How the UAE Became Israel's Hidden Partner in the Gulf
From the 1994 F-16 deal to the 2026 battlefield, the hidden story of how two unlikely partners found common cause against Iran.
The recent conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran has stripped away many illusions about the Middle East’s true alignments. When Iranian missiles and drones began raining down on Emirati territory in early 2026, striking Al Dhafra Air Base, Fujairah oil terminals, Jebel Ali port, and Dubai International Airport, the carefully cultivated fiction of UAE neutrality collapsed in flames. By April 2026, Emirati air defenses had engaged 537 ballistic missiles, 26 cruise missiles, and 2,256 drones in the largest Iranian attack campaign ever directed at the Gulf state.
The war did not create the UAE’s alignment with Israel. It merely exposed what had been building in secret for three decades. Former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in a leaked private message circulated on Telegram in the early days of the conflict, put the Iranian view of the UAE with brutal clarity. Writing as a private citizen proposing a strategy his former government colleagues had not solicited, Zarif argued that strikes on the UAE were justified alongside those on American and Israeli targets. “The UAE means Israel,” he wrote.
This accusation did not emerge from nowhere. It was the culmination of a covert relationship that began in Washington hotel rooms in the mid-1990s and metastasized through intelligence sharing, surveillance technology transfers, military coordination, and billions of dollars in trade, all while the Emirates maintained a public posture of Arab solidarity and distance from the Zionist state.
The American Military Footprint in the UAE
To understand why Iran targeted the UAE with such ferocity, one must first understand the depth of the American military presence that Abu Dhabi hosts.
The primary US military facility in the UAE is Al Dhafra Air Base, located about 20 miles south of Abu Dhabi. This jointly operated base with the UAE Air Force hosts the US Air Force’s 380th Air Expeditionary Wing. It supports intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, aerial refueling, and combat operations with aircraft including F-15s, F-22s, F-35s, U-2 spy planes, and KC-10 tankers. Around 5,000 US personnel are stationed there, along with US Army units including Patriot missile batteries..
In Dubai, Jebel Ali Port serves as the largest US Navy port of call in the Middle East. While not a formal military base, it regularly hosts aircraft carriers and naval vessels for logistics and resupply operations. No other major permanent US bases exist in the UAE, with American military presence concentrated on these two sites for regional operations. This infrastructure made the UAE an indispensable node in American power projection across the Persian Gulf. It also made Abu Dhabi a target the moment war with Iran erupted.
The Boycott Years and the Cold Peace
When the UAE federated in 1971, it inherited and codified the Arab League’s economic war on Israel. UAE Federal Decree Law No. 15 of 1972 formalized the country’s participation in the primary, secondary, and tertiary tiers of the Arab boycott. That law remained on the books for nearly five decades, until its repeal on August 29, 2020.
Through the 1970s and 1980s the UAE had no diplomatic ties, no travel links, and no open trade with Israel. The founding ruler Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan remained publicly hostile to Israel until his death in 2004. The think-tank he funded, the Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, platforming speakers and publishing materials blaming the September 11 attacks on “the CIA or Mossad,” reflecting how toxic Israel remained in Emirati public rhetoric even while private channels were quietly opening.
Yet beneath this surface of Arab solidarity, something else was stirring.
The Birth of the Secret Relationship
The best-documented origin story of clandestine UAE-Israel ties traces to a series of Washington D.C. meetings just after the Oslo Accords. Mohammed bin Zayed, then chief of staff of the UAE Armed Forces, wanted to buy American F-16 fighter jets but needed to neutralize Israel’s veto power inside Congress, according to Adam Entous’s June 2018 investigation in The New Yorker, as summarized by the Times of Israel.
Sandra Charles, a former George H.W. Bush administration official working as a consultant for Gulf countries, arranged a 1994 off-the-record meeting between Emirati academic Jamal Al-Suwaidi and Israeli diplomat Jeremy Issacharoff. After that contact, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin dropped Israeli objections to the F-16 sale. The Abu Dhabi government-backed Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research became a conduit for quiet contacts. And from the very beginning, the shared threat perception of Iran, not the Palestinian question, was the organizing logic. A parallel Israeli press account by Yossi Melman in Maariv put the depth of covert ties at “about 20 years,” anchored in arms and intelligence-IT deals “worth billions of dollars.”
The Hidden Infrastructure of Cooperation
What followed over the next two decades was the construction of an entire secret architecture of collaboration. Peer-reviewed research by Kertcher and Schiff published in the Journal of Asian and African Studies in 2025 describes this period as one of “unofficial normalization,” a state-driven and goal-oriented co-engagement that laid the groundwork for the eventual Abraham Accords.
In 2009, Israel unexpectedly supported the UAE over Germany as the host for the headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) in Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City — with the explicit condition that Israel would be permitted to send diplomats and ministers to the UAE under cover of IRENA membership. Israeli ministers and diplomats subsequently traveled to Abu Dhabi through this channel for years while both governments maintained there was no formal relationship. A leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from 2009, released by WikiLeaks, described a “good and personal relationship” between Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed, but noted they “would not do in public what they say behind closed doors.”
In January 2010, the Mossad assassination of Hamas weapons procurer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh at the Al Bustan Rotana hotel in Dubai by a 27-person team temporarily cooled relations. But the chill did not last. A New York Times investigation, as analyzed by Gulf State Analytics, revealed that Israeli officials offered Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince the opportunity to acquire NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware as a “truce” gesture to repair ties damaged by the al-Mabhouh incident, with the UAE developing ties with NSO Group as early as 2013.
