Tehran’s Real Target Was the Accords

In January 1991, Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel. Families taped plastic sheeting over their windows and waited out the sirens in gas masks. The following year Israel created the Home Front Command and required every new home to include a reinforced safe room. The country accepted that missiles would be a permanent feature of national life, and it built itself around that fact.

Dubai faced its own test in the mid-1980’s. As Iranian and Iraqi forces attacked Gulf shipping, it launched an airline with two leased aircraft, kept its drydock operating and maintained trade with Iran. Its rulers learned that a trading city survives by being indispensable to all sides, belligerents included.

Both lessons endured for decades. This year, one war tested them together.

On Sunday in Manama, Anwar Gargash told the IISS Dialogue that the UAE wants a diplomatic breakthrough with Tehran while bracing for the worst. He called 2026 “a watershed year” for the region. He also said something Gulf officials rarely say aloud. The war had made the relationship with Washington “even more important” to his country’s defense, and the GCC, he said, had “not collectively risen to the challenge.”

Since Iran began firing on the Emirates on 28 February, the UAE has absorbed more missiles and drones than any other Gulf state. It has endured a ceasefire, blockade, renewed strikes and a drone attack on an electrical generator outside the inner perimeter of its Barakah nuclear plant. With Iranian negotiators in Doha this week, Gargash was weighing whether another round is coming.

Israelis should read his words with care. The war opened with Israeli and American aircraft over Iran. Some of its heaviest second-order economic costs landed on a partner. Israel prepares for every war by counting what it can absorb, but now, it should count what its partners can absorb as well. That creates a strategic rule Israel has not had to formalize: a strike it can absorb may still impose a price on a partner that cannot.

The Emirates has fought wars abroad, in Afghanistan and Yemen. Until this year, it had never had to run its own cities under sustained missile and drone fire. It has mandatory national service and a reserve force, but its civilian sheltering system was not built around the Israeli model of reinforced rooms in new homes and routine sheltering. Nearly 90 percent of its residents are expatriates who came because the region’s wars always happened somewhere else.

Meanwhile, Israel has spent nearly eighty years organizing for the opposite. Its citizens know the distance to the nearest shelter, its stock exchange, hospitals and utilities rehearse for war. When foreign carriers pulled back from Ben Gurion, El Al became the country’s aviation lifeline, backed by state war-risk insurance arrangements. Israelis keep working under fire because they planned for it.

Dubai’s confidence depends on calm, a vulnerability Israeli planners may overlook. Its airports weathered 17 missile strikes and 111 alerts and stayed open. Its safe-haven reputation suffered. Passenger traffic fell 31.3 percent in the first half, the airline count fell from roughly 100 to about 50, and some carriers faced insurance hurdles. Hotel occupancy hit 22.8 percent in the week to 14 March. Ships crossing Hormuz faced sharply higher war-risk premiums. These losses never reach a casualty count. They land in investment committee minutes, where the next decade gets decided.

That asymmetry should shape Israeli decisions on when and how to fight. Before every operation, Israel weighs its own home front: interceptor stocks, reserve call-ups, the strain on border towns, the health of the economy. Its partners’ home fronts now belong in the same calculation. Tehran understood the mismatch. It aimed much of its fire at the Gulf, where every missile buys more economic damage.

Abu Dhabi fought this war more actively than it admitted, while keeping channels to Tehran open. The UAE is closer to Israel on security than ever, yet more convinced that Iran must be managed for the long term.

Israelis sometimes read that hedging as a lack of nerve. Geography explains it better. Iran sits directly across the Gulf from the Emirates. Israel can treat the Islamic Republic as a problem to be solved. The Emirates has to live beside it. The two countries can share the same assessment of Iran and still reach opposite judgments about whether another round is worth its price. When Abu Dhabi urges restraint, Israel should hear an accurate report on costs it does not pay.

Normalization has always carried an economic promise: proximity to Israel should bring prosperity. Every war that empties Dubai’s hotels tests that promise. Israel has every right to defend itself, and Iran answers for the missiles it fires. If Israel expects its partners to absorb the second-order consequences of its wars, consultation cannot begin after the missiles are already flying. Early warning and a credible assessment of Tehran’s likely response should become part of alliance management, not post-strike diplomacy.

Israel also has to help its partners carry the cost. Its advantage is the civil infrastructure built after 1991, much of which can be shared. During the war, Israel sent an Iron Dome battery and the soldiers to operate it to the Emirates. But peacetime cooperation matters more.

The priorities are missile and civil defense, plus the protection of desalination plants and other critical infrastructure against physical and cyber attacks. The harder problem is economic continuity when aviation or shipping is disrupted. Israel’s experience keeping essential systems functioning under fire may be as valuable to its Gulf partners as any weapons sale.

None of this requires a photograph of leaders shaking hands, which suits Abu Dhabi. All of it helps residents, airlines and investors stay through the next crisis.

I argued in these pages last week that Israel cannot survive as Sparta alone. Its partners cannot survive as Venice alone either. Israel spent nearly eighty years learning to live under fire. The Emirates chose a different path, and that choice makes it valuable to Israel. The Abraham Accords were built in peacetime. Their real test is whether Israel and its Gulf partners can make one another more resilient when the missiles return.