Executive Summary The 2026 war between Israel and Iran has triggered a significant reassessment of Israel within Arab strategic thinking. During the Abraham Accords era, many Arab states viewed Israel as a status quo power whose military strength contributed to regional stability and helped contain Iranian ambitions. The war has complicated that perception. Arab governments and strategic analysts have drawn three principal conclusions from the conflict. First, they now regard Iran as an even more serious threat than previously assumed. Second, they increasingly question the reliability of American security guarantees after Washington failed to prevent or effectively respond to Iranian attacks against Gulf infrastructure. Third, they recognize Israel as an autonomous regional power capable of reshaping strategic realities through military action. The first two conclusions rest on sound realist analysis. The third begins from an accurate observation but often leads to a flawed conclusion. Many Arab commentators have interpreted Israel’s growing strategic autonomy as evidence that it has become a revisionist power seeking regional dominance. This interpretation is reinforced by longstanding ideological narratives, including the notion of a “Greater Israel” project and the increasingly common comparison between Israel and Iran as competing non-Arab powers. The reactions of key Arab states illustrate the diversity of this reassessment. Saudi Arabia has adopted a cautious posture of denial, delaying further normalization not because it doubts the credibility of American guarantees and seeks to preserve strategic flexibility. The United Arab Emirates has reached the opposite conclusion, deepening cooperation with Israel because it views Iranian power as the more immediate danger. Egypt’s discourse reflects a different concern: anxiety about declining regional influence and strategic marginalization. This paper argues that Arab strategic thinking today combines legitimate concerns about American reliability with ideological assumptions that distort perceptions of Israel’s role. Distinguishing between these two elements is essential for understanding the future of regional alignment and the prospects for deeper Arab-Israeli cooperation. The Collapse of Pre-War Assumptions The 2026 war has set in motion a reassessment of Israel within Arab strategic thought, and the terms of that reassessment, rather than the sentiment beneath it, are what bear on the future of the regional order. Through the years of the Abraham Accords the Arab states had organized their approach to Israel around the understanding that it was a status quo power whose military strength stabilized the region against the revisionist ambitions of Iran. The war has unsettled that understanding. Across the official, the elite, and the analytical registers of Arab discussion, Israel is now described less as a guarantor of the existing order than as a power engaged in remaking it, and the question of whether Israel is to be classed as a status quo or a revisionist actor has become the organizing question of Arab strategic thinking about the postwar Middle East. The conclusions the Arabs are reaching combine sound realist observation with an inherited ideological distortion, and the two do not point in the same direction. The reassessment proceeds from the strain placed on the premises on which the Accords had rested. The first premise held that Iran was a containable threat, manageable through American pressure and the gradual consolidation of an anti-Iran alignment joining the Gulf monarchies to Israel. The second held that the United States remained a reliable guarantor whose commitments to its Arab partners would hold in a crisis. The third held that Israeli military power was an asset with which alignment was prudent. The war confirmed the first in the most emphatic terms, refuted the second, and left the third standing while transforming the Arab understanding of what alignment with such power entails. The Arab states have reasoned from these three results, and the soundness of their reasoning varies considerably from one to the next. On the first, the Arab judgment is correct and was reached on solid ground. Iran absorbed a decapitation strike that killed its supreme leader and a sustained campaign against its military and industrial base, and it retained the capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz, to strike the territory of the Gulf states directly, and to inflict damage on the global economy that the region had been assured it would never dare to attempt. The Arab states concluded that the Iranian threat was graver and more immediate than the prewar consensus had allowed. The conclusion is accurate, and on its own it ought to have strengthened rather than weakened the logic of partnership with the actor most willing and most able to confront Tehran. That it has not done so is the consequence of what the Arab states concluded from the second and third premises. On the second, the Arab judgment is also sound, and it is the most consequential of the three. Iran’s strikes on the Gulf, on the Emirati installation at Fujairah, on the airport at Kuwait, and on infrastructure in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, occurred while American forces were in the region and the American guarantee was in force, and the United States neither prevented nor answered them. The Gulf states concluded that the guarantee on which their security had nominally rested does not hold under fire, a conclusion that confirmed a doubt accumulating since the 2019 strikes on Saudi oil facilities went unanswered. Because the Gulf states had always treated normalization with Israel as a transaction with Washington, in which alignment was exchanged for American guarantees, advanced weaponry, and in the Saudi case civilian nuclear cooperation, the devaluation of the American guarantee struck directly at the inducement that had made normalization attractive. The reasoning here is realist in the strict sense, and the problem it identifies is acute. On the third, the Arab reasoning begins in sound observation and ends in a conclusion the evidence does not support. The sound observation is that Israel conducted the war on its own strategic timetable and according to its own threat assessment, and that the Arab states absorbed the consequences, the disrupted energy markets, the exposure to Iranian retaliation, the regional turbulence, without any mechanism by which to influence the decisions that produced them. The asymmetry bears on the terms any future alignment could take. From it the Arab strategists have drawn the inference that Israel has become a revisionist power, an actor remaking the regional order on its own account and to its own design, indifferent to the preferences of its neighbors and unconstrained by the equilibrium in which they must live. The perception that Israel now acts as an autonomous regional power pursuing its own strategic design is accurate. The classification of that autonomy as revisionism, carrying the connotation of expansionist menace that the term holds in Arab usage, is the point at which an inherited ideological distortion supplies what the evidence does not. Diverging Gulf Responses: Saudi Hedging and Emirati Alignment The Saudi position rests on the sound portion of this