Fraternal Enemies: Israel and the Gulf Monarchies.

• Author: Avci, Ayse

By Clive Jones and Yoel Guzansky

Oxford University Press, 2019, 297 pages, $51.35, ISBN: 9780197521878

Fraternal Enemies: Israel and the Gulf Monarchies presents an academic study of Israel's relations with the Gulf monarchies. By drawing upon a wide range of contemporary sources, it explores both the scope and limits of these ties and their influence on the modern-day Middle East (p. 22). The extent to which Israel's current relations with the Gulf monarchies can and should be seen as forming the contours of a new regional order is a key theme of this book. The approach of the authors, Clive Jones and Joel Guzansky, lies in understanding Israel's ties with many of the Gulf monarchies, notably Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain, not as a formal alliance but rather as a manifestation of a tacit security regime (TSR), an interest-based, limited, and informal mechanism of cooperation between states in the context of security issues (p. 10).

This book is the result of several discussions and debates the authors had with close colleagues and friends over several years. In this study, according to the authors, the Arab officials mostly confirmed the authors' arguments during informal conversations, but they are excluded from this study (p. 7). According to the authors, in this book, the typology of the term security regime is discussed from a more realistic perspective, rather than a liberal variant. The security regimes discussed in the book are presented as a reflection of economic and military power. This allows the interested parties to promote long-term interests (p. 12).

The book is divided into five chapters. In the introduction, the authors talk about the framework of the TSR to provide a better analysis of the study. The TSR paradigm was put forward by an Israeli-born historian of international relations named Aharon Klieman. He avoids the normative and legalistic ideas customary in the study of international regimes and places emphasis on areas of cooperation where actors' interests are combined. This book tries to analyze the relations between Israel and the Gulf countries through Klieman's perception of the TSR (p. 16). However, the authors shared concerns over three hard security issues that define the deportment and extent of ties between these "fraternal enemies": (i) Iran's growing regional influence, (ii) the rise of non-state armed actors, (iii) and shared discomfort over Washington's engagement across the...