Israel’s Gulf-State Gamble in the Iran War
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A few days ago, the war that Israel and the United States launched against Iran entered its third week, and Israelis made bleary-eyed preparations for Shabbat. Throughout the country, sleep has been scant. Iran has retaliated against the attacks by sending missiles and drones to all parts of Israel, from north to south, so people have moved from their homes to stay close to fortified bomb shelters. Some families sleep in schools or in train stations. Iran’s attacks are much diminished from the war’s onset—its rate of missile fire has decreased by ninety per cent—but the explosions arrive in the middle of the night, and in pre-dawn hours, at intervals that seem designed to fray the nerves.
The anxieties increased with the opening of a new front. Not long after Israel assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his allies in Hezbollah entered the fight, dragging the Lebanese public into a war that they had no interest in joining. Israel responded with an extraordinary campaign of strikes on Beirut and beyond, killing, by now, more than eight hundred and fifty people. Inside Israel, Hezbollah’s offensive has compounded existing concerns: Iranian missiles have a roughly ten-minute lead time before they hit, but missiles from Hezbollah are near and immediate, with, at times, mere seconds of advance notice.
Israel’s government has done what it can to give the impression of normalcy. Just days into the conflict, Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, reopened the economy, in what critics saw as an attempt to limit the war’s financial impact during an election year. With schools shuttered across the country, parents were expected to resume work while their children stayed home and the bombardments continued. Yet Operation Roaring Lion, as it is known, is extremely popular in Israel. Ninety-three per cent of Jewish Israelis support the war, according to a survey by the Israel Democracy Institute. By and large, they view the Iranian nuclear threat as existential, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed a bombing campaign on Iran’s nuclear facilities just last summer as a “historic victory.”
The Israelis who support the war hope that it will help usher in a new Middle East, built on alliances with countries that have previously been, at least publicly, hostile toward Israel. In 2020, the Abraham Accords normalized ties between Israel and four Arab states—but not Saudi Arabia, the most strategically important of them. Netanyahu has been pursuing a deal with Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, ever since. By all accounts, the two countries were inching close to an agreement in the fall of 2023, when Hamas-led attacks, on October 7th, killed roughly twelve hundred Israelis.
The war that Israel waged in response drew the world’s attention to the issue of a Palestinian state—something that Netanyahu and his government have refused to address. Leaders in the Gulf who had been willing to sideline the issue now faced populations newly galvanized by it. Nevertheless, Netanyahu seems to be counting on moderate Arab states to join Israel against Iran. Watching television news in Israel these days, it’s easy to think that normalization with Saudi Arabia is on the horizon, and that an expansion of the Abraham Accords is only a matter of time. Days into the war, in an interview with Fox News, Netanyahu predicted that toppling the Iranian regime would enable “many more peace treaties” in the region. The Times of Israel, citing anonymous senior officials, reported that Gulf countries would soon join the coalition fighting against the Islamic Republic. An analyst for the newspaper Maariv wrote about a “renewed convergence of interest” among Israel and “moderate Arab states.” Another, in a right-leaning newspaper, observed that “Israel’s status as a regional power is strengthening.”
Experts who study the Middle East caution that this is little more than wishful thinking. “The euphoria in the television studios, all this talk about a nascent coalition, couldn’t be further from reality,” Yoel Guzansky, who leads the Gulf research team at the Institute for National Security Studies, in Israel, told me. He acknowledges that Israel and the Gulf countries face a common threat from the Iranian regime—but, he said, Netanyahu’s argument that countering this threat will somehow encourage a peace alliance is unfounded: “I have no idea what he’s basing this on.”
Earlier this month, the United Arab Emirates closed its Embassy in Tehran, and its President, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan, called Iran an enemy of the country—a dramatic shift in tone from the Emiratis, who have traditionally been solicitous toward Iran. An alliance of Gulf states known as the Gulf Cooperation Council vowed to take “all necessary measures” to defend their territories from Iranian attacks. Despite the escalating rhetoric, though, not a single Gulf state has severed diplomatic ties with Iran, let alone publicly joined the war against it.
Elie Podeh, a Middle East scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, expressed surprise at the Gulf countries’ response, “or rather lack of one.” Discord between the Gulf and Iran has been growing for years. In 2010, a Qatari emir argued, in private correspondence released by WikiLeaks, that the Iranians could not be trusted. Recently, an adviser to the Emirati President pointed out that Iran had violated a non-aggression pact with the Gulf states, what he called a “gentlemen’s agreement.” In the first ten days of the war, it launched some two thousand drones across the Gulf, more than half of them targeting the U.A.E. Its bombardments struck a U.S. base there; civilian areas in Dubai and Abu Dhabi have also been hit. “I would expect there to be a military response, even if only symbolic,” Podeh said.