reasoning. The reluctance of Riyadh to advance toward normalization, often attributed to the constraints of a public opinion that in an absolute monarchy explains little, is more accurately a judgment about reliability and timing. Saudi Arabia has concluded that to normalize while the American guarantee stands devalued, while the war remains unresolved, and while the shape of the postwar order remains undefined would mean surrendering its optionality at the moment that optionality commands its highest value, in exchange for an American commitment the war has called into question. The hedging is the rational conduct of a state intent on seeing the settlement take form, and on securing a credible guarantee, before it commits its position, and it expresses a calculation about the United States and about timing rather than a verdict on any Israeli threat. The Emirati position is the contrary conclusion drawn from the same facts. Abu Dhabi has deepened its alignment with Israel on the assessment that the Iranian threat is acute enough to its own circumstances, its geographic exposure, its small national population, and its dependence on stability for an economy built on commerce and finance, that partnership with the most capable adversary of Tehran is worth its costs. Anwar Gargash, the senior adviser to the Emirati president, expressed the calculation when he observed that Israeli influence in the Gulf would grow rather than diminish, and when he registered his disappointment at the weakness of the wider Gulf response to Iran. The divergence between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh turns on threat tolerance and on competing readings of how the postwar order will settle, between two states whose circumstances differ in fundamental respects. Neither has concluded that Israel poses a danger to itself, whatever the idiom in which each conducts its public diplomacy. Egypt and the Return of the “Greater Israel” Narrative Egypt occupies a different position. Having made its peace with Israel in 1979, Egypt is the custodian of an older arrangement, a cold peace founded on mutual deterrence and sustained by American subsidy, which removed Egypt from the cycle of Arab-Israeli wars without binding it to partnership. The war has rendered Egypt strategically marginal. It depends on Gulf states whose positions have diverged, it has suffered a collapse in Suez Canal revenue that the World Bank places at some ten billion dollars as shipping reroutes from the conflict, and it sits beside the Gaza and Lebanese theaters without the means to shape either. The anxiety that surfaces in its managed press, reaching at intervals for the vocabulary of an Israeli threat, is in large part an anxiety about irrelevance. Egypt is watching a regional order recast by the military power of others and finds that it commands neither the resources nor the leverage to determine its own place in the result, and the rhetoric of Israeli expansion supplies a frame in which Egyptian passivity can appear as principled resistance rather than as the incapacity it reflects. The ideological distortion that converts the realist core of the Arab reassessment into a portrait of Israel as an expansionist menace travels under the propaganda construct of a Greater Israel. The slogan is of Arabist and Islamist origins, and its migration into the more serious registers of Arab strategic discussion marks the point at which inherited ideology overtakes reality. The construct holds that the Israeli campaigns of the past two years, undertaken in rapid succession and justified in each case by reference to an immediate threat, amount in the aggregate to a territorial and hegemonic project. The actual campaigns will not bear this reading. They were responses to identifiable dangers, the massacres of October 7, the Hezbollah arsenal built in defiance of Resolution 1701, the advance of the Iranian nuclear program, and the ring of Iranian proxies arrayed to encircle Israel and to hollow out the Arab states from within, and their cumulative effect was to remove from the region the dangers that had threatened the Gulf for two decades. The Greater Israel construct does not describe any of this but supplies a narrative through which the record can be assimilated to a strategically self-serving prior conviction about the nature of the Jewish state. The construct issues in the equation of Israel with Iran, as two non-Arab powers contending to organize the region around their respective primacies and threatening, in equal measure, the autonomy of the Arab states caught between them. The false equation, which has acquired wide currency in Arab strategic writing, rests on a single shared attribute, that both powers act upon the region without Arab consent, and from that attribute it manufactures an equivalence that dissolves every distinction that matters. Iran builds proxies to dismember Arab states from within, exports a revolutionary ideology directed at the overthrow of the standing Arab governments, and closed the Strait of Hormuz against the commerce of the entire region. Israel destroyed those proxies. To class the two as variants of a single phenomenon is to mistake the agent of a threat for the agent of its removal, and the Arab strategic writers that have adopted the equation have done so not because the analysis compels it but because the alternative, an open acknowledgment that the security of the Arab states against Iran was purchased by Israeli arms, is one its governments are not yet prepared to make. The persistence of the ideological frame is overdetermined. It spares Arab governments an admission that would carry domestic and ideological cost, since to credit Israel openly with the defense of Arab security would require setting aside commitments on which their legitimacy has long partly rested. It converts a problem of American reliability, which the Arab states cannot solve by their own means, into a problem of Israeli intention, which licenses the more comfortable posture of principled distance. And it serves the interest of the very power whose threat it obscures, for nothing assists Tehran more than the assimilation of Israel to Iran in the strategic imagination of the Arab world. The frame functions, in this respect, as an Iranian asset operating inside Arab strategic thought, and its consolidation is a gain Tehran has secured at no cost to itself. Conclusion: Separating Realism from Ideology The reassessment will shape Arab conduct whether or not its conclusions are sound, and the task for Western policy makers is to separate the part that is sound from the part that is not. The realist core, the judgment that the American guarantee has failed and that alignment with Israel under present conditions exposes the Arab states to costs they cannot control, identifies a true problem, and it can be addressed only by the restoration of American credibility, by a demonstration that American guarantees hold under fire and that alignment carries protection commensurate with its costs. The ideological shell, the construct of a Greater Israel and the equation of Israel with Iran, identifies no real problem and can be met by no concession, because it is not a response to Israeli conduct but the residue of a prior disposition that antisemitic propaganda has activated and that Arab governments find convenient to retain.