TEL AVIV — In the skies east of Israel, a few minutes before 2 a.m., four Israeli pilots scanned the horizon for two unmanned aerial vehicles bound for Israel from Iran. Suddenly the pilots saw them — two triangular drones, each about eight meters wide, hurtling west at about 1,200 miles per hour.
“Positive identification,” one pilot radioed his commanders. “I’ll shoot.”
Seconds later, both Iranian drones had crashed to the ground, shot down by two Israeli fighter jets at two locations over Arab territory.
The secret episode, which took place on March 15, 2021, was one of the first successful examples of a fledgling military relationship between Israel, certain Arab partners and the United States – a project President Biden launched during his visit the Middle East this week†
The episode, confirmed by two senior Israeli officials and recordings of the pilots’ communications, illustrated how Israel, once isolated in the Middle East because of Arab solidarity with the Palestinians, is now increasingly cooperating with various Arab armies. It also illustrated how shared fears for Iran are now dispelling concerns in some Arab governments about its failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Over the past decade, Iran and its proxies in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have increasingly used drones to attack Israel, US forces in the Middle East and Sunni Arab states, including against oil facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia this year.
While Iran’s biggest long-term threat is… nuclear programTehran’s opponents are concerned about the drones because their small size and relatively slow speed make them difficult to detect and intercept – and because they are already doing damage.
announced last month by Israel, the new initiative, the Middle East Air Defense Project, is an effort to bolster the region’s defenses against drones. The idea is to enable the participants to immediately alert each other to incoming drone strikes, through the coordination of the US Central Command. Israel has already warned some Arab countries of an imminent drone strike, a senior Israeli defense official said.
Israel hopes that in the future the participants will be connected to the same radar system, eliminating the need to send each other warnings. “Everyone will see the same feed on their screen,” Brig said. Gene. Ran Kochav, Israeli Army chief spokesman and former commander of Israel’s air defense.
Part of the coordination is already taking place. In the March episode, Israel was also able to successfully request permission from a nearby Arab country to enter its airspace and intercept the drones before crossing Israel’s borders.
Israeli officials refused to identify that country, lest it embarrass itself by allowing another air force to operate over its sovereign territory. But it’s probably Jordan, the only friendly country on Israel’s eastern border.
This secrecy shows that efforts to create a more formal network are still at a preliminary stage. Israeli officials hope Mr. Biden will make his own formal announcement about the project during his visit this week. But Arab participants are hesitant to confirm their commitment, let alone advertise their participation in a full-fledged military alliance with Israel.
“There is a deal of cooperation, and it is here to stay,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a Dubai-based expert on Gulf politics and diplomacy. “But it is far from becoming a unified system.”
Bilateral military coordination between Israel, Bahrain and the UAE — and possibly even Saudi Arabia, which currently has no formal ties to Israel — is feasible, Abdulla said.
But “I don’t think anyone is in the mood for a regional alliance,” he added.
Nevertheless, the fact that such a concept is even discussed highlights the dividend derived from three diplomatic deals that Israel has sealed with Bahrain, Morocco and the UAE in 2020, with the support of the Trump administration.
Motivated in part by mutual concerns about Iran, the deals enabled those countries to clearly more trade and investment† They also encouraged Egypt and Jordan — which entered into relations with Israel decades ago but never cemented it properly — to work more closely with their neighbors.
But the most striking result is the growing military relationship between the new partners.
Israel’s defense ministry has signed public agreements with its Bahraini and Moroccan counterparts, making it easier for the three countries to coordinate and share military equipment.
In a move that would have been unthinkable three years ago, Israel has stationed a military liaison in Bahrain as part of a separate regional anti-piracy initiative. The Israeli and Bahraini navies also trained together in the Persian Gulf in November, along with the US navy.
The Emirati Air Force chief also attended an Israeli military exercise in October, and Israeli officials hope the Emirates will eventually participate in an annual air exercise in Israel, along with several Western air forces.
Of these growing military ties, officials and analysts say the anti-drone project is the most concrete yet driven by a real desire for better coordination.
While Israel’s new Arab partners don’t see Iran’s nuclear program as a threat as much as Israel does, they are all concerned about drones, said Major General Amos Yadlin, a retired senior air force officer and former head of Israel’s military intelligence. †
“A NATO in the Middle East makes little sense,” said General Yadlin. “We don’t think Israelis are going to fight the Saudis in Yemen, and we don’t think the Emirates will come and fight Israel in Gaza.”
But a joint drone defense system, with limited scope, “represents the regional needs and requirements of all parties,” he added.
Iran started using drones about a decade ago, investing huge sums of money to design and build its own models rather than buying them from China, said Alon Unger, a former drone operator for the Israeli Air Force who conducts an annual drone survey. convention in Israel. †
The drones are of great use to Iran. They can carry weapons to inflict direct damage, they can be used for surveillance, and they can also carry small loads, such as rifles and explosives, to Iranian proxies that would otherwise be out of Tehran’s reach.
In 2019, an Iranian drone launched from Syria, an Iranian ally, was shot down over Israel just north of the occupied West Bank. Investigators later found it carrying a shipment of explosives that Israeli officials say were intended for Palestinian militants in the West Bank.
Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, this month fired three drones at Israeli gas platforms in a Lebanon-claimed area of the eastern Mediterranean. Israeli officials said the drones, which were quickly intercepted, carried no weapons of any kind and that they were launched only to show Hezbollah’s ability to reach a point it considers strategic and sensitive.
The Iranian drones present Israel with a new technological challenge. The Israeli Defense Institute has advanced air defense mechanisms that can intercept missiles fired by enemies in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Israel also has a complex system of sensors that can detect tunnels that Palestinian and Lebanese militants sometimes dig under Israel’s borders.
But that defense is relatively inefficient against the drone.
A drone is “a relatively slow aircraft with a low radar profile,” Mr Unger said. “It is difficult to identify its launch or its course, or to shoot them down with high-speed fighter jets, which were built to face enemy fighters in aerial combat.”
An Iranian drone attack on Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, in September 2019raised a sense of alarm about the growing drone threat — not just in Israel, but in the United States and throughout the Sunni Arab world.
That helped US and Israeli efforts to establish a regional cooperation program against drones. Contact and cooperation already existed on a small, clandestine level between Israel and some Arab countries, officials say. But the sealing of the historic diplomatic overtures in 2020, collectively known as the Abraham chordsdeepened military relations that were gradually made public in recent months.
These stronger ties have already enabled the Israeli Air Force to train in the skies over friendly Arab countries, two Israeli officials said — a groundbreaking development for a force previously confined to Israel’s overcrowded and narrow airspace.
And in the long run, Israel hopes the benefits of such an alliance will make its Arab partners more open about their involvement.
“Need is the mother of invention,” said General Yadlin. And, he added, “The operational need of all partners is to have better defenses.”
Ronen Bergman reported from Tel Aviv, and Patrick Kingsley from Jerusalem.