Israeli generals, ministers and ex-Mossad chiefs were milling around at this week’s Herzliya conference talking national security at a time of unprecedented turmoil across the Middle East. Binyamin Netanyahu, now prime minister for the fourth time, deployed his signature phase about living in a “tough neighbourhood.” But a cursory glance around the Arab world left even the hyperbole-prone Netanyahu, on that point at least, sounding like a master of understatement.

Israel’s strategic position has never been so good, argued one senior official – thanks to the diversions and divisions of the wars in Syria and Iraq, the jihadis of the Islamic State, collapse in Libya and conflict in Yemen. It has benefited too from the Egyptian military’s crushing of the Muslim Brotherhood and the squeeze on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Jordan has come though the Arab spring unreformed and maintains discreet but intimate security links with the Jewish state.

Opposition by the Gulf states to the impending Iranian nuclear deal has added to this sense of comfort. Last week a senior Israeli and a senior Saudi even shared a platform in Washington to articulate their anxieties about the Islamic Republic. Israel has been hawkish – Netanyahu attracting ridicule for the cartoon bomb he displayed at the UN; Arab critics have been more discreet. But both condemn Iranian backing for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Both are alarmed by Iran’s role in Iraq and are seeking compensation from Washington for Barack Obama’s tilt to Tehran. Israel never believed it would benefit from democratic change in the Arab world. In the age of rampaging sectarianism in the region, it stands with the Sunni autocracies.

Read the article in full at the Guardian.