secret element of the Red Sea Conspiracy: that “representatives of leading Arab countries … are sitting down together with Israel in order to advance the common interest of war with Iran.”191 NBC News reports that Netanyahu’s “provocative” and “strident call for Israeli-Arab action against the government in Tehran”—a call translated as “war with Iran” by his own office—“startle[s] Iranians and even the White House” with its directness.192 NBC goes even further, however, acknowledging that the statement advances an existing perception the world over: “that Israel, its Gulf Arab neighbors, and the United States are interested in using military action to topple the government of Iran.”193 Another comment by Netanyahu in the same venue (an international conference in Warsaw) is equally indelicate, as it sees the Israeli prime minister acknowledging that “representatives of leading Arab countries” and Israel have participated in “many” prior meetings that he would describe as “secret summits.”194 When and where these “secret summits” occurred—and if they involved Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, and the United States, as many suspect—Netanyahu does not say, though NBC notes that “communal concerns about Iran have enabled nascent ties between Israel and Sunni Arab states that had been unimaginable for generations. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain that do not recognize Israel or maintain any formal diplomatic relations have started acknowledging more and more openly their behind-the-scenes ties to Israel and their quiet cooperation on security issues, most notably Iran. President Donald Trump has shared Netanyahu’s views about the dangers of Iran.”195 The Associated Press reports that “Saudi Arabia, long rumored to have backdoor ties to Israel, lifted a decades-long ban on the use of its airspace for flights to Israel last spring. The leaders of the small Gulf nation of Bahrain have also expressed willingness to normalize relations. Gulf Arab states have given less voice to their traditional antipathy toward Israel as they have grown increasingly fearful of Iran over its involvement in various regional conflicts and its support for various armed groups. Getting closer to Israel also helps them to curry favor in Washington.”196
Asked about Netanyahu’s comments on a war with Iran, and subsequent claims by the prime minister’s office that it mistranslated its own statement, Sen. Angus King (I-ME), a member of three Senate committees relevant to Netanyahu’s remarks—the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Committee on Armed Services, and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—will tell MSNBC, “He [Netanyahu] knew what he meant.”197 Indeed, as the Associated Press notes, the conference in Poland “offers Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an opportunity to flaunt in public what he has long boasted about happening behind the scenes—his country’s improved relations with some Gulf Arab nations … [He] has repeatedly stated that Israel has clandestinely developed good relations with several Arab states.”198 Meanwhile, Danny Danon, Israel’s United Nations ambassador, goes further than his boss in Warsaw, bragging that “they [Gulf Arab nations] are already cooperating with us. We ask them to recognize us and not to be ashamed for using our technology or our defense systems.”199 One of the instances of cooperation to which Danon may refer is a fall 2018 “security conference” in the United Arab Emirates attended by two of Netanyahu’s ministers—a level of Israeli-UAE engagement that once would have been unthinkable.200 Yoel Guzansky, a senior researcher at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, tells the Associated Press that “covert meetings [between Israel and Arab nations] already exist, and [their] ‘under-the-table’ relations are the world’s worst-kept secret.”201
With one of Trump’s top international allies having conceded that he is working with Trump’s other allies—and has been for some time—to plunge America and countless other nations into a dangerous regional or even global military conflict with Iran, Western media react with predictable shock. “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed his desire to go to war with Iran,” Newsweek reports, noting that Netanyahu plans to “push the initiative forward” by meeting directly with “dozens of foreign envoys, including those from the Arab world.”202 While acknowledging that Netanyahu somewhat weakly attempted to walk back his comments—amending “war with Iran” to “combating Iran”—and that no high-level contacts between Israel and Iran’s chief enemy in the region, Saudi Arabia, have been “publicly revealed,” Newsweek nevertheless notes that “Saudi Arabia has led the charge against Iran, and Israel has often appealed to the kingdom to join forces against the Islamic Republic.”203
Netanyahu’s February 2019 comments are, indeed, only the public blossoming of a story long privately in