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Yoel Guzansky
blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2020/08/26/book-review-fraternal-enemies-by-clive-jones-and-yoel-guzansky/
by Tyler B. Parker
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The authors contribute theoretical rigour and empirical richness to a range of recent
accounts of Gulf–Israeli relations. Professor Jones (at Durham University) and Dr
Guzansky (at Tel Aviv University) use Fraternal Enemies to expound on what they termed
in a 2017 article a ‘Tacit Security Regime’ (TSR). For them, a TSR is underway because
‘it allows security co-operation to be pursued between the actors involved (most notably
over Iran) but without compromising sensitive political positions that might give rise to
internal opposition’ (11). The Gulf–Israeli TSR is infused with soft power attraction and
hard power coordination, embodying a Realpolitik calculation of the domestic costs
associated with the regional benefits of addressing what the authors identify as three core
threats: Iranian adventurism, jihadi militancy, and American retrenchment (42).
Jones’s and Guzansky’s theorisation has many strengths. Firstly, the TSR concept shows
that cooperation and competition is issue specific. Oman coordinates with Israel via a
joint desalination centre, but it does not share the perceived threat of Iran. The UAE has
purchased Israeli surveillance software, but its recent accord was predicated on Israel
suspending its annexation of portions of the West Bank. In the late 1990s, Qatar hosted
an Israeli trade delegation, all the while supporting Hamas. The TSR concept helps
demonstrate exactly where Gulf–Israeli relations sit on the adversary–ally spectrum.
Secondly, TSR as a concept in international relations moves beyond structural realism,
which finds domestic factors as indeterminant in external balancing and alliances.
Implicitly drawing from neoclassical realism, Jones and Guzansky instead find that
‘internal constraints on all sides determine the type and intensity of external engagement’
(203). This helps explain why the UAE pursues full normalisation: its officials face the
lowest degree of internal constraints among the Gulf states.
One theoretical weakness is the causal weight assigned to the six elements of the Gulf–
Israeli TSR: the irrelevance of geographic distance, the centrality of shared threat
perception, the constraining nature of domestic norms, the role of United States’ ‘Great
Power commitment’, the diversity of ties, and its non-static nature (18–19). But when
does one of these factors outweigh the others? For Bahrain’s leadership, the threat of
Iranian subversion may supersede the danger of domestic debates over normalisation
with Israel. For Saudi Arabia, Iran poses a less direct material danger, but an enduring
ideational threat to its religious legitimacy. In Israel, Netanyahu addresses both an Iranian
presence in Syria and the precarity of his premiership. Given the diversity of each state,
Jones and Guzansky could have sharpened the TSR concept by assigning a relative
importance for each factor.
This omission results in the book’s main empirical oversight: Kuwait’s rejection of Israel.
The book uses a single quote from one Kuwaiti journalist on the importance of religious
tolerance as indicative of ‘wider societal acceptance’ of Israel and ‘a growing de facto
acceptance of the state itself’ (47). This is undercut not only by cited examples of
governmental hostility, but also unexplored examples of societal rejection of normalisation
with the so-called ‘Zionist entity’ (46). Unlike its neighbouring monarchies, Kuwait
eschews bilateral engagement with Israel, even though it faces a comparable risk of
Iranian subversion and jihadi attacks. Why do normative constraints eclipse threat
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perception for Kuwait? Perhaps it is due to the personality of Emir Sheikh Sabah, the
power of the parliament, or the influence of its Palestinian community. Unfortunately, the
book does not fully explore Kuwait’s exceptionalism.
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