ANALYSIS: the New Arab-Israeli Alliance Will Reshape the Middle East
The Abraham Accords’ signing ceremony on September 20, 2020 .(Wikimedia Commons)
Ishaan Rai (SFS ‘23) is a regular writer for the Indo-Asia Pacific section and a contributing writer to the Caravel's Crow’s Nest. The content and opinions of this piece are the writer’s and the writer’s alone. They do not reflect the opinions of the Caravel or its staff.
Over the past few weeks, U.S. diplomats have been meeting counterparts from several different countries in Vienna, seeking to negotiate the United States’ return to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal. What was once one of the crowning foreign policy achievements of the Barack Obama administration was abruptly canceled when Donald Trump came to office, only for President Joe Biden to immediately seek re-entry into the agreement once his term began.
So far, the talks appear to be going well, but complications remain: on April 13, an explosion on a nuclear plant in central Iran caused a power failure and a blackout throughout the entire facility, an act Iran has described as “nuclear terrorism.” But it was not the United States that created the explosion, nor was it France, Britain, Russia, China, or Germany, any of the other six countries involved in the JCPOA.
Intelligence reports instead suggest that it was Israel that caused the explosion–that tiny state of nine million people that has been waging a shadow war on Iran for years and has been the target of the Muslim world’s enmity for more than seventy years.
Even though Israel is not even part of the negotiations, the country casts a strangely large shadow over the JCPOA, as it has heavily criticized the nuclear deal and has generally done everything in its power to try and subvert Iran’s nuclear capacity. For instance, Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, was widely believed to have assassinated top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh last December. Yet, what is perhaps most interesting about the ongoing Iran-Israel feud is the unexpected friends that Israel had found. In recent years, Israel has been strengthening ties with countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and, even more shockingly, Saudi Arabia, the guardian of Islam’s two holiest cities and host of one of the world’s most extreme forms of Islam, Wahhabism.
The idea that Arabs and Israelis could actually work together may have seemed unthinkable just ten years ago. Yet with historic normalization deals last year, Israel seems poised to become true allies with these Gulf states. The question remains: why are Israel and numerous Arab countries now hand in hand, and what are the implications could this alliance have for the future of the region?
A New Paradigm
The Abraham Accords were signed under the auspices of the Trump administration in August 2020. Under this historic agreement, the countries of the UAE and Bahrain agreed to formally recognize Israel, with fellow Arab countries Sudan and Morocco doing so shortly afterward. The reason these normalization deals are so significant is that most of the Muslim World had refused to even recognize Israel as a sovereign state since its beginning in 1948, instead alleging that it is an illegal country occupying the land of the Palestinian Arabs. So, what caused the change? For one thing, there is precedent: both Egypt and Jordan, Israel’s neighbors, have recognized the country for decades. The citizens of both countries have no strong love for Israel, but the governments realize that the Jewish state is here to stay and that it is better to work with it than to ostracize it.
Similarly, the recognition of Israel by the UAE and Bahrain was driven by pragmatic politics, or, more specifically, to further a relationship that had already become cordial; for instance, Israel had already opened up a diplomatic mission to the UAE in 2015. The UAE in particular also had real material incentives to recognize Israel since, as part of a side deal with the United States, the Emiratis obtained powerful F-35 stealth fighter jets. Immediately following the accords, the UAE also signed a flurry of deals granting its government access to Israel’s famous cyber technologies sector. When people think of the UAE, they may think of a land of fancy hotels rather than a major military power, but, in fact, the UAE is a key piece in the Arab alliance, with former U.S. defense secretary James Mattis even calling the UAE Armed Forces “Little Sparta” for their work in helping defeat ISIS. The UAE knows that cutting-edge Israeli technology would vastly strengthen their military capabilities, and they would be foolish to miss out on that value.
The other key piece is, of course, Saudi Arabia. The country is famous for adhering to a hardline, literal interpretation of Islam, as as a result, the Saudi government restricts women’s rights and uses executions by the sword. They have also been one of the main drivers of antisemitism across the Muslim World: before 2020, Saudi school textbooks were said to contain predictions of a religious war where Muslims would kill all the Jews, and that “Zionist forces” used money and drugs to control the world.
However, both Saudi Arabia and Israel have a common enemy—the Islamic Republic of Iran—and the enemy of an enemy is a friend.
Saudi Arabia’s fear of Iran is more of the geopolitical variety, with the two countries competing for hegemonic control of the Middle East. On one level, this cold war is driven by ideology, by two competing forms of Islam: Iran sees itself as the vanguard of Shi’a Islam, while Saudi Arabia sees itself as the protector of orthodox Sunni Islam, especially since the country is the custodian of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy allied with the United States and other Western countries, while Iran is a revisionist state seeking to upend the Western world order by contesting the United States and its allies in the region.
For Israel, on the other hand, while geopolitics does play a role, the threat the Jewish state sees in Iran is existential. Since the Islamic Republic’s inception in 1979, Iran has made opposition to Israel a key pillar of their platform: the Supreme Leader and its presidents frequently refer to Israel as an illegitimate “Zionist regime” propped up by the U.S., and Iran has consistently supported anti-Israel militia groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
For a people who have suffered the genocidal horrors of the Holocaust, Israelis have real reason to fear that a nuclear-armed Iran, a country they see as a “fanatical regime,” could turn its ICBMs against the Jewish state. Israel sees the JCPOA as not restrictive enough on Iran’s program, as it includes a 15-year expiration date for many of its provisions, after which it is conceivable that Iran could obtain a nuclear weapon. Israel’s behavior in regards to Iran’s nuclear program, such as its assassinations and bombings, may seem reckless to the U.S., but it is driven by survival strategy and the generational trauma of the Jewish people.
