LONDON: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday that the threat posed by Iran to its Middle Eastern neighbours was driving them into hitherto unthinkable alliances with the Jewish state.

“Iran is devouring one nation after the other,” Netanyahu said at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs think-tank in London.

“It is doing so either by direct conquest or by using proxy. They took over Lebanon, Yemen... they try to do the same thing with Iraq, in Syria.

“The good news is that the other guys are getting together with Israel as never before. It is something that I would have never expected in my lifetime.”

He said Israel was working “very hard” to establish an effective alliance with “the modern Sunni states” to condemn and counter Iranian aggression. “I think that actually has a great promise of peace” for the region, he said.

He said the Middle East was witnessing “the emergence of a battle between the Islamists and the modernists”, provoking a “new alliance between Israel and Islamic states”.

Israel has long viewed Iran as its number one enemy, while Sunni Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia are regional rivals of Iran.

Since Israel was established in 1948, only two Arab states — Egypt and Jordan — have signed peace deals with the country and established full diplomatic relations.

The United States has sought to promote links between Israel and the Arab world, with President Donald Trump’s administration hoping to leverage regional interests to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu said the 2015 Iran nuclear deal reached with the international community does not go far enough to prevent Tehran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Published in Dawn, November 4th, 2017