By 2015, shared opposition to the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal deepened secret coordination. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s envoy Yitzhak Molcho was tasked with political outreach to Arab states. In 2016, Netanyahu and senior Emiratis met secretly in Cyprus to discuss the Iran deal. The Obama White House was not informed. Senior Emirati diplomat Anwar Gargash later conceded that the relationship with Israel had grown “organically over the last 15 years or so,” an admission that the 2020 deal formalized what already existed.
The Surveillance Connection
Perhaps no dimension of the secret relationship is darker than the surveillance technology transfers that bound Abu Dhabi to Tel Aviv. The UAE under MBZ acquired Israeli Pegasus spyware as early as August 2013 and deployed it to target dissident Ahmed Mansoor, who was arrested in March 2017, sentenced to 10 years in prison in May 2018, and handed an additional 15-year sentence on July 10, 2024 in the UAE84 mass political trial. UAE-operated Pegasus was also placed on the phone of Hanan Elatr, Khashoggi’s fiancée, while she was in UAE custody in April 2018 — months before his murder.
The UAE held two separate Pegasus licenses, one held by the Abu Dhabi federal government and one acquired independently by Dubai’s ruler. The Abu Dhabi-based firm DarkMatter, with close government ties under MBZ, was accused of running Project Raven, recruiting former NSA and Israeli Unit 8200 personnel with $1 million salaries and luxury homes in Cyprus, and building the surveillance app ToTok.
The Abraham Accords and What Came After
On August 13, 2020, MBZ, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu announced a deal that let the world know which Middle Eastern nations were truly aligned with the Judeo-American axis. The Abraham Accords Peace Agreement was signed on the White House South Lawn on September 15, 2020. Mossad director Yossi Cohen shuttled to the UAE on numerous secretive journeys and played a key role in brokering the agreement alongside the Trump administration’s back-channel diplomacy. Israel agreed to “suspend” West Bank annexation in exchange — the word used in the joint statement itself, though Netanyahu said the same night that annexation remained “on the table.” The 1972 UAE boycott law was repealed on August 29, 2020.
Economic intercourse between the two countries exploded immediately. Bilateral trade reached $3.2 billion in 2024, an 11 percent increase over 2023, even as the Gaza war raged, according to the Times of Israel. A bilateral free-trade agreement entered force “in record time” with investments across healthcare, fintech, energy, agritech, and security.
The military cooperation deepened in parallel. In January 2021 the UAE and U.S. signed Letters of Agreement for F-35 Joint Strike Fighters as part of a $23.37 billion arms package. Israel formally dropped its objection after Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Defense Secretary Mark Esper signed a Qualitative Military Edge assurance deal on October 22, 2020.
Joint naval drills in the Red Sea followed, along with reported joint listening posts on the Yemeni islands of Perim and Socotra, according to the European Council on Foreign Relations. Israeli arms makers showcased weapons at IDEX/NAVDEX in Abu Dhabi in February 2025, including systems used in Gaza.
The Accusations Against Mohammed bin Zayed
MBZ has been personally accused across multiple categories of evidence of authorizing and directing a secret partnership with Israel that predated any public acknowledgment. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas publicly called the 2020 Accord “treason,” a charge echoed by former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who called it a “huge mistake,” and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who threatened to withdraw the Turkish ambassador in protest. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said the UAE normalization left “the stain of this infamy” permanently on the Emiratis and accused MBZ of betraying “the world of Islam, Arab nations, regional countries and Palestine itself.”
The War That Revealed Everything
When Israel launched Operation Rising Lion against Iranian nuclear, military, and regime sites on June 13, 2025, followed by U.S. strikes days later, the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned “in the strongest terms Israel’s military targeting of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” After U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites on June 22, the UAE expressed “profound concern” while notably not naming the United States.
But the rhetoric masked the reality. Al Dhafra Air Base, with its 5,000 American personnel, its F-22 Raptors and F-35 Lightning IIs, its U-2 spy planes and Patriot missile batteries, was used throughout the subsequent 2026 campaign and repeatedly struck by Iran’s IRGC. The base that had quietly enabled American power projection for decades now became a direct target of Iranian retaliation.
Four senior Gulf officials told the Times of Israel that Gulf capitals — “particularly the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar” — were privately urging Washington to keep striking Iran. Iranian intelligence sources accused the UAE of playing an active role in the U.S.-Israeli campaign from its inception, alleging Abu Dhabi was the launch point for the U.S. attack on Kharg Island on March 13, 2026.
After initial Iranian hits on Emirati infrastructure, including strikes on Al Dhafra, Jebel Ali port, and Dubai International Airport, MBZ broke with Emirati tradition and publicly called Iran “the enemy,” his first remarks since the war restarted. On April 8, 2026, the UAE demanded that “Iran’s full range of threats — nuclear capabilities, ballistic missiles, drones, military capabilities, and affiliated proxies” be addressed conclusively. A simple ceasefire was “not enough.” By early 2026, the European Council on Foreign Relations observed that Saudi Arabia now frames regional dynamics around a “UAE-Israel axis,” a rivalry so pronounced that Riyadh is deliberately offsetting Emirati activism in Somalia, Sudan, Libya, and Yemen.
During the spring of 2026, the pretense of Arab solidarity lay in ruin alongside the ruined hangars of Al Dhafra, finally revealing the UAE for what it had been for three decades: a subservient client state acting as a frontline enforcer for the Judeo-American axis. The war served as a brutal, clarifying fire, burning away the veneer of sovereignty to expose a regime that has traded its ancestral honor for the role of a permanent collaborator in the global endeavor to make the Middle East safe for Jewish supremacy.
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