Israeli airstrike in Qatar shattered assumptions of immunity and marked the first direct violation of the sovereignty of a Gulf Arab nation, raising questions over the durability of the Abraham Accords or normalization of ties between Arab states and Israel, and deepening fears of escalation
On September 9, 2025, an Israeli airstrike targeted Palestinian Hamas political leaders in a residential area in Qatar’s capital, Doha, and killed six people. The attack destroyed a building but apparently failed to kill the leaders. It was the first serious Israeli violation of the sovereignty of any of the Arab states forming the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). An act of international aggression defined under the United Nations Charter, it marked a major escalation in Israel’s forever wars.
The attack ended the assumption that Israel would not target a US ally and mounted concerns over open-ended Israeli assaults across the region, apart from its brutal campaign in Gaza, which has mostly been described as genocidal. Israel has destroyed parts of southern Lebanon, bombed Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. It killed the prime minister and cabinet members of Yemen’s Houthi-controlled government.
When the US joined Israel in attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, it triggered a strike on the largest American air base in the region in Qatar and the forward headquarters of US Central Command on June 23, 2025. Missile debris fell in Doha, and the night sky was lit up with interceptor fire as a state actor attacked a Gulf capital for the first time since Iraq fired missiles during the Gulf War that followed the 1991 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Abraham Accords at Risk
The GCC countries, which have remained cohesive in the face of a common threat, rallied around Qatar in the aftermath of the Israeli strike. The Israeli aggression threatens to derail their focus on economic diversification away from hydrocarbons and investments in sectors such as tourism, finance, technology, and clean energy. Saudi Vision 2030 and the UAE’s Vision 2031 aim to attract foreign investment, bolster the private sector, and cultivate a skilled workforce for a sustainable economy.
There has been much dismay in Saudi Arabia, which was once widely expected to follow other Arab states in normalizing ties with Israel, over the endless Israeli wars. Saudis have repeatedly condemned Israel’s destabilizing violations of international norms. UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s foreign policy advisor, Anwar Gargash, condemned the Israeli attack on Qatar as treacherous, amid questions about the durability of the Abraham Accords or normalization of ties between Arab states and Israel.
The Israeli airstrike in Qatar has been described as the ‘gravest crisis for Israel’s budding relations in the Gulf’. It will have a major impact on the normalisation and the close relationship of the US, Israel’s main backer and a source of its impunity, and the GCC states. Defense partnerships between GCC states and the US have underpinned regional security.
GCC’s Shifting Ties with Israel
The GCC countries have not been involved militarily in the Arab-Israeli conflict since a Saudi contingent fought in the 1948 war with Israel. They participated in the 1973-74 oil embargo to pressure the West to force Israel to withdraw from Egyptian and Syrian territory. Qatar and Oman hosted Israeli trade offices, and Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin (1994) and Shimon Peres (1996) visited these countries. This coincided with the dilution of the full Arab boycott of Israel until the 1990s, involving companies and third countries doing business with Israelis. The GCC nations hosted meetings as part of the Oslo peace process (1993) between Israel and Palestine.
Israeli assaults in the occupied Palestinian territories forced the closure of Israel’s trade missions in Oman in 2000 and Qatar nine years later. The UAE froze normalisation efforts when a 27-strong Israeli security service Mossad death squad traveled in and out of Dubai on forged European and Australian passports to kill Hamas’s Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in January 2010.
The 2010-11 wave of pro-democracy protests, which toppled Tunisian and Egyptian regimes, led to a thaw with Israel, culminating in the 2020 Abraham Accords, with the convergence of shared interests. Bahrain and the UAE’s normalisation of ties with Israel represented the first such Arab recognition since Jordan recognised it in 1994.
Abraham Accords And Jewish Life in the Gulf
In a Friday sermon, days before the pacts were signed, an imam at Islam’s holiest shrine in Mecca spoke about Prophet Muhammad’s kindness to a Jewish neighbour, as part of what was believed to be the groundwork for Saudi Arabia to follow suit. The seeming thaw was a culmination of years of backchannel diplomacy that Arab leaders had been hinting at. In 2018, de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman backed the Israelis’ right to have their own land.’ Bahraini foreign minister Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, a year later, called Israel a part of the region’s heritage.
Israel and Saudi Arabia developed informal connections as the US worked on an agreement between the two countries under the Abraham Accords. Jewish communities in the Gulf states were emerging from the shadow of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They have adopted a more public profile. Kosher food is now available for them, and there have been open celebrations of their holidays.
A synagogue was renovated in Bahrain’s Manama following the signing of the Abraham Accords. Nancy Khedouri, a Jew, became a member of Bahrain’s parliament in 2018. Houda Nonoo, a Jewish woman who was named Bahrain’s ambassador to Washington in 2008, has been among the founders of an association of Jews working for greater acceptance of Jewish life in the GCC nations. Israeli tourists and businesspeople in the GCC led to a regional industry of Jewish celebrations.
Fracturing of Arab-Jewish Ties
Bahrain has a rooted Jewish community, which arrived in the country in the late 19th century for trade from Iraq. The UAE has the GCC’s largest Jewish community. Jews thrived for centuries in the region until the settler-colonial Zionist movement created a state in Palestine with the expulsion of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. The Israeli Law of Return entitles all non-Israeli Jews and converts to Judaism to settle and receive Israeli citizenship. Peaceful means were not necessarily used for Jewish emigration.
The 1950-1951 bombings targeting Jews in Baghdad have been linked to the clandestine Zionist activities to force around 110,000 of an estimated 135,000 Iraqi Jews to emigrate to Israel. Former Oxford professor Avi Shlaim. whose book Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew (Simon & Schuster, 2023) uncovers what he calls ‘undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks’, argues that the Zionists dealt a mortal blow to the position of Jews in Arab lands.
The bombings were the last straw after Israel’s creation turned them into a suspected fifth column from accepted compatriots. The Zionist underground is suspected of having deliberately inflamed anti-Semitism in Iraq. Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians over the subsequent decades further damaged centuries-old cordial Jewish-Muslim ties dating back to Islam’s rise.
Celebrated for their ancient heritage and rich culture, Arab Jews remained well-integrated into a tolerant and multicultural Muslim-majority Iraq. Iraq’s Jews were privileged, prosperous, and distinguished sections of society, tracing their presence in Babylon over 2,500 years, when the 1950-51 bombings uprooted them. Iraqi Jews ran religious, educational, and social welfare institutions. Prominent Jewish families from Baghdad established businesses in Britain, India, and the Far East.
Shlaim has blamed the Eurocentric Zionist movement and Israel for intensifying divisions between Arabs and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, Hebrew and Arabic, and Judaism and Islam. Shlaim accuses them of actively working to erase an ancient heritage of pluralism, religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and coexistence represented by the city of his birth (Baghdad). Shlaim has blamed Zionism for discouraging them from seeing each other as fellow human beings. He calls Israel an apartheid and fortress state with a siege mentality, attributing genocidal intentions to its neighbours.
Despite a seemingly hopeless situation, focus on historical Jewish experiences under Muslim rule, including the refuge and respect Jews found in the Ottoman Empire, in sharp contrast with their persecution in Europe, and the thriving of Jews in Muslim societies for centuries before the rise of Zionism and tensions over Palestine disrupted the historical harmony, could help improve Jewish-Muslim relations and aid in the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict resolution.
