The Gulf and Israel: the Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend

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THE RUNDOWN | They say the enemy of my enemy is my friend. With the future of Iran's nuclear program unclear in the wake up Trump pulling the United States out of the nuclear deal, Israel and the Arab Gulf states have been pulled closer together.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in September that although the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was a 'bad agreement' it brought Israel closer to the Arab world.

'The agreement with Iran was a bad agreement in every respect except for one – it brought us closer to the Arab world on a scale that we never knew, and one of our goals is that it continues,' Netanyahu said in a speech at the Foreign Ministry.

'I think that another important thing is, of course, the fact that there is a gradual normalization with leading countries in the Arab world,' he added.

Netanyahu has repeatedly said that Sunni states have been making overtures to Israel, spurred by the perceived mutual threat of Iran, the Middle East's predominant Shiite power, which both accuse of fueling regional conflicts by supporting armed proxies in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Bahrain.

An exhaustive report by the New Yorker magazine published in June detailed deep co-operation in recent years between Netanyahu and Gulf powerhouses Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates alongside an increasingly decaying Israel-US relationship in the last years of former president Barack Obama's administration.

The report detailed, among other things, a 2015 meeting in Cyprus between top Emirati and Israeli officials -- suspected to have included Netanyahu himself -- during which the parties coordinated a joint stance on how to tackle Iran in the face of Obama's imminent singing of a nuclear pact with Tehran.

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