A close read of media reports suggests that Israeli officials are trying to publicly draw their Persian Gulf counterparts into aiding the anti-Iran coalition. Several days ago, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Emiratis had attacked a desalination plant in Iran, citing a source “familiar with the details.” An Emirati official quickly denounced the report as “fake news.” When Israeli media reported early in the war that Qatar had struck inside Iran, after an attempted attack on Doha’s international airport, the Qatari foreign ministry issued a denial, clarifying that his country had not joined the “campaign targeting Iran.”
Some experts believe that there is private coördination between the Gulf states and the U.S.-Israeli coalition, but the Gulf states clearly do not want to appear to be taking sides. Their caution is understandable, Podeh told me. Despite the bellicose language coming out of Washington and Jerusalem about the necessity of reshaping Iran’s government, Iran’s neighbors in the Gulf “have come to the conflict with the assumption that the Iranian regime will not disappear,” Podeh said.
The war does seem to be causing some realignments. Ehud Yaari, a well-sourced analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has reported that Qatar intends to expel Hamas leaders from its territory over their refusal to condemn Iranian attacks. Whether or not that happens, a new landscape is emerging, in which Tehran’s proxies—in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran itself—are in retreat. “If you look at it through a fifty-year lens, these Shiite organizations have suffered a severe blow,” Podeh said.
Rather than benefit from such changes in the Middle East, though, Israel risks establishing itself as a “regional bully that is out of control,” Guzansky, of the I.N.S.S., told me. He added that Arab countries see Israel asserting military dominion over the Middle East, “and they want to counterbalance it.” One way to do that would be to forge closer ties with Turkey, as Saudi Arabia did recently, much to Netanyahu’s consternation. The fear is that, by warming up to Turkey, whose leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been increasingly hostile toward Israel, these states will be driven further away from it.
Dennis Ross, a longtime U.S. diplomat to the region, called the breadth of Iran’s attacks a “rude awakening” for the Gulf states. But, he said, “Does that mean that we’re on the brink of normalization? The answer is no.” He did predict that the strikes would encourage greater military integration between the Gulf, the U.S., and Israel. For one thing, the Gulf states are eager to acquire Iron Beam technology—a system, developed by an Israeli company, that uses high-energy lasers to intercept missiles and drones.
But Ross doesn’t believe that the current state of affairs will lead to a political opening. “In Israel, there is not sufficient appreciation for how this government is perceived,” he said. Many leaders in the Gulf once held a measure of respect for Netanyahu; they were pleased when he resisted the Obama Administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, and they supported his belligerent remarks against it before Congress, in 2015. “Bibi’s speech may have been a disaster in America, but in the Gulf states it was an enormous sign of respect for him,” Ross said. “That’s all gone.”
The Israeli government has not moved on the issue of Palestinian statehood, and it has “actively inflamed the West Bank,” Ross pointed out. After Netanyahu’s ruthless prosecution of the war in Gaza, in which more than seventy thousand Palestinians have been killed, the Gulf-state leaders who once respected Netanyahu no longer trust him, Ross said. “They think that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir”—another far-right minister in Netanyahu’s government—“define what Israel will do.” Netanyahu tends to play down the influence of these extremist figures, Ross said, but the impunity with which Jewish settlers have carried out attacks against Palestinian villagers in the West Bank demonstrates how beholden he is to them.
“The Saudis were very close to reaching an understanding with Israel,” Ross added. “Today that won’t satisfy them. They need more, and Israel can only offer less.” In a survey conducted by the Washington Institute last year, Saudis were asked how they would view the establishment of diplomatic ties and peace with Israel. Only one per cent viewed it as a positive step, compared with forty-one percent who had viewed it positively five years earlier.
The notion that public opinion does not matter in a monarchy such as Saudi Arabia is gravely mistaken, Guzansky said. Its crown prince is deftly attuned to public sentiment, fearing unrest. That sentiment has shifted decidedly against Israel and for the Palestinian cause, and there is no reason to think that a military campaign aimed at Iran will reverse it. “In a week, in a month, when this war is over, the cameras will turn back to Gaza,” Guzansky continued. The devastating effects of Israel’s war there will resurface. So, too, will the demand that Israel work toward a two-state solution. “Can the Israeli government even say it?” ♦