Has Israel made real friends in the Middle East?

As Jordanian fighter jets shot down Iranian drones heading for Israel two Saturdays ago, there were joyful cries of Allahu Akbar on the ground as some people lent out of their windows to cheer the drones they thought were getting through. King Abdullah II was depicted on social media wearing an Israeli military uniform complete with the Star of David and he must dearly wish that Israelis would shut up about their “new strategic alliance” with old enemies like Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Jordan’s foreign minister was forced into an unconvincing declaration that they would shoot down anyone’s drones, not just Iran’s. Yet, the important fact remains: this is the first time, as far as anyone can remember, that Jordan’s armed forces have fought to defend Israel. It’s a new Middle East. 

Remember, a friend said, Jordanians are conservative Sunnis: ‘They dislike Iran as much as they dislike Israel’

The new Middle East — the tentative alliance between Israel and the most important Arab states — has endured despite six months of Arab audiences being saturated with pictures of Palestinian children in Gaza torn apart by bombs or, lately, emaciated from hunger. The Arab street is unhappy but it has not exploded. A friend in the Jordanian capital, Amman, sat up all night that Saturday listening to the whoosh of missiles and the roar of jets overhead. He emerged from his apartment to find that most of his neighbors supported what the Royal Jordanian Air Force had done on the king’s orders: “If you invade our airspace, we will shoot you down.” He lives in a smart neighborhood of Amman but he thought the rest of the country agreed, albeit by a thin majority as two-thirds of Jordanians are of Palestinian descent. Still, he expects the king’s support to hold up even if Israel bombs Iran. Remember, he said, Jordanians are conservative Sunnis: “They dislike Iran as much as they dislike Israel.”

The conflict with Tehran is certainly far more important to the Saudi leader, Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), than the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, even if the war in Gaza makes that difficult for him to state openly. There were claims this week that the Saudi Air Force had — like the Jordanian — shot down Iranian drones. That was according to one report from an Israeli news agency and it hasn’t been confirmed. Regardless, the Saudis host the American planes and radars that would have done the job. And, like Jordan, the Saudis have been members for at least the past three years of an informal coalition set up by the US military to deal with the threat of missiles and drones from Iran and its proxy armies.

Israel and Saudi Arabia have been sending their supreme military chiefs to regular meetings hosted by US Central Command, Centcom. An account of those meetings speaks of a “genuine rapport and comradery” developing between the most senior officers from these two countries without formal diplomatic relations. The top commanders from Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates also sat around the same table with the Israelis. There has been intelligence sharing. It’s apparently crude, officers from the different countries in the coalition having to phone Centcom’s operations center in Qatar when they spot a threat, but the principle has been established. Israeli and Arab pilots have flown together on exercises that imagine drones skimming across the Red Sea. The unprecedented co-operation seen at the weekend was rehearsed. 

Before Hamas launched its pogrom on October 7, MbS had been edging towards political normalization with Israel. As he told Fox News: “Every day we get closer.” He wanted — and still wants — to join the Abraham Accords, the agreement by the UAE and Bahrain to recognize Israel and open diplomatic relations. The Accords were negotiated by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s much-mocked son-in-law. It may have been because the young Kushner was advised by Henry Kissinger, or perhaps because he had been underestimated all along, but the accords were an astonishing breakthrough. They could today form the basis for a new peace in the region. President Joe Biden has been desperate to get an Israeli-Saudi peace deal. That now depends on ending the war in Gaza. 

Joel Rayburn, who used to run Iran policy on the US national security council, is one of those who believes Iran orchestrated the Hamas attacks last October precisely to stop the Saudis formalizing their relations with Israel: “The Iranian regime manufactured a conflict with Israel and is attempting to use that conflict to consolidate control in several key countries in the Arab world.” Rayburn explains that Iran has used its expeditionary army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or Quds Force, to run militant groups around the region: Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza; Hezbollah in Lebanon; several Shia militias in Iraq. He also says the Quds Force has been smuggling weapons into Jordan and the West Bank. Until three weeks ago, the general in charge of these operations was Mohammad Reza Zahedi. Then Israel killed him, and half-a-dozen other senior Iranian officers, with a missile attack on a building in the Syrian capital, Damascus — the reason Iran struck directly at Israel last weekend. 

Rayburn says that, given his command, he believes Zahedi was one of the masterminds of the October 7 attacks and would therefore have been an important target for the Israelis: “It’s not like the Israeli strike came out of the blue.” How is it that Israel has managed to hang on to its Arab allies despite such an obviously risky and inflammatory move? Because Iran had been engaged in a “broad campaign” of escalation in the region, using the Quds Force. “They have ratcheted up the pressure in an extremely provocative way… The Arab capitals aren’t blind. They’ve seen for years that there’s an increasing Iranian regime militant threat to their stability and their security. They’re threatened by a common enemy to the Israelis. That’s the basis of this coalition, it’s a defensive coalition.”

The reaction in Tehran to the events of the weekend had a curious echo of the Six-Day War in 1967 when Israel was attacked by an Arab coalition that included two of the countries it now calls allies, Egypt and Jordan. On the second day of the war, Israeli jets obliterated almost the entire Egyptian air force as it waited on the ground. Despite this, Egypt’s military commander sent a message to the Jordanians claiming to have destroyed 75 percent of Israel’s planes and ordering them to join a march on Tel Aviv. Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, repeated these lies to save face, though he knew the truth was evident. Iran’s leaders have shown a similar wish to avoid confronting unpleasant realities. Their rhetoric is of “crushing revenge” against the “Zionist entity,” despite the fact that the only casualty from the hundreds of drones and missiles was an unlucky ten-year-old Bedouin Arab girl in the Negev.

Iran was given a clear demonstration of Israel’s military and technical superiority on Saturday — the “win” that Biden fervently hopes Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will take. But it may well be that by the time you read this, Israel will have sent bombers flying over Jordan to carry out a punitive strike against Iran. The Israeli public are demanding more than a token response. Israelis know they can only ever lose one war. They believe they may have to fight that war unless deterrence is restored. So Iran is having to shed one of its shibboleths. As Rayburn puts it, the regime has always operated on the assumption that it will never have to defend itself at home while using its proxies to carry out attacks around the Middle East. The leadership in Tehran miscalculated by launching missiles at Israel from its own soil. 

One report from the Israeli cabinet meeting held to decide what to do said that if the discussions were uploaded to YouTube, 4 million people would be at Ben Gurion airport trying to flee. The most hardline member of the cabinet, the minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, issued a statement saying Israel had to show it was “prepared to go berserk.” This is a revival of Richard Nixon’s “madman theory,” the belief that deterrence depends on your enemies thinking you will do something crazy if provoked. Except that Nixon sent signals — leaks of ranting conversations; an order to put US forces on alert — while the Israelis seem intent on sending bombs. 

The next steps would probably unfold with an awful logic. Iran could be expected to turn to Hezbollah, its militia in Lebanon, which has tens of thousands of missiles pointed at Israel. However good Israel’s air defenses are, they could not catch every one of those missiles. The Middle East now seems one or two miscalculations away from disaster, a wider war. The Arab states that stood by Israel at the weekend certainly have not signed up for that. The next casualty in Israel’s conflict with Iran might be its new coalition of Arab allies.

Watch Paul Wood and historian Charlie Gammell discuss the Arab-Israeli alliance on Spectator TV:

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here..