'Vindicated': Unscathed by war, Gulf states look to capitalise on Israel and Iran's losses

Middle East Eye

4 hours ago

The Gulf states see two losers in the conflict between Israel and Iran, analysts and Arab officials tell Middle East Eye.
Having squeaked through the hostilities with little damage themselves, leaders in the energy-rich Gulf are now in a position to tap their relative advantages in Israel and the Islamic Republic.
Watching the smoke rise from Tehran was a change for leaders in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who just a few years ago were fending off drones and missiles launched at them from Iran's allies, the Houthis in Yemen.
Israeli warplanes made hay of Iran's weak air defences. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals were assassinated, and ballistic missile launchers and arms factories were destroyed. The war culminated in the US bombing Iran's Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities.
And that is the aspect that US and Israeli officials are hammering home about the conflict in their interactions, three Arab officials told MEE.
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But for the first time in a generation, Arab rulers got to see how Israel would fare against a conventional army.
Israeli encroachment stopped
'The Israelis showed strong spirit in supporting their military…They were brave. However, the home front in Israel couldn't take more than two weeks of missile strikes,' one Arab official told MEE, sharing an assessment of the war review in a leading Arab capital.
MEE spoke with officials representing three Arab capitals for this article. All said that in their country's corridors of power, the assessment is that Israel was the first to signal it was ready for a ceasefire after having exhausted its list of military targets and seeing that the Islamic Republic was not facing collapse.
'Benjamin Netanyahu was on a rise until now,' Bader al-Saif, a professor at Kuwait University, told MEE. 'Of course, Israel demonstrated military superiority over Iran's skies. But Iran stopped the Israeli encroachment and hit back. The image of an invincible Israel with flawless air defence is broken.'
'The image of an invincible Israel with flawless air defence is broken'
- Bader al-Saif, Kuwait University
The perception of Israeli vulnerability is important to understand how the US's Arab allies will approach Israel in the future, experts say. It could give them more leverage with Israel, including states that normalised ties with it in 2020 under the Abraham Accords.
The same goes for Tehran, the Arab officials told MEE. They expect Gulf leaders to offer investments to Tehran and are not ruling out high-level visits in the coming months.
In April, Saudi Arabia's defence minister and brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited Tehran.
Despite saying Iran's nuclear programme has been 'blown up to kingdom come', US President Donald Trump says his administration will restart talks with Iran. Iran says its nuclear programme is "badly damaged".
Either way, the Gulf states backed the nuclear talks, and their sway in Tehran could increase even more now, Arab officials told MEE.
'The Gulf gets a hearing in Washington. At the end of the day, that remains the tremendous leverage it has with Iran - calling up Trump in the middle of the night and him answering the phone,' one Arab diplomat told MEE.
The UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia sealed deals for hundreds of billions of dollars with the US when Trump visited the region in May. At the time, they appeared to get concessions. Under pressure from Saudi Arabia, Trump stopped US attacks on the Houthis in Yemen, MEE revealed. He also lifted sanctions on Syria.
'The Israelis were brave...[but] the home front couldn't take more than two weeks of missile strikes'
- Arab official
The Gulf states were unable to stop Israel's attack on Iran. For a moment, it looked dicey.
Although the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have differing priorities, experts say none of them wanted to see the US directly join Israel's offensive.
In the end, all the Arab officials who spoke with MEE characterised the US strike on Iran's nuclear facilities as 'limited" or "minimal".
Iran's retaliatory strike on al-Udeid military base in Qatar was coordinated well in advance with Gulf states, MEE reported.
'This crisis has really elevated the Gulf states' leadership,' Ayham Kamel, Middle East president at Edelman Public and Government Affairs, told MEE.
'They were able to play a behind-the-scenes diplomatic role and avoid any significant attack on their territory. They triangulated their cooperation to be inclusive of key states in the broader region, particularly Iran, Turkey and Israel,' he added.
Sympathy with Iran?
For years, the US tried to recruit Gulf states into an alliance with Israel to counter Iran.
