023b, 2026a; Lerman, 2023). Israel, for its part, has an interest in understanding that the Moroccan relationship is not a template that can be exported to settings that lack its deep roots, and that the Moroccan public’s acceptance depends on Israeli conduct toward the Palestinians (Hespress English, 2025; Shlaim, 2000).
Two objections to the multi-tiered model deserve a response. The first, advanced from a Palestinian and critical perspective, holds that the discourse of conviviality and shared history serves to mask a political bargain in which Palestinian rights were subordinated to the Sahara, and that the language of tiers dignifies what is essentially realpolitik (Ben-Layashi & Maddy-Weitzman, 2010; Palestine Chronicle, 2026). The model accommodates the objection by assigning realpolitik to its proper tier, the fifth, and by acknowledging that the sixth tier’s legitimacy deficit arises precisely from the Palestinian question; it does not claim that the lower tiers justify the upper ones, only that they explain their resilience. The second objection, from the opposite direction, holds that to emphasize the deficit of popular legitimacy is to underestimate the willingness of Moroccan elites to override public opinion, as the monarchy has done on other questions. The record supports the observation but not the conclusion. The monarchy’s authority is substantial, but it is exercised within a religious and national legitimacy that it cannot afford to erode, and the Moroccan state has consistently paired its normalization steps with reaffirmations of the Palestinian cause (Chtatou, 2023b; Pennell, 2000; Waterbury, 1970).
Conclusion
The relationship between Morocco and Israel is best understood not as a single bond but as a layered structure whose tiers rest on different foundations and perform different functions. History supplies continuity, conviviality supplies texture, religious complicity supplies sanctity, sincerity supplies credibility, mutual interest supplies stability, and the Abraham Accords supply form. The relationship is not two and a half thousand years old in the sense that a diplomatic relationship can be said to have an age, but the Jewish presence in Morocco, and the social, religious, and political arrangements that grew around it, are old enough and dense enough to give the contemporary relationship a depth that is unusual among normalizations in the Arab world (Chtatou, 2023c; Gottreich, 2020; Hirschberg, 1974).
The argument of layered resilience has been tested against a series of ruptures: independence and mass emigration, the Arab–Israeli wars, the closure of the liaison offices, the cancellation of the Negev Forum summit, and the Gaza war. At each point the relationship bent without breaking, and the evidence of September and October 2026, with its embassies, its investment treaties, and its defense industrial pavilion, shows that it is entering a more institutional phase (Chtatou, 2026a; i24NEWS, 2026; The National, 2026). The same evidence also shows that its most visible tier is its least popular, and that the durability of the whole will depend on the vitality of the tiers that lie below the surface. A relationship rooted in shared history and everyday life can survive political storms; a relationship that rests only on strategy and sponsorship cannot be assumed to do so.
For scholarship, the implication is that studies of normalization should look beyond the diplomatic event to the social and cultural strata that make it intelligible, and should attend to the temporalities that distinguish them. For policy, the implication is that the future of Moroccan–Israeli relations depends less on the number of agreements signed than on the care with which the foundational tiers are protected and the legitimacy of the summit is earned. If Morocco and Israel succeed in aligning interest with memory and strategy with sincerity, and in doing so without sacrificing the Palestinian cause on which public legitimacy depends, the multi-tiered relationship may prove a more durable model of normalization than the transactional agreements that have too often characterized the region (Chtatou, 2021c, 2023b; Lerman, 2023).
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Gulf News. (2020, December 10). Israel, Morocco agree to normalize relations in latest US-brokered deal. https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/israel-morocco-agree-to-normalize-relations-in-latest-us-brokered-deal-1.1607617869921
Hespress English. (2025, June 24). Survey: Moroccan support for normalization with Israel drops sharply after war on Gaza. https://en.hespress.com/114088-114088.html
Hirschberg, H. Z. (1974). A history of the Jews in North Africa: Vol. 1. From antiquity to the sixteenth century (2nd rev. ed.). Brill.
i24NEWS. (2026, September). Israel, Morocco upgrade ties as Abraham Accords mark six years. https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/diplomacy/artc-israel-morocco-upgrade-ties-as-abraham-accords-mark-six-years
Ibn Khaldun. (1925–1956). Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l’Afrique septentrionale (Baron de Slane, Trans.; P. Casanova, Ed.; Vols. 1–4). Paul Geuthner. (Original work written ca. 1377)
Kenbib, M. (1994). Juifs et musulmans au Maroc, 1859–1948: Contribution à l’histoire des relations intercommunautaires en terre d’Islam. Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines.
