Maria Fantappie and Bader Al-Saif
Over the past decade, and especially since the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, Israel has assumed that its military, intelligence, and technological prowess can buy it allies among the Arab Gulf states. In more recent months, Israeli officials also came to believe that escalation would turn the regional equilibrium in their favor: a wider war between Israel and Iran and its proxies could force the Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia, to finally and fully join with the Israelis.
If war engulfed the Middle East, Israeli leaders thought, the responses of Iran and its proxies to Israel’s provocations would erode the already fragile reconciliation between the Gulf states and Iran, leaving them—and Saudi Arabia, in particular—dependent on security guarantees from Israel’s main ally, the United States. Israeli officials believed that Arab leaders’ opposition to Israeli operations in Gaza and their diplomatic efforts in support of the Palestinians were, ultimately, not their primary concern; their own self-interest was. And thus escalation by Israel would confirm that Iran was the main threat to its Arab neighbors, leaving the Gulf states no choice but to align themselves more closely with Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly articulated this calculus in his September speech at the UN, referring to the Gulf states as Israel’s “Arab partners of peace” and called for Saudi Arabia to ally with it to counter “Iran’s nefarious designs.”
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