When Hezbollah dominated Lebanon, Bashar al-Assad ruled Syria, and the Houthis were lobbing missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia - that pitch was attractive. It reached its peak before the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, when US Central Command tried to create a 'Middle East Nato' linking Israel to Gulf states and Egypt's air defence.
But when Israel and Iran came to blows, instead of joining in Israel's offensive, the US's Arab allies lobbied Trump to stop the war.
'Right now, even among the ruling classes, there is more sympathy with Iran than there has been in a long time'
- Patrick Theros, former US ambassador
Israel and Iran exchanged direct fire twice in 2024. The US did receive some Saudi and Qatari support defending Israel last year. But Iran choreographed its missile barrages then.
This round was the first bare-knuckled battle between them, with Israeli jets pounding Tehran and Iran hammering major cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia all condemned Israel's attack on Iran. Qatar has historically maintained closer ties to the Islamic Republic, in part because they share the world's largest natural gas field.
But this conflict saw the UAE and Saudi Arabia publicly and privately press for a ceasefire, two Arab officials told MEE.
'US and Israeli officials may not have anticipated how serious the Gulf is about de-escalation. They know now. Saudi Arabia is on the top of that list,' Patrick Theros, a former US diplomat who served as ambassador to Qatar and a high-ranking official in the UAE, told MEE.
'Right now, even among the ruling classes, including Saudi Arabia, there is more sympathy with Iran than there has been in a long time,' Theros said.
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Not so long ago, Israel may have been able to convince Saudi Arabia to join in its attack. In 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman compared Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Hitler and said he was trying to 'conquer the world'.
Then, Saudi Arabia became bogged down fighting Iran's allies in Yemen. In 2019, two major Saudi oil facilities were attacked. At the time, President Trump shrugged off the assault, which emanated from Iran. In the following years, Saudi Arabia moved to patch up ties with the Islamic Republic.
In 2023, China brokered a rapprochement between Riyadh and Tehran. It worked for everyone during the war. The Strait of Hormuz, which China relies on for its oil shipments, remained open. Iranian oil exports soared despite Israeli attacks, and Saudi Arabia's oil installations were safe again.
'The Gulf isn't where it was at in 2019,' Saif, at Kuwait University, told MEE. "We [the Gulf] feel vindicated that we did not join the war.'
Gaza ceasefire and normalisation
The Gulf states' main focus is reducing their economies' dependence on oil revenue. Saudi Arabia has pushed through liberalising social reforms and is pursuing an ambitious Vision 2030 agenda that includes luxury Red Sea tourism. Both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi want to build AI data centres.
One overlooked element of the change, Theros told MEE, is that the sectarian tensions that feed into the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran in spheres of influence like Yemen and Syria have ebbed, as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pursues modernising social reforms.
'Now that Mohammed Bin Salman has de-Wahhabised Saudi Arabia, the rhetoric out of the clerics about the Shia has been curbed,' Theros said. 'That makes it harder for Israel to bring Saudi Arabia along.'
If anything, public opinion in the Gulf has turned more negative towards Israel over its war on Gaza, where over 56,000 Palestinians have been killed. A poll released by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy in the first months of the Gaza war revealed 96 percent of people in Saudi Arabia oppose normalisation with Israel.
Trump signalled on Wednesday that he wants to build out his fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran to Gaza, where he said 'great progress is being made' to end the war.
Ending that conflict is a prerequisite to any talk of normalising ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Under Saudi pressure, Trump refrained from lobbying the kingdom to cut a deal with Israel during his visit to Riyadh in May, but told Saudi Arabia, 'you'll be greatly honouring me' by doing so.
Saudi Arabia says it needs to see Israel take irreversible steps towards a Palestinian state to normalise relations. Diplomats say that after the Israel-Iran war, the price Saudi Arabia will demand is going up.
'Saudi Arabia has a very good sense of where the Arab street is going,' one Arab official told MEE. 'It will insist on something serious.'