Kingdom of Morocco. (2011). Constitution of the Kingdom of Morocco (Dahir No. 1-11-91 of 29 July 2011).
Kraemer, J. L. (2008). Maimonides: The life and world of one of civilization’s greatest minds. Doubleday.
Lachter, E. (2026, September 16). US-backed Israel-Morocco deal deepens Abraham Accords amid growing regional threats. Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/world/us-backed-agreement-deepens-ties-officials-address-saudi-arabia-growing-houthi-threat-global-shipping
Laroui, A. (1977). The history of the Maghrib: An interpretive essay (R. Manheim, Trans.). Princeton University Press.
Laskier, M. M. (1983). The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish communities of Morocco, 1862–1962. State University of New York Press.
Laskier, M. M. (1994). North African Jewry in the twentieth century: The Jews of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. New York University Press.
Lerman, E. (2023). Israel’s relations with Morocco and the future of the Abraham Accords. Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. https://jiss.org.il/en/lerman-israels-relations-with-moroccoand-the-future-of-the-abraham-accords/
Lewis, B. (1984). The Jews of Islam. Princeton University Press.
Maddy-Weitzman, B. (2011). The Berber identity movement and the challenge to North African states. University of Texas Press.
The Media Line. (2023, June). Morocco cancels Negev Forum to protest Israeli settlement expansion. https://themedialine.org/headlines/morocco-cancels-negev-forum-to-protest-israeli-settlement-expansion
Morocco World News. (2022, August). Arab Barometer: Moroccans less positive about Israel normalization. https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2022/08/350760/arab-barometer-moroccans-less-positive-about-israel-normalization
Morocco World News. (2023, January). Arab Barometer: 64% of Moroccans oppose relations with Israel. https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2023/01/37519/arab-barometer-64-of-moroccans-oppose-relations-with-israel/
The National. (2026, September 17). Israel and Morocco agree to upgrade diplomatic ties. https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/2026/09/17/israel-and-morocco-agree-to-upgrade-diplomatic-ties/
Palestine Chronicle. (2026, October 9). ‘No normalization, no compromise’: Demonstrators in Morocco reject Israel ties. https://www.palestinechronicle.com/no-normalization-no-compromise-demonstrators-in-morocco-reject-israel-ties/
Pennell, C. R. (2000). Morocco since 1830: A history. New York University Press.
Rosen, L. (1984). Bargaining for reality: The construction of social relations in a Muslim community. University of Chicago Press.
Schroeter, D. J. (1988). Merchants of Essaouira: Urban society and imperialism in southwestern Morocco, 1844–1886. Cambridge University Press.
Schroeter, D. J. (2002). The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardic world. Stanford University Press.
Shenhav, Y. (2006). The Arab Jews: A postcolonial reading of nationalism, religion, and ethnicity. Stanford University Press.
Shlaim, A. (2000). The iron wall: Israel and the Arab world. W. W. Norton.
Shohat, E. (1999). The invention of the Mizrahim. Journal of Palestine Studies, 29(1), 5–20.
Stillman, N. A. (1979). The Jews of Arab lands: A history and source book. Jewish Publication Society.
Stillman, N. A. (1991). The Jews of Arab lands in modern times. Jewish Publication Society.
United Nations Security Council. (2025). Resolution 2797 (2025) (S/RES/2797).
Waterbury, J. (1970). The Commander of the Faithful: The Moroccan political elite—A study in segmented politics. Columbia University Press.
Westermarck, E. (1926). Ritual and belief in Morocco (Vols. 1–2). Macmillan.
Zafrani, H. (2003). Le judaïsme maghrébin: Le Maroc, terre des rencontres, des cultures et des civilisations. Marsam.
About Dr. Mohamed Chtatou
Dr. Mohamed Chtatou is a Professor of education science at the university in Rabat. He is currently a political analyst with Moroccan, Gulf, French, Italian and British media on politics and culture in the Middle East, Islam and Islamism as well as terrorism. He is, also, a specialist on political Islam in the MENA region with interest in the roots of terrorism and religious extremism.
View all posts by Dr. Mohamed Chtatou →
Abitbol, M. (1993). Juifs d’Afrique du Nord et expulsés d’Espagne après 1492. Revue de l’histoire des religions, 210(1), 49–90. https://www.persee.fr/doc/rhr_0035-1423_1993_num_210_1_1415
Abraham Accords defense cooperation continues to thrive. (2026, October). The Times of Israel Blogs. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/abraham-accords-defense-cooperation-continues-to-thrive
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Ben-Layashi, S., & Maddy-Weitzman, B. (2010). Myth, history and realpolitik: Morocco and its Jewish community. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 9(1), 89–106.
