When the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, the ensuing weeks-long war unleashed a massive barrage of missiles and drones on the United Arab Emirates, sparking a security crisis for which the oil-rich Gulf country was unprepared.
Only Israel was hit harder than the UAE, but Israel has an extensive, well-established defense system that includes bomb shelters and the missile interceptor known as Iron Dome. The UAE had neither of these. It was seeing its position as a safe haven, a Singapore of the Middle East, threatened by a conflict that it had neither sought nor overtly supported.
And yet, according to seemingly counterintuitive observations delivered in a recent interview with UAE presidential adviser Anwar Gargash, Iran’s attack on the Gulf states will “actually strengthen the Israeli role in the Gulf, [and] not diminish it.”
A retired U.S. State Department official who specialized in Middle Eastern affairs offered a succinct explanation for the UAE’s position. The Emiratis, he said, have “a very old-fashioned mentality.” He continued: “When they are in trouble, they look very carefully at who shows up. They saw that Israel really showed up.”
According to an Axios report by Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, Israel dispatched Iron Dome missile interceptors to the UAE, along with the military personnel to operate them. This was the first time Israel had sent the Iron Dome to another country. Haaretz journalist Gili Cohen added, during the newspaper’s May 4 Hebrew podcast episode, that Israel had also sent officers from the Home Front Command to help the UAE set up a warning system that would alert civilians of incoming rockets and direct them to the nearest possible shelter.
The point for the Emirati rulers was not that the reason their country needed Israel’s help was to protect itself from a war Israel had started, but rather that the Iranians, with whom they had diplomatic relations, unleashed a massive barrage of rockets, missiles and drones on their heads for no rational reason.
A well-connected Emirati businessperson agreed that Israel’s decision to attack Iran was “a really poor idea.” But, he explained, the Iranians, by bombing Dubai and Abu Dhabi in an implicit rebuke of the UAE for its good relationship with Israel and the U.S., seemed to be saying that “if [Iran] goes down, it’s all over for the region. Chaos.” The UAE abhors chaos.
Like Israel, which has historically described itself as “a villa in the jungle,” the UAE, explained the Emirati businessperson, sees itself as a civilized place that values prosperity, stability and secularism, and which is isolated in a region rife with Islamism, broken ideologies, poorly functioning states and unreliable allies.
“The UAE is very transactional,” said the Emirati businessperson, who described his country’s relationship with Israel as “totally pragmatic, with no love.” His government, he said, “knew exactly who [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu was,” understood “his type” and didn’t imagine that Netanyahu loved them any more than they loved him. But they knew how to work with him for mutual benefit.
“The UAE is all-in on its relationship with Israel because it serves them and their medium- to long-term vision of this region,” he said. He added: “We have nothing in common with [the rest of the Middle East] in terms of values and systems. We are pragmatic, and they’re not. So it’s a difficult neighborhood to be in.” He continued: “From the UAE’s perspective, there is nobody else that has the willingness to live in a post-American world in the region. In that respect, we share Israel’s values.”
The UAE is heavily invested in its relationship with the U.S., but does not consider it a reliable ally. This feeling about the U.S. began not with President Donald Trump, who is notoriously inconsistent, but with the Obama administration, first in its response to the Arab Spring and then in its taking the lead on negotiating a multilateral nuclear deal with the Iranians.
From the UAE’s perspective, President Barack Obama “abandoned” Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, “who was a faithful servant for more than 30 years,” while the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the Iran nuclear deal, was “a reward to a rogue state.” The Israeli government was a staunch ally of Mubarak (at one point during the 2011 uprising, an Israeli legislator claimed he had offered the Egyptian leader shelter in Israel), and Netanyahu was vociferously opposed to the JCPOA.
Where the UAE does not share Israel’s values, said the Emirati businessperson, was in what he described as their diverging “end goals.” The Emiratis, he explained, “like stability. But Israel thrives on instability and has a high tolerance for continuous low-grade conflict.”
For now, though, while they might not be perfectly aligned, the two countries are, pragmatically and transactionally, happy bedfellows. And as another expert — who, like all the people interviewed for this article, requested that their remarks be published without attribution — said: “The relationship between the two countries will probably deepen in the coming years.”