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Tom Hussain

For months, the United Arab Emirates had denied Iran’s accusations that it was in league with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or hosting his country’s military personnel.
Then, US ambassador to Israel Mick Huckabee handed Tehran a propaganda gift and Abu Dhabi a diplomatic headache all in a single sentence.
Israel sent Iron Dome air defence batteries to the UAE amid the ongoing war on Iran to help protect it from Iranian attacks, Huckabee confirmed at a conference in Tel Aviv on May 12.
A day later, Netanyahu made the UAE’s headache even worse.
On May 13, his office announced that the Israeli prime minister had secretly flown to the Gulf state in late March – during active bombing campaigns on Iran – to meet UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
“This visit has led to a historic breakthrough in relations between Israel and the UAE,” the statement declared.

The UAE’s foreign ministry responded by flatly denying any such visit had taken place, though its statement had the strange quality of treating an announcement by a sitting head of government as though it were an unverified claim. Still, the damage was done.
“The fact that there have been many exchanges between the Zionist regime and some countries in the region is not hidden from our view,” Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said at a press conference on Monday.
“The countries of the region, including the UAE, should learn from what happened in the last two or three months,” he warned.
The UAE normalised relations with Israel in 2020, alongside fellow Gulf monarchy Bahrain, under the US-brokered Abraham Accords.
It has since sought to extract the strategic and technological benefits of this partnership while insulating itself from the political costs, which have only grown since Iran began launching missile and drone salvoes in retaliation for the US-Israeli military campaign that began on February 28.

Tehran has targeted the UAE more than any other country in the region, justifying its strikes, at least partially, on the grounds that the Gulf state was facilitating Israeli military operations.
The public recent disclosures “exposed relationships that Abu Dhabi would prefer to manage more discreetly”, said Middle East researcher Guy Burton, adding that among ordinary Emiratis, “there is little genuine public enthusiasm for close ties with Israel”.
Yet the country’s leadership “appears to calculate that the strategic, technological and economic benefits outweigh the reputational damage”, said Burton, who is a visiting fellow with the sectarianism, proxies and de-sectarianism project at Lancaster University in the UK.
He said he did not think Abu Dhabi would reverse course “unless those reputational costs begin translating into concrete political or economic consequences”.
Public distance, private ties
Dania Thafer, executive director of the Washington-based Gulf International Forum, said the deepening of UAE-Israel defence ties “reflect concerns in Abu Dhabi that extend far beyond reputation or regional public opinion”.
At stake, from the Emirati perspective, were “core questions” of national security, critical infrastructure protection and the long-term viability of the economic transformation projects that had “become central to the UAE’s national identity”, she said.
Yet the UAE “finds itself trapped in a conflict it neither sought nor supported, having quietly opposed the initiation of the war by both Israel and the US”, Thafer said.
At the same time, it was “being compelled to deepen security coordination with both partners”, while seeking additional deterrence through new partnerships with India and others in Europe and Asia.


Paradoxically, Burton said that the Emiratis’ public rejection of Netanyahu’s claims “may actually indicate that cooperation is deeper than either side wishes to openly acknowledge”.
“Public distancing and private coordination are not contradictory in Middle Eastern diplomacy,” he said. “They often occur simultaneously.”
The UAE’s leadership “has certainly accepted serious political risks” through its normalisation of ties with Israel, said Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of the Washington-based risk consultancy Gulf State Analytics. “Particularly within the context of the Gaza genocide.”
But he believes that the Emiratis view the relationship as “too valuable to walk away from”, noting that a key lesson drawn from the thousands of drones and missiles launched by Iran since late February was that “while many fellow Arab-Islamic countries failed to come to the UAE’s defence, Israel was there for it”.
Divergent Gulf priorities
To understand why the UAE occupies this exposed position, it is helpful to grasp the fault lines running through Gulf Arab politics.
Of the three dominant Gulf powers, Saudi Arabia and Qatar identify Israel as the primary regional threat, while the UAE views Iran as its primary adversary – and Israel as a useful diplomatic partner.
Accordingly, a regional coordination framework comprising Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan has counselled restraint towards Iran, much to the chagrin of the more hawkish UAE.
It is against this backdrop that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s May 15 stopover in Abu Dhabi – and the wide-ranging UAE-India defence cooperation agreement signed there – has stoked speculation about an emergent trilateral alignment between the UAE, India and Israel.

