The war against the Ayatollah’s regime is destroying more than launchers, depots, and proxies. It is destroying alibis. For decades, much of the Arab world denounced Israel in public, hid behind American power in private, and pretended Iran could be contained without direct confrontation. That lie is dying.

Tehran has exposed the region’s central truth: the greatest threat was never the Jewish state that built deterrence, but the revolutionary regime that exports coercion, fire, and disorder.

What summits and peace-process theater could not achieve, this war may: expand the Abraham Accords. Not through goodwill, but through fear. That shift is not symbolic. Iran’s aggression is pushing the Gulf toward Israel because Arab states now need deterrence, not rhetoric. The more Iran threatens ports, airports, desalination plants, gas facilities, terminals, and shipping lanes, the less Israel looks like a political inconvenience and a hard-security anchor.

The Gulf has learned the price of exposure. For example, Iran’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz and its permanent suicide drone attacks forced the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to look for Ukrainian anti-drone systems assistance. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia had to lean harder on its East-West pipeline. The lesson is brutal: infrastructure without deterrence is just a target list. These three nations long hid behind old formulas. Now, war is killing them. When missiles fly and energy routes shake, slogans die. Today, they need defenses, intelligence, and force. Ron Dermer’s visit to Riyadh mattered because the issue is no longer a process. It is power.

Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman face political constraints, but danger is stripping them bare. The real Gulf divide is not between states that speak to Israel and states that do not. It is between states that face reality and states still performing for audiences that cannot defend them. Israel has a cutting-edge multi-layer anti-missile shield they lack. Normalization will deepen not through ceremony, but through weapons, intelligence, and joint defense.

Simultaneously, this war can push Israel toward greater military-industrial independence from the United States and a more self-sustaining regional role. The more Gulf states seek Israeli systems, technology, and defense integration, the more the Jewish State can expand production, deepen exports, and reduce the long-term risks of dependence on Washington. A state that arms its neighbors, secures trade corridors, and anchors deterrence does not remain a client. It becomes the arsenal of the new Middle East.

But the Gulf is only the front edge of the shift. The same war pushing Sunni Arab monarchies toward Israel is also exposing the wreckage Iran built in the Levant.

Lebanon offers the clearest case. Beirut long upheld an absurd fiction: a sovereign republic on paper, an Iranian parallel army in reality. Hezbollah calls this resistance. A more honest term is national self-destruction on Tehran’s payroll.

French-backed diplomacy now gains traction because reconstruction, legitimacy, and sovereignty depend on one condition: dismantling Hezbollah from within. Lebanon cannot remain both a state and an Iranian military outpost. It must choose. Recovery requires accepting Israel’s permanence and moving toward recognition and normalization. There is no middle ground between functional statehood and a cedar-wrapped protectorate.

Syria may move more cautiously, but in the same direction. Middle East normalization rarely begins with speeches. It unfolds with deconfliction, intelligence channels, border arrangements, and shared enemies. If Damascus sees Iran weakening and Hezbollah becoming a burden instead of an asset, cooperation with Israel shifts from heresy to statecraft. The old anti-Israel order is not being debated. It is being buried.

The Palestinian Authority also risks being bypassed if it still refuses to adapt. Israel’s permanence as the strongest power from the Mediterranean to the Gulf is no longer a matter for debate. Delay, rejection, and fantasies of Israel’s weakening are no longer a credible strategy. If postwar Gaza really moves under external or international administration, Ramallah may discover too late that history does not wait for professional delusion.

A viable course requires accepting facts: Israel will retain the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley barrier, and key West Bank security zones that no serious Israeli government will cede. The last realistic offramp is an Emirates-style model of localized self-rule in major population centers alongside a joint special Israeli security arrangement. That is not an ideal solution. It is the last alternative to political extinction.

The old Middle East was organized around anti-Israel rhetoric. The next may be organized around anti-Iran necessity. Tehran wanted to bully the region back into old lies. Instead, it is driving Arab states closer to Israel, making Israeli deterrent power more central to their survival, and forging the next Abraham Accords under fire.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)