From my balcony in the Judean mountains, I can see the lights of Jordan on a clear night and the skyline of Amman at sunrise. On other nights, I simply look south and east and know that the same Iranian missiles and drones from the Houthis in Yemen threatening my children and grandchildren are also threatening the mosques, holy cities, the oil fields, and the very capital that keep the House of Saud in power. That is the uncomfortable intimacy of this region. We are not friends. We are not yet even fully acknowledged as legitimate neighbors. Yet Riyadh is knocking on Jerusalem’s door like a man who has four wives and seeks out his mistress for marital counseling.
Let’s call it what it is. Saudi Arabia is treating Israel as that secret mistress.
The official household is crowded, and they don’t always get along. Wife number one is Pakistan: nuclear-armed, Sunni, and now bound to Riyadh by a mutual-defense pact signed in Mecca itself. Wife number two is Turkey: NATO’s second-largest army, Islamist, and freshly joined to the same Mecca Joint Defense Agreement (Mecca Pact) that treats an attack on one as an attack on all. Wife number three is Egypt: the first Arab state to make (a cold) peace with Israel, a partner in Sinai security, and a regular interlocutor sharing a threatened body of water with the Saudis; it is an essential lifeline to Cairo’s shipping and its own stability. Wife number four is the United States, still the biggest and best arms supplier and now offering a glittering dowry of 48 F-35s worth more than $24 billion.
All four are public. All four come with contracts, smiling photo-ops, and statements about Islamic solidarity or strategic partnership. The first three of the four are more concerned about their own marital chamber – and the tribes that they come from – rather than the well-being of the house itself, and would have no problem burning it all down to protect their own interests. None of them, so far, has stopped the Houthis from shooting at Saudi oil facilities, threatening the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, or sending drones toward Mecca. The fourth, the United States, has been asked to help protect the whole house, but has declined to do so.
It may look good – showing a united house – on paper, but it seems someone forgot to put batteries in the Mecca mutual defense pact. So, the kingdom has quietly asked for help from the one country that has spent years intercepting Iranian missiles, hunting Houthi launchers, eliminating terrorist leaders and command centers, and sharing intelligence through U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM): Israel.
That is the secret tryst that no one wants to admit is happening. The man with four wives has come running to the woman he will not introduce at family gatherings, or even acknowledge her existence outside her penthouse that he doesn’t even pay for, and only “visits” in the dark of night.
I do not acknowledge this with bitterness. I acknowledge it with the weary clarity of someone who has watched this pattern for decades. Arab leaders have always preferred to keep Israel in the shadows while they collected American weapons, Pakistani nuclear umbrellas, Turkish drones, and Egyptian political cover. They play these off other suitors, including China, and the abusive ex, Iran, who nobody wants anything to do with, but none can avoid. When the missiles start flying, the shadows become less useful. Israel’s air defenses, its intelligence, and operational experience against the exact Iranian axis now squeezing the Red Sea — these are not theoretical. They are proven. The Saudis know it. That is why the secret relationship exists.
The irony is almost biblical. Esau and Jacob reconciled and then went their own ways but never fully embracing one another as brothers. The “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” is asking the Jewish state – the younger blessed sibling — to help protect the approaches to those same mosques from a Shiite militia that chants “Death to America, Death to Israel” and now, increasingly, “Death to the House of Saud.” The same kingdom that still reflexively conditions any public recognition of Israel to a Palestinian Arab state is privately seeking Israeli help so that its tankers can leave port, its pipelines can supply the tankers, and its pilgrims can reach Mecca without looking up at the sky in fear. And so the Houthi missiles don’t become an insurrection that threatens the House of Saud falling like a house of cards.
This is not new in kind. Egypt made peace in 1979 because it had been beaten and needed the Sinai back, if not for the land, at least to save face and for its own stability. Jordan followed because it understood the alternative was chaos. Peace with Egypt and Jordan is cold, functional, just between governments, all while state-run institutions continue to foment anti-Israel rhetoric that makes Israel hated on the streets of Cairo and Amman.
The Abraham Accords materialized because the Arabs saw Iran as the greater threat and Israel as the only regional power that had already paid the price of confronting it. Saudi Arabia is simply later to the same realization, and still too proud or too constrained by its own street and its own clerics – and the Palestinian cause tying them down — to say it out loud. Israel remains the hidden mistress to which the discontented husband turns for real comfort.
The Mecca Pact with Turkey and Pakistan seems impressive on paper. Mutual defense. Joint exercises. A secretariat. It has not produced a single Saudi battery that can do what Israeli systems have done night after night. The American F-35s, if they ever arrive, will take years to field and come with the usual restrictions and the usual questions about qualitative military edge. Egypt can talk and coordinate; it cannot replace the targeting picture Israel already has of Houthi positions and Iranian supply lines.
So the mistress remains useful. She is not invited to family gatherings. She is not mentioned in the communiqués. She is simply the one who knows how to keep the house from burning down.
I am not naïve about what this means for Israel. We have interests too in the Houthis and their Iranian puppeteer being roundly defeated. We should give the intelligence. We should coordinate through CENTCOM. We should not pretend that quiet cooperation is the same as peace, or that Riyadh’s current desperation will automatically produce an embassy in Jerusalem. Normalization will come, if it comes, only when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman decides the cost of public hypocrisy – and specifically tying his vision for a Saudi future is more inhibited by championing the Palestinian cause that brings it down — is higher than the cost of public honesty. Yet even with four wives in the same family, the Saudis do not share everything that goes on with each of the wives with all the others. MBS may come around when he’s ready to admit that all the smoke and mirrors of the Mecca mutual defense pact is not worth the paper on which it is written. Until then, Israel remains the woman who is visited only when the wives cannot satisfy their husband’s needs.
That is not a dignified position. It is, however, a familiar one. Jews have been useful to empires and caliphates for centuries — until we were not. The difference now is that we have a state, an army, and the ability to say no. We can help because it is in our interest that Iran and its proxies not control the Red Sea.
From these hills I watch the same sky the Saudis watch. I pray for the safety of my family and my neighbors, and I pray that the men who rule in Riyadh will one day have the courage to treat Israel as a public partner rather than a secret mistress. Until that day, the comfort provided by the mistress will continue behind closed doors.