So, while Iran lacks many sovereign allies in the region, it has sought to spread its influence through the support of the aforementioned militias, in particular Shiite ones, throughout the Middle East. These militias have gained great power in Iraq, giving Iran a shocking amount of control in the neighboring country, and importantly for Saudi Arabia, Iran supported the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s neighbor. The Houthis, whose motto includes language such as “death to Israel” and “a curse upon the Jews,” were actually able to wrest control of the majority of the country during a brutal civil war, and Saudi Arabia has been leading a war against them for more than six years now.
Thus, with Israel and Saudi Arabia both finding themselves threatened by Iran’s machinations, they have found reason to join together. Of course, Saudi Arabia has also been a fierce critic of Israel in the past over issues relating to Palestine, but the détente between Saudi Arabia and Israel is driven by new blood in the ruling House of Saud, most notably through the controversial crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). MBS is reviled by many Americans due to his role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, but his autocratic rule has also brought real progress to his country. He has bettered the rights of women, and he has been attempting to promote tourism as well as reduce the country’s reliance on petroleum as a part of his Vision 2030 initiative. Most importantly, he is a pragmatist, and recognizes the value of Israel to his own country’s interests: in 2018, he became the first Saudi official to affirm that Israelis had a right to their land.
However, it is critical to note that the Saudi Arabia-Israel alliance is not yet formal. The Saudis have not signed a normalization deal like their Emirati and Bahraini counterparts, and their position continues to be that recognition of Israel will only come after a two-state solution with the Palestinians is formulated. But ties are deepening. The UAE and Bahrain are very close allies with Saudi Arabia, and it is unlikely the Abraham Accords could have occurred without Saudi approval. In November of last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Saudi Arabia and met with MBS in a groundbreaking meeting. Many say formal recognition is only inevitable, especially once the rule of the elderly King Salman ends and MBS becomes the monarch.
Endgame
Of course, there is the question of where this Arab-Israeli alliance will lead the region. Will it cause war with Iran? A nuclear arms race in the region? Obviously, both of these outcomes are the worst-case scenarios, and both can be avoided through nimble diplomacy. The “shadow war” between Israel and Iran does appear to be heating up, but Saudi-Iranian relations appear to have taken an unexpected turn.
In the past few days, multiple sources reported secret meetings between Iranian and Saudi officials in Iraq that began on April 5, largely focused on hashing out a resolution to the war in Yemen. Even MBS, who once called Iran’s supreme leader “the new Hitler of the Middle East,” has struck a more conciliatory tone, saying on state television on April 28, “We do not want for Iran to be in a difficult situation, on the contrary, we want Iran to prosper and grow.”
Does this mean the Arab-Israeli alliance is over before it even began, that rapprochement with Iran is on the horizon? Not so fast. Many experts still believe that Saudi-Iran ties will remain tense. Saudi Arabia and Iran both still have competing interests, and MBS also made clear in that April 28 interview that he disapproved of Iran’s “negative behavior” in the region. In this case, Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic efforts more suggest that the Kingdom is seeking to escape the stalemate of the Yemen war rather than wanting to end the competition with Iran.
Overall, perhaps the most interesting thing that both of these developments—the Arab-Israeli alliance and the Saudi-Iran negotiations—signal is the pulling away of the United States from the region.
Since the Gulf War in 1991, the U.S. has held an oppressively strong presence in the Middle East, but, nowadays, both the U.S. government and its citizens largely view the region with exhaustion and scorn, and see regions such as Asia as more worthy of U.S. attention. Thus, the U.S.’s Middle Eastern allies find they have to fill in the gaps, especially in the face of an increasingly assertive Iran. Though the U.S. was allied to both Israel and Saudi Arabia separately, the mutual enmity between the two kept them apart, but now, without the steady hand of the United States, they have no choice but to work together. Saudi Arabia in particular may feel like it no longer has a free hand to act aggressively towards Iran, and thus is trying to strike a more conciliatory tone towards the Islamic Republic through secret diplomatic channels.
The United States can still play a critical role in furthering Middle East peace, however: if the U.S. is able to push for harsher terms in the JCPOA, such as a promise from Iran to reduce their support of Shiite militias, that could very well cool the current tension. But the best way to keep the situation from escalating is to prevent Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.
The growing alliance also shatters traditional notions coming out of the U.S. foreign policy elite saying that Arabs would only make peace with Israel after it resolves its conflict with the Palestinians. As Netanyahu himself said, the old refrain of “land for peace,” i.e. Palestinian land in exchange for Arab peace, has been replaced with “peace for peace.” A new, pragmatic generation of Arabs, exemplified by MBS, is deciding that the pros of a relationship with Israel outweigh the cons. While Israeli normalization with the UAE and Bahrain may not have been as groundbreaking as the normalizations with Egypt or Jordan, since those countries had actually gone to war with Israel in the past, there is no doubt that an Israeli-Saudi deal would be an epoch-defining moment in the Middle East, and it would be devastating to Iran’s plans for Middle Eastern hegemony.
But ultimately, the growing cordiality between the Arab countries and Israel will benefit citizens of those states. In the months following the normalization deals, Israelis began flocking to glitzy UAE cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, for the first time ever, exploring the extravagant shopping malls and engaging in cultural exchange with the eager Emiratis. That’s something worth celebrating.
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