By Dalia Dassa Kaye and Sanam Vakil

When Iran directed over 300 missiles and drones at Israel on April 13, Jordan helped fend off the attack. Initial media reports suggested that several other Arab states assisted in Israel’s defense, efforts they later denied. Nonetheless, a chorus of Israeli leaders, as well as some observers in Washington, interpreted these acts as a sign of a major shift. These Arab states, the argument went, would side with Israel if its conflict with Iran continued to escalate. Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, the Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff, declared that Iran’s attack had “created new opportunities for cooperation in the Middle East.” The Institute for National Security Studies, a leading Israeli think tank, declared that “the regional and international coalition that participated in intercepting launches from Iran toward Israel demonstrates the potential of establishing a regional alliance against Iran.”

After Israel responded to the Iranian attack with a relatively limited strike on a military facility in Iran, the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius opined that Israel was “behaving like the leader of a regional coalition against Iran.” With its muted response, he wrote, “it appeared to be weighing the interests of its allies in this coalition—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan—which all provided quiet help in last weekend’s shoot-down.” In Ignatius’s view, this represented a potential “paradigm shift for Israel,” one that would give the Middle East a “new shape.”

These assessments, however, are overenthusiastic and fail to grasp the complexity of the region’s challenges. To be sure, Israel’s future strategy against Iran may take regional considerations into greater account, given the unprecedented nature of April’s military exchanges. But the realities in the region that inhibit Arab-Israeli cooperation have not significantly changed. Even before Hamas’s October 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, the Arab states that signed the 2020 Abraham Accords, embracing normalization with Israel, were growing frustrated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s support for expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank and his tolerance for his far-right ministers’ attempts to undermine the status quo in Jerusalem. A string of deadly attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in West Bank towns in the spring of 2023 further inflamed regional tensions. After Israel launched its military operations in Gaza in October, prompting waves of protests across the Middle East, Arab leaders became even more hesitant to openly back Israel, aware that open cooperation could hurt their domestic legitimacy.

Nothing about the Arab response to this round of Iranian-Israeli confrontation suggests that these positions have shifted. The group of states that many Israelis reductively refer to as a “Sunni alliance” are, in fact, still seeking to balance their relationships with Iran and Israel, protect their economies and security, and, above all, avert a wider regional conflict. They are also likely to continue to prioritize ending the catastrophic war in Gaza over confronting Iran. Yet with tensions rising between Iran and Israel, the Arab states’ enthusiasm to fast-track Israel’s regional integration is more contingent than ever on Israel’s willingness to accept Palestinian statehood.

Ahead of Iran’s April 13 attack on Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) shared intelligence about the impending attack with the United States. The U.S. Central Command then used this information to coordinate its response with Israel and other partners. Jordan allowed U.S. and British military planes into its airspace to head off incoming Iranian drones and missiles and directly intercepted Iranian attacks. Early media reports, particularly in the United States and Israel, stressed that a broad regional effort had thwarted Tehran’s assault.

But it soon became clear that the Arab role in repelling Iran’s attack had been limited. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE explicitly denied making any direct military contribution to Israel’s defense. Jordanian officials defended their participation as necessary to protect their own interests. Jordan’s “security and sovereignty” ranked “above all considerations,” Jordanian King Abdullah II declared, emphasizing that his country had not acted to help Israel.

The efforts that Arab states did make to counter Iran were almost certainly driven by a desire to maintain their relationships with the United States, not to align themselves more closely with Israel. Since Israel launched its operation in Gaza, Arab leaders have been surprised that U.S. President Joe Biden has not had more success restraining Israel’s conduct there. But they are still seeking to deepen their cooperation with Washington; they see no alternative source for the kind of security the United States supplies.

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https://www.foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/anti-iran-alliance-emerging-middle-east