A report in the Washington Post the day after the Iran war began suggested that Saudi Arabia and Israel had both lobbied Donald Trump to attack Iran. The Saudis swiftly denied that they had pushed for war.

In the days since, as Iran lashed out in retaliation, Saudi Arabia came under attack. An Iranian drone hit the US embassy in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, and an oil processing plant at Ras Tanura was targeted. Two people were killed on March 8 after a projectile fell on a residential area in Al-Kharj city, near an airbase used by the US military.

My academic and civil society contacts in Saudi Arabia expressed deep scepticism of the idea that Saudi Arabia had pushed the US to bomb Iran. The attacks go against everything that the Saudis have been doing for the past few years, when long-simmering tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia had begun to thaw.

Iran and Saudi Arabia have a long and complex history. Saudi Arabia is an overwhelmingly Arab, Sunni state, while Iran is a mainly Persian, Shia state.

Tensions between the two rivals came to a head in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Iran’s new leader, Ayatolloh Ruhollah Khomeini, began to criticise the Saudis, saying they were unfit to be the custodians of the two holy places of Islam, Mecca and Medina. That antagonised the Saudis, who tried to diminish the credibility of the new Islamic Republic

Iran then began to provide........

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