A recent report suggesting that Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates are exploring the possibility of creating a four-nation defense alliance has potentially game-changing ramifications.
While the last few months since the Abraham Accords and normalization agreements signed between Israel and numerous Arab and Muslim countries have witnessed many unprecedented events, this could outshine them all.
The historic narrative of the Israel-Arab conflict has been that the region and the wider Arab and Muslim world will not countenance the existence of the Jewish State, and has tried on many occasions in the past to extinguish it.
That has come to an end in recent years, when the State of Israel and pragmatic Sunni Arab states in the region have been on the same side against common foes, whether extremist non-state entities like the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, or more prominently against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Shiite terrorist proxies in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq. .
What began as back-channel coordination and clandestine meetings in the 1990s has moved in the last decade to closer cooperation, even if largely unacknowledged at first. Already in 2013, there was talk of Israel joining an anti-Iran defense alliance with a number of moderate Arab states that would involve sharing Jerusalem’s newly developed anti-missile technologies.
According to those earlier reports, Israel would gain access to radar early warning stations in Saudi Arabia and the UAE and in exchange share its own data from its multi-layered anti-ballistic missile defense systems. The report also detailed that Jordan would be protected from surface-to-surface threats by Israel’s Arrow long-range anti-missile batteries. READ MORE
