The ‘villa in the jungle’ nuclear paradigm: Israel’s nuclear narrative and practice in a changing regional security complex

Abstract

The ‘villa in the jungle’ metaphor, conventionally associated with Israel’s former Defence Minister Ehud Barak, is one of the most referenced metaphors in Israeli political discourse. Its perpetuation has contributed to the fixation of two co-constitutive collective identities: Israel as an exemplary democratic society amidst a violent and backward Arab neighbourhood. This article examines an often-overlooked aspect of such a discourse: its transposition within Israel’s nuclear narrative and its impact on Israel’s nuclear politics. It contends that the perpetuation of this discourse has fuelled Israel’s nuclear orientalist narrative, fixing a paradigm according to which certain identities have crystallised as commonsensical and certain actions as legitimate. On one hand, it has helped to construct Israel’s entitlement to possess nuclear weapons and the Arab non-entitlement thereto. On the other hand, it has provided a rationale for Israel’s kinetic counterproliferation actions. However, the ‘villa in the jungle’ discourse and the identities constructed by it are anchored to a specific security context, which saw Israel as an isolated country facing an existential threat. But what if a change in the status quo, such as the emergence of a new regional security complex (RSC), devalued the ‘villa in the jungle’ paradigm and thus delegitimised both Israel’s nuclear orientalist discourse and practice? As Israel normalises its relations with Gulf monarchies and civilian nuclear programmes become increasingly salient in the region, for the first time since its creation, Israeli policymakers might find themselves entangled in a new dilemma, one centred on a re-assessment of the definition of ‘enemy state’ in Naor’s very first definition of the Begin Doctrine – or the ‘jungle’ in Barak’s definition.

The dreams and aspirations of many in the Arab world have not changed. We still live in a modern and prosperous villa in the middle of the jungle, a place where different laws prevail. No hope for those who cannot defend themselves and no mercy for the weak.¹

Historically attributed to then foreign minister Ehud Barak’s 1996 famous speech in St Louis, the metaphor ‘villa in the jungle’ has been extensively used as a representational framework of Israel as a Westernized island of civilisation surrounded by barbaric Arabs and Muslims. As observed by Lazar Berman in a piece for The Times of Israel, ‘The reference to “defending the villa” might sound somewhat odd to most observers, but to Israeli ears, it is familiar shorthand for a widely – almost unconsciously – accepted idea.’² Indeed, Israeli policy and military elites have consistently resorted to the use of metaphors to exemplify and distinguish specific collective identities. Former Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel, in a 2020 interview with Haaretz journalist Ravit Hecht, associated the Arab culture with a ‘jungle’.³ Similarly, in February 2016, Prime Minister Netanyahu said, ‘They’ll say to me, “That’s what you want to do, to defend the villa?” The answer is yes. “Will we surround all of Israel with fences and obstacles?” The answer is yes. In the environment we live in, we must defend ourselves from the predators.’⁴ In 2020, a public opinion survey conducted by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) showed that 66 per cent of Israelis concurred with the statement, ‘The State of Israel is a villa in the jungle.’⁵

Narratives permeated by the ‘us versus them’ dichotomic representation are not recent phenomena; they have been central to Zionist rhetoric since the late 1800s. In Rome and Jerusalem, Moses Hess, one of the founding fathers of the Zionist ideology before Theodore Herzl, addressed the Jewish people: ‘You should be the bearers of civilisation to the primitive people of Asia… you should be the mediators between Europe and far Asia, open the roads that lead to India and China – those unknown regions which must ultimately be thrown open to civilization.’⁶ The regions in question, Hess specified, were inhabited by ‘wild Arabian hordes and the African people’, which had to submit themselves to the European domination.⁷ In the same vein, Theodore Herzl’s use of the civilising rhetoric of European colonialism as opposed to the barbarism in the East was a central element in the Zionist work of convincing imperial powers to support the Jewish cause. According to him, ‘We [the Jews] should there [in Palestine] form a part of a wall of defence for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilisation against barbarism.’⁸