Analysts are quick to question the veracity of such unproven claims, but they are given oxygen by Netanyahu himself, who told his cabinet mere days before the Iran war began that Israel was forming a “hexagon of alliances” with India, Greece and other unnamed partners.
“The intention,” he said, “is to create an axis of nations that see eye to eye on the reality, challenges and goals against the radical axes, both the radical Shia axis, which we have struck very hard, and the emerging radical Sunni axis.”
Such a declaration sits awkwardly alongside the avowedly multi-aligned foreign policies of India and the UAE, and analysts say it reveals more about Israel’s ambitions than about the actual posture of its putative partners.
“It is necessary to recognise that Israel is determined to make the UAE” and other Gulf monarchies dependent on it for security, Cafiero said.
“This dynamic is an important dimension of ‘Greater Israel’, which is about more than territorial expansion,” he said, referring to a Zionist ideology advocating for an enlarged Jewish state.

Thafer said India had numerous motivations for closer ties with the UAE, from energy security amid rising oil prices as a result of the war, to concerns over maritime insecurity in the Gulf.
But its interest was also “shaped by the growing role of Pakistan in Gulf security affairs and in the broader confrontation involving Iran, Israel and the US”, she said, adding that engagement aimed to ensure “India retains influence in a region where Pakistan could otherwise emerge as a more dominant security partner for Gulf states confronting sustained Iranian pressure”.
Netanyahu’s sectarian characterisation of regional geopolitics has found some traction among Indian commentators because of the casting of Pakistan and a putative “Islamic Nato” as common adversaries of India and Israel.
Islamabad, for its part, has long drawn parallels between the Modi administration’s treatment of Indian Muslims and other minorities and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. And Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Mohammed Asif has repeatedly alleged a conspiracy by India and Israel to encircle his country during the Iran war.


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Israel thrusts reluctant UAE into open over defence ties

Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets in October 2023 during the opening days of the Gaza war. Photo: Reuters

Tel Aviv City Hall is lit up with the UAE flag after the kingdom and Israel announced they would be establishing full diplomatic ties on August 13, 2020. Photo: AP

A presenter from Iran State TV fires a gun at a UAE flag in a studio in Tehran on May 15. Photo: WANA/Reuters

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference in Jerusalem on February 26. Photo: AFP

UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan meets Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Abu Dhabi on May 15. Photo: UAE Presidential Court/Reuters

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Israelis protest against the war with Iran and Netanyahu’s government in Tel Aviv on May 2. Photo: AFP

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks in Jerusalem during a press conference amid the US-Israel war on Iran in March. Photo: Reuters

An Israeli activist wearing a mask of Benjamin Netanyahu and holding US dollars protests against the government and the ongoing war with Iran in Tel Aviv on May 2. Photo: AFP

A woman takes cover along a highway as air raid sirens warn of an incoming Iranian missile strike in Tel Aviv on April 7. Photo: AP

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid (right) and former prime minister Naftali Bennett announce on April 26 that they will run together at the election. Photo: JINI/Xinhua

Israeli armoured vehicles move along a track on the Lebanese side of the border, as seen from the Upper Galilee in northern Israel on Wednesday. Photo: EPA

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Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during an event in Jerusalem in April. Photo: Reuters

UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed in 2023. Photo: Kremlin via dpa

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Rockets are intercepted by the Iron Dome over the Upper Galilee region in northern Israel, on April 11. A US news outlet says Israel sent an Iron Dome battery to the UAE early in the Iran war. Photo: AFP

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Disclosures about Iron Dome batteries and secret meetings have exposed ties analysts say the UAE would rather handle ‘more discreetly’


Disclosures about Iron Dome batteries and secret meetings have exposed ties analysts say the UAE would rather handle ‘more discreetly’.


Israel thrusts reluctant UAE into open over defence ties

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Disclosures about Iron Dome batteries and secret meetings have exposed ties analysts say the UAE would rather handle ‘more discreetly’

Disclosures about Iron Dome batteries and secret meetings have exposed ties analysts say the UAE would rather handle ‘more discreetly’