Twenty months of intense Israeli militarism in the region surging recently to take in Iran have left the Arab states wary of the strategic dangers and chaos that come with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “remaking of the Middle East” and what it could mean for them.
It is no secret that after Israel’s decapitation of Hizbullah’s leadership in Lebanon last October, the consensus within both official and intellectual Arab political circles was that Iran would be next.
When Israel attacked Iran eight months later in the middle of diplomatic exchanges between Tehran and Washington, Arab states were left to grapple with the entangled political and strategic reverberations of strikes that could affect their national interests.
On one level, Arab states condemned in the “strongest terms” the “blatant” aggression against “brotherly” Iran, in the words of Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s respective statements on 13 June. Egypt’s similarly alarmed condemnation slammed Israel’s attack as “unjustified” and warned of “unprecedented repercussions” on the security and stability of the Middle East.
Privately, hushed conversations within Arab intellectual circles saw elevated levels of anxiety, canvassing the region for Israel’s “next” target. This time it was not a single country, unlocking a level of paranoia rooted in the violent events of the past 20 months.
Who’s-next lists included Lebanon, Turkey, Algeria, and even Egypt, mostly in that order.
Contrary to the strongly worded official statements of frustration with Israel’s unprovoked aggression against Iran, a Western narrative proclaiming private Arab state support for both the attack on Tehran and regime change prevailed in the mainstream US media and in statements by US officials.
In the same vein US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told the Israeli newspaper the Jerusalem Post this week that the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites have “dramatically” improved the chances of a Saudi-Israeli normalisation deal.
While normalisation and its benefits were never off the table for Riyadh despite the continued war on Gaza, Israel’s expansionist policy and unchecked regional militarism echoing Netanyahu’s ambitions for a leadership role in the Middle East are now posing new challenges to its Arab neighbours.
For the Gulf and other Arab states whose normalization policies with Israel served their political interests and enhanced relations with Washington, the prospect of Israeli regional hegemony is cause for new found concern.
“Israel has been betting on very risky moves in the past year and a half concerning its typical adversaries, mostly non state actors, which paid off so they thought they could continue the job with Iran,” Badr Al-Saif a history professor at Kuwait University and non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
Netanyahu’s project to establish an Israeli led regional order “is something that we do not want or project in the Gulf region,” he said in an interview.
Iran has been a difficult neighbour, Al-Saif argued, but it is not in the Gulf’s national interest to see Israeli or US instigated regime change next door. “This is destabilizing for to us. We have issues with both Israel and Iran but it we’re going to rank them, Israel is a much worse adversary.”
In the Saudi owned newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Abdelmoneim Said, a member of the Egyptian senate and informed political analyst, published an article titled ‘No Israeli leadership in the Middle East.’ Said argued that despite Israel’s military perceived victories on several fronts since October 2023, it is in no position to impose regional hegemony.
And yet, he told Al-Ahram Weekly, Israel’s regional militarism “worries” Arab states.
While Arab-Iranian relations were shaped by a defensive policy approach in the past, the decades-old rivalry thawed in 2023 after Tehran and Riyadh restored diplomatic ties. The UAE followed months later, while Egypt slowly progressed in its détente with Iran, which peaked earlier this month with an official visit by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to Cairo where he met Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi.
The visit marked a significant departure from Cairo’s strained relations with Tehran after the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 severed ties with Egypt because of its Peace Treaty with Israel. According to official press releases on both sides, Araghchi’s visit to Cairo addressed ways of developing bilateral ties as well as regional issues including Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Observers say that the Egyptian-Iranian entente is driven by national security concerns born out of the shifting regional dynamics since October 2023.
In addition to breaking Iran’s proxy Hizbullah in Lebanon and decapitating Hamas’s entire leadership in Gaza, Israel’s militarism expanded to Syria after the fall of Hafez Al-Assad regime, Iran’s ally, in December 2024.
“Israel practically occupies one third of Syria now” as a security buffer zone, said Gameel Matar, a prominent political analyst and former Egyptian diplomat.
In south Lebanon, Israeli forces continue to occupy dozens of villages and border areas since November 2024, despite a ceasefire agreement with Hizbullah.
For centuries, Syria has been of strategic importance for Egypt’s national security beyond its northeastern border. Israel’s occupation of swaths of Syrian territories since Assad’s fall, as well as its destruction of Syrian defence capabilities and navy has been a major concern for Egypt, he added. “A weak Syria impacts Egypt strategically,” Matar said in an interview.
While Arab states mended ties with Iran, US and Israeli aspirations for a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel since the 2020 Abraham Accords stalled.
The UAE and Bahrain signed the Accords and were later joined by Sudan and Morocco during US President Donald Trump’s first term in office, ushering in, in his words, the “dawn of a new Middle East.”
While offering nothing to Saudi Arabia in terms of progress on the Palestinian question and the two-state solution diplomatic track in exchange for normalisation, Israel and the former US Biden Administration failed to fulfill with the deal.
As Israel’s war on Gaza since October 2023 has expanded to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and most recently Iran, Netanyahu repeatedly proclaimed he was changing the Middle East. His decades old advocacy to attack Iran which was deterred by previous US administrations only to be fulfilled by Trump, has left Arab allies, including Gulf states increasingly wary of unleashed Israeli militarism in the region.
To think that Gulf states are going to “upend many years of hard work and rapprochement with Iran to allow an untested, unclear, American intervention is certainly not supported, publicly and privately,” Al-Saif of Kuwait University, said.
Nor did Gulf states privately support the war on Iran, he continued. Such discourse may have been legible many years ago, but it is certainly not in the calculus of the Arabs and their foreign policies right now.
Prospects of a ceasefire between Israel and Iran announced by Trump on Tuesday have had little impact on the reverberations of the aggression. Observers say that with little indication that the war was targeting Iran’s nuclear programme, Israel’s real motives could range from regime change in the Islamic Republic to Netanyahu’s efforts to avert domestic challenges at home by starting wars and prolonging the genocide in Gaza.
The ”who’s next” state of mind in Arab intellectual circles thus captures Israel’s emergence as a major destabilising force in the region, unlike anything that Iran has instigated since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, observers say.
Alaa al-Hadidi, a former Egyptian Ambassador to Turkey and Russia, is aware of the intensity of Israel’s militarism that sparked the “who’s next” debate.
“I consider it to be chatter,” he said. “But the fact that the Arab intelligentsia is having conversations about it, that it’s a given, even for a moment, is the real problem,” he Al-Ahram Weekly.
As long as Netanyahu seeks apparently endless wars to keep his far-right Government Coalition in office, Israel’s aggression could last for a long time, he said. “No one expected the war that started in October 2023 to last for 20 months, but it has. His next target doesn’t have to be a state. It could be Iraq’s Shiite Hashd al-Sha’abi [Popular Mobilisation Forces] or the Houthis in Yemen. There is a long list,” he added.
But even with American support, the nature of a new Middle East under Israeli dominance has proved to be far more complex, al-Hadidi said. A weak Iran does not necessarily tip the regional balance of power in Israel’s favour.
“The instability that a massively weakened Iran could cause in the region would effectively avert Israeli dominance,” he said.
In Egypt, which has the largest population in the Arab world at 109 million, popular support for Iran’s retaliation to Israel’s aggression in scenes that many have hailed as unprecedented in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict was felt in the sympathetic tone that both state-run and independent media outlets and social media have used to describe Iran.
“Egyptians are in awe of Iran’s retaliation,” said Matar. “This cannot be underestimated.”
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