From Hess to Netanyahu, Zionist thinkers and Israeli policy elites⁹ have made extensive and recurrent use of metaphors and imageries to construct opposite collective identities, and draw ‘relational comparisons’¹⁰ between the ‘Western’ Jewish-Israeli anthropological superiority over the primitivism of the Arab ‘Orient’.¹¹ ‘Oasis fortress in a desert’,¹² ‘villa in the jungle’,¹³ ‘lighthouse in the stormy sea’,¹⁴ and ‘proper society amid the Middle Ages’,¹⁵ are just some examples of binary oppositions recurrently used by Israeli policy elites. More recently, the Gaza war has witnessed a resurgence of these dichotomic discourses, exemplified by Prime Minister Netanyahu framing the conflict as ‘a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle’.¹⁶ This portrayal casts Israel’s military operation in Gaza as a broad, Manichean struggle.¹⁷ In this article, the ‘villa in the jungle’ discourse will be used as an umbrella term to encapsulate the broader system of ‘relational comparisons’ employed over time by Israeli policy elites. Through a longstanding effort of repetition, the assignment of predicates such as ‘jungle’ and ‘villa’ (but also many others which are semantically related) to particular types of actors has contributed to the construction and fixation of two specific co-constitutive collective identities. At the same time, the relational content of these collective identities, which mutually construct each other, have produced two parallel mechanisms: identification and de-identification.¹⁸ As a consequence, constructing the ‘Other’ has become as much, if not more, about constructing ‘Israel’, its legitimacy, its rightness, and its exceptionality.

Within a constructivist framework, ‘the interactions between discourses and practices result in the establishment of dominant narratives and intersubjective meanings that define individual and collective identities and behaviors, leading to the construction of social structures that simultaneously condition and are influenced by agents and their interaction’.¹⁹ Therefore, by emphasising the tangible impact of ideational elements within the nuclear dimension, a constructivist approach deepens our understanding of the underlying causes of certain mechanisms inherent in the nuclear order. Additionally, this approach allows for an exploration of the conditions that might favour an alteration of the dynamics – de-identification – potentially contributing to positive transformations. The interconnectedness between identity and security has been studied from various perspectives.²⁰ Scholars have emphasised how shifts in self-images might contribute to a shift in security, such as a conflict.²¹ In particular, in her book, Israel’s National Identity, Neta Oren defines the ‘villa in the jungle’ metaphor as a central theme of Israel’s political identity.²² More specifically, she explores how a protracted and insoluble conflict has allowed Israel to fix a discourse and the collective identities that are constructed by it.²³ Hence, the latter are anchored in a specific security condition, whose hypothetical transformation would demand a trade-off between identity and security. Drawing on Oren’s argument, this article examines a correlated – and often overlooked – aspect of the ‘villa in the jungle’ discourse: its transposition within Israel’s nuclear orientalist narrative and, therefore, its implications for Israel’s nuclear politics. Specifically, it argues that the perpetuation of this dichotomic discourse has fuelled Israel’s nuclear orientalist narrative, fixing a paradigm according to which certain identities have crystallised as commonsensical and certain actions as legitimate. On the one hand, it has helped to construct Israel’s entitlement to nuclear weapons – a villa is a ‘good’ proliferator, whereas the ‘goodness’ is measured by the extent to which it is a democratic, stable, and status quo entity – and the Arab non-entitlement thereto – states of the ‘jungle’ would be ‘bad’ proliferators, precisely because of their violent, barbaric, backward nature. On the other hand, it has produced ‘warrants for action’, making Israel’s kinetic counterproliferation operations more justifiable and thus acceptable.

Identity-based narratives, however, are historically contingent and thus discontinuous. Michael Barnett defines identities as ‘fundamentally social and relational, defined by the actor’s interaction with and relationship to others; therefore, identities may be contingent, dependent on the actor’s interaction with others and place within an institutional context’.²⁴ In other words, the legitimisation function at the core of an identity narrative only works if the relational predicates stay antithetical. In this case, the villa in the jungle discourse and the collective identities constructed by it are anchored to a specific security context, which saw Israel as an isolated country facing an existential threat. This is the basis upon which Israel constructed its exceptionality with regard to its nuclear status. Consequently, the legitimisation process underlying Israel’s nuclear arsenal and counterproliferation doctrine depends on this status quo, in which the Arab neighbourhood is constructed as unstable, undemocratic and belligerent. But what if a change in the status quo, such as the emergence of a new regional security complex (RSC), devalued the ‘villa in the jungle’ paradigm and thus delegitimised Israel’s nuclear orientalist discourse and practice? As Israel normalises its relations with Gulf monarchies and civilian nuclear programmes become increasingly salient in the region, for the first time since its creation, Israeli policymakers might find themselves entangled in a new dilemma, one centred on a re-assessment of the definition of ‘enemy state’ in Arye Naor’s very first definition of the Begin Doctrine²⁵ – or the ‘jungle’ in Barak’s definition. In this light, how is Israel’s nuclear orientalist discourse changing in relation to the nuclear aspirations of ‘friendly countries’?²⁶ And how is its counterproliferation practice adjusting to this different predication?

