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Israel has quietly begun helping Saudi Arabia defend vital infrastructure against escalating Houthi missile and drone attacks. Regional diplomatic and security officials told Israel Hayom in September that contacts run through United States Central Command and that the help is intelligence based for now. An Israeli official said he assumed it includes early warning. Haaretz reported on October 12, 2026 that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, through American mediators, sought Saudi approval for Israel to join strikes on the Houthis in Yemen. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was reportedly reluctant, fearing a public backlash.

Donald Trump told reporters on the White House lawn on October 16 that “Israel’s been very helpful to Saudi Arabia,” without saying what Israel had done. Netanyahu told Channel 14 on October 13 that “There is almost no country in the Middle East that doesn’t ask us for help.”

This quiet understanding is only the latest chapter in a long record of discreet Saudi and Israeli cooperation against shared enemies. Its operational roots lie in the North Yemen civil war of the 1960s. After a 1962 coup brought republicans to power in Sanaa, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser sent about 70,000 troops to defend the new government against royalist forces backed by Riyadh. Beginning in 1964, Israeli pilots flew night missions along the Saudi coastline in Operation Porcupine, dropping weapons, ammunition and medical supplies to the royalists. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst now at Brookings, wrote that Saudi and Israeli “intelligence services coordinated the delivery of weapons and expertise to the Royalists, who were based in Saudi Arabia.”

Riyadh kept up its public hostility for decades. Saudi Arabia joined the Arab League boycott declared in 1945, and King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud and King Faisal both opposed Zionism openly. Saudi forces in the Arab wars were symbolic, a small contingent in 1948 and a brigade of 3,000 soldiers sent to Jordan in 1967 that did not fight. Faisal later led the 1973 oil embargo. Yet the kingdom set that hostility aside when it feared for its own security, as the Yemen episode showed.

The Gulf War showed how a shared threat could align Riyadh and Jerusalem without a handshake. In January 1991 Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles at both Saudi Arabia and Israel, and Washington praised Israeli restraint because the coalition it led included Saudi Arabia. Crown Prince Fahd had already floated an eight-point plan in 1981, and its seventh point affirmed the right of the countries of the region to live in peace. In 2002 Crown Prince Abdullah proposed what became the Arab Peace Initiative, which the Arab League adopted in Beirut. It offered normal relations with Israel in exchange for a full withdrawal to the 1967 lines and an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Shared security fears then pushed the Palestinian question toward the background, though Saudi officials still say normalization depends on a path to Palestinian statehood. During the 2006 Lebanon War, Saudi Arabia condemned Hezbollah’s “adventurism,” and Israeli media reported secret contacts that Riyadh denied. An Israeli think tank later judged that Prince Bandar bin Sultan met Israeli officials several times in 2006 and early 2007. Israel and Saudi Arabia both opposed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Haaretz reported in 2018 that Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group negotiated a $55 million sale of its Pegasus spyware to Saudi officials in 2017, and former officials told the Washington Post that Israel approved it. NSO called the reports baseless. Saudi Arabia let Air India fly to Tel Aviv through its airspace in 2018, and in July 2022 it publicly opened its skies to all carriers, including Israeli airlines.

Israeli media reported that on November 22, 2020, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mossad chief Yossi Cohen flew to NEOM, the planned Saudi city on the Red Sea, to meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan denied it, writing “No such meeting occurred. The only officials present were American and Saudi.” Pompeo confirmed he met the Crown Prince in NEOM, and flight tracking showed a private jet making the round trip from Tel Aviv. Netanyahu declined to comment.

Money followed access. About six months after Jared Kushner left the White House, the Saudi Public Investment Fund committed $2 billion to his new firm, Affinity Partners. The New York Times reported in 2022 that the fund’s screening panel objected over the inexperience of Affinity’s management, an excessive proposed fee and public relations risk, and that the full board, led by the Crown Prince, overruled it. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), then chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, wrote in September 2024 that Affinity had collected about $157 million in management fees from foreign investors, including $87 million from the Saudi government, while producing no return for clients. Separately, Israeli business outlets reported that Affinity bought 15 percent of the automotive and credit operations of Israel’s Shlomo Group for $110 million and, in July 2024, a 4.95 percent stake in the insurer Phoenix.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has taken a blunt, transactional line on Palestinian leadership. During a closed meeting with American Jewish leaders in New York on March 27, 2018, he reportedly said, “In the last several decades the Palestinian leadership has missed one opportunity after the other and rejected all the peace proposals it was given. It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining.”

Axios reported the remarks a month later, citing an Israeli foreign ministry cable and three sources. It added that he said normalization would require significant progress on the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. Around the same time he told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, “I believe that each people, anywhere, has a right to live in their peaceful nation. I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land.” He added that a peace agreement was needed for stability and normal relations.

In October 2020, former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan told Al Arabiya, “The Palestinian cause is a just cause but its advocates are failures, and the Israeli cause is unjust but its advocates have proven to be successful.” He was responding to Palestinian Authority criticism of the UAE and Bahrain normalization deals.

Franklin Foer reported in The Atlantic in September 2024 that the Crown Prince told Secretary of State Antony Blinken in January 2024 that 70 percent of Saudis are younger than he is and that most had never known much about the Palestinian issue before the Gaza war. “Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful,” he reportedly said. A Saudi official called that account of the conversation incorrect, though Ynet reported the official did not deny its overall substance. Publicly, the Crown Prince told the Shura Council that the kingdom would keep working toward a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Each time open normalization seemed near, regional war froze the diplomatic track. In September 2023 the Crown Prince told Bret Baier on Fox News, “Every day we get closer,” and called a potential deal “the biggest historical deal since the end of the Cold War,” while saying the Palestinian issue had to be solved. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, Riyadh paused the talks, according to a source who spoke to AFP. In February 2024 the Saudi foreign ministry told Washington there would be no diplomatic relations without a Palestinian state. In November 2024 the Crown Prince told an Arab and Islamic summit that the kingdom rejected what he called “collective genocide” by Israel against the Palestinians. In 2025 Saudi Arabia and France co-chaired United Nations conferences that produced the New York Declaration on a two state solution, which 142 states endorsed in the General Assembly.

Today the Saudi monarchy balances contradictory pulls. On October 23 the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan issued a joint statement naming the Israeli occupation as the main source of instability in the region and beyond. The same statement condemned Ansar Allah attacks on Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile Israel is reportedly helping Riyadh defend itself against those attacks. Israel Hayom reported in September that the help runs through United States Central Command and is intelligence based, and an Israeli defense official confirmed in October that Israeli intelligence assists Saudi operations against the Houthis. Neither government has acknowledged it on the record.

Whatever its short-term security benefits, this arrangement has a price. A government that tells its citizens one thing and does another is borrowing against its own legitimacy. A regime that outsources its air defense to a belligerent in someone else’s war has also made itself a target.

That brings the strong gods of geopolitics back into view. Iran is re-asserting itself in West Asia, and it is not confused about who is helping its enemies. Riyadh has bet that it can quietly share intelligence with Israel while staying outside the fight. That is a dangerous bet. If Tehran decides the kingdom is a working part of the enemy’s defense network, Saudi oil facilities, desalination plants, and cities become legitimate targets in Iranian planning. The Crown Prince has refused Israeli intervention from Saudi soil to avoid a domestic backlash. His quiet cooperation behind the scenes may still bring the war to his doorstep.

A single misstep by the Saudis could expose them to a devastating Iranian attack, one capable of shaking the foundations of what is, after all, an artificial and recently created state. A fitting form of justice for those who collaborate with Jewish power.

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