Bilu, Y. (2000). Without bounds: The life and death of Rabbi Ya’aqov Wazana. Wayne State University Press.
Black, I., & Morris, B. (1991). Israel’s secret wars: A history of Israel’s intelligence services. Grove Weidenfeld.
Boum, A. (2013). Memories of absence: How Muslims remember Jews in Morocco. Stanford University Press.
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Chetrit, J., Gerber, J. S., & Arussy, D. (Eds.). (2021). Jews and Muslims in Morocco: Their intersecting worlds. Lexington Books.
Chtatou, M. (2020a, March 28). Sefrou: Moroccan city of religious symbiosis between Islam and Judaism – Analysis. Eurasia Review. https://www.eurasiareview.com/28032020-sefrou-moroccan-city-of-religious-symbiosis-between-islam-and-judaism-analysis/
Chtatou, M. (2020b, March 8). The shared beliefs of Muslims and Jews in Morocco – Analysis. Eurasia Review. https://www.eurasiareview.com
Chtatou, M. (2021a, July 26). Could Morocco help negotiate between Israel and Hamas? Fikra Forum, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/could-morocco-help-negotiate-between-israel-and-hamas
Chtatou, M. (2021b, September 17). The return of liberals to power in the Moroccan general elections. Fikra Forum, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/return-liberals-power-moroccan-general-elections
Chtatou, M. (2021c, January 5). Understanding Moroccan “normalization” with Israel. Fikra Forum, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/understanding-moroccan-normalization-israel
Chtatou, M. (2022, September 14). The Middle East NATO: From fiction to fact. Fikra Forum, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/middle-east-nato-fiction-fact
Chtatou, M. (2023a, February 26). Jewish-Muslim conviviality in Morocco (4/4). The Times of Israel Blogs. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/jewish-muslim-conviviality-in-morocco-4-4/
Chtatou, M. (2023b, February 16). Morocco, Israel, and the future of the Negev Forum. Fikra Forum, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/morocco-israel-and-future-negev-forum
Chtatou, M. (2023c, March 28). Salient aspects of Moroccan Judaism – Analysis. Eurasia Review. https://highatlasfoundation.org/publications/salient-aspects-of-moroccan-judaism-analysis
Chtatou, M. (2026a, October 9). The Marrakech Air Show 2026: Israel’s defense industry in Morocco and the strategic transformation of Moroccan–Israeli relations. The Times of Israel Blogs. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-marrakech-air-show-2026/
Chtatou, M. (2026b, March 21). The war against Iran: Does it mark the beginning of a new Middle East? Geopolitics, strategic ruptures, and regional reconfiguration. The Times of Israel Blogs. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-war-against-iran/
Chouraqui, A. (1968). Between East and West: A history of the Jews of North Africa (M. M. Bernet, Trans.). Jewish Publication Society.
Cohen, M. R. (1994). Under crescent and cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press.
Davidson, H. A. (2005). Moses Maimonides: The man and his works. Oxford University Press.
Deshen, S. (1989). The mellah society: Jewish community life in Sherifian Morocco. University of Chicago Press.
Geertz, C., Geertz, H., & Rosen, L. (1979). Meaning and order in Moroccan society: Three essays in cultural analysis. Cambridge University Press.
Gerber, J. S. (1980). Jewish society in Fez, 1450–1700: Studies in communal and economic life. Brill.
Gerber, J. S. (1992). The Jews of Spain: A history of the Sephardic experience. Free Press.
Gottreich, E. (2007). The Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim space in Morocco’s Red City. Indiana University Press.
Gottreich, E. (2020). Jewish Morocco: A history from pre-Islamic to postcolonial times. I. B. Tauris.
Gulf News. (2020, December 10). Israel, Morocco agree to normalize relations in latest US-brokered deal. https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/israel-morocco-agree-to-normalize-relations-in-latest-us-brokered-deal-1.1607617869921
Hespress English. (2025, June 24). Survey: Moroccan support for normalization with Israel drops sharply after war on Gaza. https://en.hespress.com/114088-114088.html
Hirschberg, H. Z. (1974). A history of the Jews in North Africa: Vol. 1. From antiquity to the sixteenth century (2nd rev. ed.). Brill.
i24NEWS. (2026, September). Israel, Morocco upgrade ties as Abraham Accords mark six years. https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/diplomacy/artc-israel-morocco-upgrade-ties-as-abraham-accords-mark-six-years
Ibn Khaldun. (1925–1956). Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l’Afrique septentrionale (Baron de Slane, Trans.; P. Casanova, Ed.; Vols. 1–4). Paul Geuthner. (Original work written ca. 1377)
Kenbib, M. (1994). Juifs et musulmans au Maroc, 1859–1948: Contribution à l’histoire des relations intercommunautaires en terre d’Islam. Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines.