Nuclear identities between dichotomic discourses and negative interdependence

The dominant definition of the problem acquires, by repetition, and by the weight and credibility of those who propose or subscribe it, the warrant of ‘common sense’.²⁷

The endeavour to fix a specific regime of truth, namely a dichotomic reality in which Israel is depicted as a bastion of civilisation amidst a supposedly primitive neighbourhood, has reverberated across various domains, including the nuclear one. Within the latter, binary oppositions such as civilisation/barbarism, rationality/irrationality, stability/chaos, democracy/authoritarianism, have recurrently been employed as predicates to construct and distinguish countries’ identities and roles. The perpetuation of such a narrative aims at cementing a specific vision of Israel, the Arab ‘others’, and the state of tension in which the antithetical predicates coexist.

Israel’s nuclear narrative has extensively used the dichotomic structure inherent in the ‘villa in the jungle’ discourse. The rational/irrational binary opposition is the main presupposition that structures such discourse. Using the attributes ‘irrational’, ‘madman’, ‘crazy’ has become integral to Israeli policy elites’ rhetoric and has exacerbated over time in parallel with nuclear developments in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, and Iran. In the late 1970s, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sent a letter to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher emphasising ‘what could happen in the Middle East, and particularly to the men, women and children in Israel should the lethal weapons of mass killing and destruction fall at any time into the hands of an absolute ruler like Colonel Qaddafi’.²⁸ Shortly after Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor Chief of Staff of Israel Defence Forces, General Rafael Eitan, wrote to South African Minister of Defence Malan, ‘Israel’s iron determination would not allow these crazy Arabs to possess nuclear weapons. […] Anyone who tries to say that the nuclear reactor in Iraq was only for research purposes is wicked, cynical and oil, not human blood, flows in his veins.’²⁹ The same Menachem Begin, a few hours after the Osirak strike, said in a private call, ‘I don’t want you to feel that we are doing anything recklessly here, but this is the beginning of the creation of nuclear weapons in the hands of a madman [Saddam Hussein].’³⁰ According to an anonymous Israeli veteran diplomat, the Mossad psychological portrait of Saddam Hussein described him as ‘a hard-headed megalomaniac, cunning, sophisticated and cruel. He is willing to take high risks and drastic action to realise his ambition for self-aggrandisement. His possession and use of a nuclear weapon will enable him to threaten and strike Israel and, thereby, win supremacy over the Arab world. He is prepared to act at an early opportunity, even in the awareness that retaliation might follow.’³¹ The association of Saddam Hussein with attributes such as ‘madman’ was a persistent practice: Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir often defined him so during the 1991 Gulf War, while Israel’s former military’s chief of staff, Dan Shomron described him as an undeterrable and ‘an irrational player who even thinks in terms of suicide’.³² Many years later, on Syria’s nuclear reactor, then Mossad chief Dagan argued, ‘For Syria to have a nuclear weapons program, to have a nuclear weapon, is unacceptable.’³³ On Iran, members of Israel’s political and military elites have for more than a decade grounded their assessments in the assumed leadership’s irrationality and obsession with martyrdom and Messianic ideals.

The recurrent use of the term ‘irrational’, associated with Arab enemies, helped to construct them as ‘unsafe’, and ‘unpredictable’ actors whose nuclear programs would naturally constitute a threat to international security. Contrarily, Israel – the binary opposite – automatically identified as a ‘rational actor’ and thus as a reliable, safe nuclear actor. In his book, Israel’s Nuclear Deterrence: A Strategy for the 1980s, Shai Feldman underlines that ‘among the risks associated with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the one arousing the most widely expressed concern is that such weapons will be acquired and used by irrational decision-makers’.³⁴ He also adds, ‘little doubt should exist that enormous dangers are entailed in the irrational use of nuclear power. Nuclear weapons in the hands of crazy leaders, independent of control from other echelons in the command structure, may indeed make for unmitigated disaster.’³⁵ Along the same lines, Israeli scholar Yair Evron stated, ‘The level of rationality of some of the leaders in the Arab world and the highly irresponsible behaviour of some of the other leaders suggest that nuclear weapons in the Middle East, far from necessarily stabilising relations in that troubled and tormented region, might, in fact, lead to the first full-scale nuclear war in the world.’³⁶

