Netanyahu's rare interview put Gulf ties and Israel's domestic politics on display

The police had stopped all the traffic last Saturday afternoon near the small street where the ABC's Jerusalem bureau is located.

Amid blaring police sirens and lights, a convoy of dark plated cars drove at speed to a house further down the street. It has not been an uncommon sight.

A wealthy friend of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lives there and there have been frequent reports of the Israeli PM and his family staying at the house.

The Israeli public broadcaster, Kan, reported that an American 60 Minutes interview broadcast on Sunday night had been filmed there, which would explain the Saturday afternoon traffic disruptions.

For a figure so central to the news, Netanyahu rarely gives interviews.

Israeli media noted the interview — his first major US broadcast interview since February 28 — came 60 days after he gave his only press conference in Hebrew since the start of the latest war with Iran, and even this was held over Zoom and limited to eight questions.

That made this interview, which, in full, went for one hour and 20 minutes, all the more significant. Particularly at this point in time.

That's just not because interviewer Major Garrett covered everything from the PM's culpability for the security failures that allowed the October 2023 Hamas attacks to the future of war in Iran. It's because of an extraordinary public intervention that the PM's office made a couple of days later, when it released a statement saying that during the war, Netanyahu "secretly visited the United Arab Emirates, where he met with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed".

"This visit", the statement continued, "has led to a historic breakthrough in relations between Israel and the UAE". 

The statement was extraordinary enough in itself. Why did the Israeli PM suddenly feel the need to divulge this previously secret meeting?

UAE disputes Netanyahu's account

Even more extraordinary was the UAE's public response a few hours later, and the public spat that followed.

"The UAE reaffirms that its relations with Israel are public and conducted within the framework of the well-known and officially declared Abraham Accords, and are not based on non-transparent or unofficial arrangements," the Emirati foreign ministry said.

"Accordingly, any claims regarding unannounced visits or undisclosed arrangements are entirely unfounded unless officially announced by the relevant authorities in the UAE."

"The UAE calls on media outlets to exercise accuracy and professionalism, and to refrain from circulating unverified information or promoting misleading political narratives," it added.

So just to pause here for a moment and note that this was not a government denying a speculative, unsourced report by a media outlet. It was a flat denial of a statement made by the prime minister of another country.

The Israelis then doubled down, briefing Israeli media that the meeting had taken place at Al-Ain, an oasis city by the Oman border on March 26 and that meeting had lasted several hours.

The Times of Israel then noted that Netanyahu's spokesman at the time of the meeting, and acting chief of staff, Ziv Agmon, had insisted on Facebook that his former boss's account was true.

"As someone who knows the United Arab Emirates well and has lived there for long periods of time, and as someone who accompanied the prime minister on the historic trip that has been top secret until today, I can say that the prime minister was received in Abu Dhabi with the honour of kings," Agmon wrote on Facebook.

"Sheikh bin Zayed, his family members, and other dignitaries welcomed us and were happy to see the prime minister of Israel on their soil," he continued. 

"The sheikh greatly respected the prime minister and personally drove the prime minister in his personal car from the plane to the palace."

"The things the prime minister concluded during this amazing visit will be talked about for generations to come. A great success!"

UAE's opaque foreign relationships

The nature of the ties between the UAE, Israel and the United States since February 28 have been the subject of what could be called increasingly firm speculation, sometimes followed by confirmation.

The longer-term backdrop to this is that the UAE was one of the first, and largest, Gulf nations to have signed on to the Abraham Accords, a set of agreements, signed under the first Trump administration, aimed at normalising relationships between the Gulf states and Israel.

But the UAE also has huge trade and financial ties with Iran.

The UAE's official position in the early days of the war this year was one of righteous indignation about the fact that it was, and remains, the state that suffered the greatest number of Iranian drone and missile strikes of any in the region.

The indignation was due to the fact the UAE — along with other Gulf nations — had pleaded with the US and Israel not to start a conflict with Iran, given the Gulf states have to keep living with a possibly destabilised, or even more angry, Iranian neighbour long after the US had departed the scene.

But there was speculation that bases in Gulf countries were being used by the US, despite assertions by Gulf countries including the UAE, that they had explicitly refused to let their facilities be used in offensive operations.

There have subsequently been reports that Israel provided its "iron dome" defences to the UAE during the conflict. This claim was confirmed this week by the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

Then this week came reports that seriously recast what has been going on in the Gulf: that both the UAE and Saudi Arabia had been involved in direct strikes on Iranian targets.

The UAE's Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment on the strikes but pointed to previous statements in which it asserted its right to respond, including militarily, to hostile acts.

The Saudi government wasn't saying anything either.

But that brings us back to the meeting which did or didn't happen at Al-Ain on March 26 — and Netanyahu's interview on CBS.

Like many Gulf states, the UAE tends to conduct fairly opaque foreign relationships. Phrases like "strategic ambiguity" come to mind.

That's hardly surprising given the Gulf states find themselves perpetually sitting on the hotspot of tensions that involve everyone from Iran to the United States to Iranian proxies, unstable neighbours, and increasingly different individual interests that mean they cannot be seen as a uniform block.

Israel's unilateral revelation about the meeting with the UAE has, therefore, dumped the UAE right in it.

Iran was, not surprisingly, expressing its outrage about the revelations in a 'told you so' sort of way. And if Donald Trump's renewed sabre rattling in Beijing this week about going back to full scale war with Iran comes to anything, it leaves the UAE very exposed.

Even if Trump continues to flop around on renewed war, Netanyahu made clear on CBS this week that as far as he is concerned the war with Iran is not over and also that, even if it was, his war with Hezbollah in Lebanon is not.

Domestic elections loom

It is interesting to fit the statements about the UAE into the jigsaw of Netanyahu's messages in the 60 Minutes interview and the fact that elections in Israel, as well as the US, are now only months away.

Domestically, Netanyahu has cast himself as a wartime prime minister but he is keen to also offer himself as a peacetime PM with a strategic vision for peace through greater ties — diplomatic and economic — with Gulf neighbours.

That's despite the fact that in Gaza, in Lebanon and Iran, Israel may have degraded enemy capacities, but it has not eliminated them.

"I said in the second day of the war, 'We're going to change the Middle East'," he said.

"I now see the possibility of the expansion and the deepening of the agreements we do have to alliances with Arab states of the kind that we never even dreamed of."

He said he couldn't outline all that was underway but mentioned things like sharing AI and Quantum developments with near neighbours.

Significantly he then said it was time Israel "weaned ourselves" off the some $US3.8 billion ($4.2 billion) a year of military aid Israel gets from the US.

Views about Israel from the US public have plunged spectacularly since the war in Gaza and there has been growing questioning of US support for its ally, so Netanyahu's remarks are also a canny anticipation of this.

Of course, he denied that decline in support had anything to do with Israel's actions in Gaza, or anywhere else, but that it instead "correlates almost 100 per cent with the geometric rise of social media".

He dodged questions about what responsibility he might hold for the security failures that allowed the October 7 attacks in 2023 and said the "real issue" was what had happened since that that time, not what preceded it.

He also dodged questions about the New York Times account of how he had persuaded Trump to go to war, and whether there had been a spectacular miscalculation of what it would take for the Iranian regime to collapse, and of the risk of Iran weaponising the Strait of Hormuz.

There was "no question", however, "that the relative power of Israel has changed", Netanyahu said. 

For all the Israeli PM's talk though, the question for the Gulf states is whether they are happy for Israel to be the dominant player in the Middle East. Its ham-fisted efforts to corral the UAE in the interests of Netanyahu's domestic politics may give them all more cause to wonder.

Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.