Kingdom of Morocco. (2011). Constitution of the Kingdom of Morocco (Dahir No. 1-11-91 of 29 July 2011).
Kraemer, J. L. (2008). Maimonides: The life and world of one of civilization’s greatest minds. Doubleday.
Lachter, E. (2026, September 16). US-backed Israel-Morocco deal deepens Abraham Accords amid growing regional threats. Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/world/us-backed-agreement-deepens-ties-officials-address-saudi-arabia-growing-houthi-threat-global-shipping
Laroui, A. (1977). The history of the Maghrib: An interpretive essay (R. Manheim, Trans.). Princeton University Press.
Laskier, M. M. (1983). The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish communities of Morocco, 1862–1962. State University of New York Press.
Laskier, M. M. (1994). North African Jewry in the twentieth century: The Jews of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. New York University Press.
Lerman, E. (2023). Israel’s relations with Morocco and the future of the Abraham Accords. Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. https://jiss.org.il/en/lerman-israels-relations-with-moroccoand-the-future-of-the-abraham-accords/
Lewis, B. (1984). The Jews of Islam. Princeton University Press.
Maddy-Weitzman, B. (2011). The Berber identity movement and the challenge to North African states. University of Texas Press.
The Media Line. (2023, June). Morocco cancels Negev Forum to protest Israeli settlement expansion. https://themedialine.org/headlines/morocco-cancels-negev-forum-to-protest-israeli-settlement-expansion
Morocco World News. (2022, August). Arab Barometer: Moroccans less positive about Israel normalization. https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2022/08/350760/arab-barometer-moroccans-less-positive-about-israel-normalization
Morocco World News. (2023, January). Arab Barometer: 64% of Moroccans oppose relations with Israel. https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2023/01/37519/arab-barometer-64-of-moroccans-oppose-relations-with-israel/
The National. (2026, September 17). Israel and Morocco agree to upgrade diplomatic ties. https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/2026/09/17/israel-and-morocco-agree-to-upgrade-diplomatic-ties/
Palestine Chronicle. (2026, October 9). ‘No normalization, no compromise’: Demonstrators in Morocco reject Israel ties. https://www.palestinechronicle.com/no-normalization-no-compromise-demonstrators-in-morocco-reject-israel-ties/
Pennell, C. R. (2000). Morocco since 1830: A history. New York University Press.
Rosen, L. (1984). Bargaining for reality: The construction of social relations in a Muslim community. University of Chicago Press.
Schroeter, D. J. (1988). Merchants of Essaouira: Urban society and imperialism in southwestern Morocco, 1844–1886. Cambridge University Press.
Schroeter, D. J. (2002). The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardic world. Stanford University Press.
Shenhav, Y. (2006). The Arab Jews: A postcolonial reading of nationalism, religion, and ethnicity. Stanford University Press.
Shlaim, A. (2000). The iron wall: Israel and the Arab world. W. W. Norton.
Shohat, E. (1999). The invention of the Mizrahim. Journal of Palestine Studies, 29(1), 5–20.
Stillman, N. A. (1979). The Jews of Arab lands: A history and source book. Jewish Publication Society.
Stillman, N. A. (1991). The Jews of Arab lands in modern times. Jewish Publication Society.
United Nations Security Council. (2025). Resolution 2797 (2025) (S/RES/2797).
Waterbury, J. (1970). The Commander of the Faithful: The Moroccan political elite—A study in segmented politics. Columbia University Press.
Westermarck, E. (1926). Ritual and belief in Morocco (Vols. 1–2). Macmillan.
Zafrani, H. (2003). Le judaïsme maghrébin: Le Maroc, terre des rencontres, des cultures et des civilisations. Marsam.
About Dr. Mohamed Chtatou
Dr. Mohamed Chtatou is a Professor of education science at the university in Rabat. He is currently a political analyst with Moroccan, Gulf, French, Italian and British media on politics and culture in the Middle East, Islam and Islamism as well as terrorism. He is, also, a specialist on political Islam in the MENA region with interest in the roots of terrorism and religious extremism.
View all posts by Dr. Mohamed Chtatou →
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