The Churchill Complex. The Rise and Fall of the Special Relationship

Abstract

in Gaza, Egypt and Turkey. Third, set against the instability of the Middle East during and after the Arab Spring, the rise of Hezbollah and its patron Iran, and the latter’s nuclear project, highlighted the importance of the cooperation between Israel and the Gulf Monarchies against some common enemies in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere in the Middle East. Last, American retrenchment away from the Middle East since the Obama administration and the underlying assumption by the Gulf Monarchies’ elite that Israel, especially Netanyahu, could influence Trump’s policies on the Middle East and have a strong influence on the US Congress. When this assumption is taken into account, it is unsurprising that Netanyahu’s address to Congress in March 2015 took an opposing stand against an American president in his own political playground, but it was nevertheless an impressive step for the Gulf Monarchies. Although Netanyahu failed to stop the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the Iranian deal, which was signed four months later, he still scored important points with the Gulf Monarchies’ media and the ruling elite. Separately, each of these pillars is compelling enough to explain the shift in the relations between Israel and the Gulf Monarchies after the 1993 Oslo accords, but it is the intersection of all these changes which makes Jones and Guzansky’s argument so persuasive. One minor flaw would be that while the authors embed a wide range of secondary sources, they also employ four oral interviews and some informal chats they have conducted over the years with Israel’s intelligence elite. Given the nature of covert diplomacy undertaken by the intelligence elite and the lack of access to Israel’s state archival records that document such activities, oral evidence becomes golden nuggets which weigh even more than usual when apprised at a time archival sources are scarce. With this in mind, one would wish to have a bit more of those intelligence elite voices featured more prominently in the book. Even before the announcement of ‘normalization’ of relations between Israel and the UAE on 13 August 2020, which made this book still more topical, it was a highly recommended textbook and a very useful read for a wide range of audiences that encompasses undergraduates, post-graduate students, practitioners and academics.