The implications of transposing these orientalist discourses into the nuclear domain are two-pronged. First, determining Israel to be an outpost of civilisation entangled in a perpetual existential struggle against barbarism has helped to construct Israel’s entitlement to possess nuclear weapons. Since a villa is a ‘good’ proliferator, whereas the ‘goodness’ is measured by the extent to which it is a ‘stable, democratic status quo power’, Israel’s nuclear arsenal is rarely scrutinised or perceived as a threat. Even in instances where Israeli policy elites such as the far-right Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu and lawmaker Tally Gotliv explicitly advocated for using nuclear weapons in the Gaza Strip,³⁷ reactions remained limited. While China, Iran, and numerous Arab nations condemned these statements at the United Nations Security Council, the United States merely urged all parties ‘to refrain from hateful rhetoric’.³⁸ Contrarily, the repeated mention of Arab states as violent, backward, and unstable entities – a ‘jungle’ – has helped portraying them as potentially ‘bad’ proliferators, ‘oriental others, whose irrationality, irresponsibility, and lack of restraint means their possession of nuclear technology is a clear danger to international security’.³⁹ An illustrative example is the discourse among Israeli policy elites regarding Iran’s nuclear programme. In a 2012 interview, Prime Minister Netanyahu emphasized the existential threat represented by the Iranian nuclear programme: ‘There is no doubt about Iran’s intention – to destroy us.’⁴⁰ Drawing a historical parallel, wherein Jews faced genocide without the means to defend themselves and ‘begged others’, Netanyahu asserted that today ‘[Israel is] not begging, [but] preparing.’ Similarly, then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a prominent figure in Netanyahu’s government from 2009 to 2012, echoed Netanyahu’s apprehension, characterizing a nuclear-armed Iran as ‘one of the most serious things that can happen to Israel […] a threat of existential proportions’.⁴¹

It is worth noting that Israel’s orientalist discourse is one particular manifestation of a broader orientalist orthodoxy characterising the Western nuclear discourse.⁴² As Hugh Gusterson aptly summarises it:

There has long been a widespread perception among U.S. defense intellectuals, politicians and pundits that, while we can live with the nuclear weapons of the five official nuclear nations for the indefinite future, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to nuclear-threshold states in the Third World, especially the Islamic world, would be enormously dangerous.⁴³

This perceptual dissonance is manifest when observing the media coverage concerning Israel’s possession of an undeclared and unmonitored nuclear arsenal in comparison to coverage of Arab countries’ nuclear aspirations. Western discourses concerning Muslim-majority countries and nuclear weapons imply an ontological distinction, wherein the likelihood of an ‘Islamic bomb’ is conceived as intrinsically more threatening.⁴⁴ The ‘Islamic or Muslim bomb’ trope serves as a prominent example of how race and religion have become irrevocably embedded in nuclear discourses, reflecting a wider conflation wherein Arab coincided with Muslim in an undifferentiated mass characterized by violence and terrorism.⁴⁵ Second, it is within the entrenchment of this narrative that subjectivities, relations, and threats are understood, laying the groundwork for formulating political conclusions. Norman Fairclough argues that:

discourses do not just reflect or represent social entities and relations, they construct or ‘constitute’ them… any discursive ‘event’ (i.e. any instance of discourse) is seen as being simultaneously a piece of text, an instance of discursive practice, and an instance of social practice.⁴⁶

Indeed, given the desires, beliefs and expectations of the actors, ‘warranting conditions’ contribute, making ‘a particular action or belief more “reasonable,” “justified,” or “appropriate”’.⁴⁷ By specifying which objects constitute a threat and which ones are to be safeguarded, these discourses have furnished Israel with justifications to forestall potential international threats and have made kinetic counterproliferation operations more acceptable and thus justifiable. During an interview, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, reflecting on the dilemmas encountered during his tenure when authorizing operations aimed at halting Iran’s nuclear programme, recollected ‘I asked myself questions’, but reminded himself of the imperative ‘to prevent Iran from developing the fuse that could end my children’s lives.’⁴⁸

From a critical constructivist approach, the functioning of discourse encompasses two interesting elements. Firstly, it posits that the chains of association established by dichotomic discourses are contingent; that is, they are socially constructed and thus fluid. Secondly, it introduces the notion of ‘negative interdependence’ between identities. As for the first, meaning, like identities, can never be fixed permanently and is intrinsically unstable.⁴⁹ As explained by Roxanne Doty, ‘Any fixing of a discourse and the identities that are constructed by it can only be partial in nature. It is the overflowing and incomplete nature of discourses that opens up spaces for change, discontinuity, and variation.’⁵⁰

The contingent and fluid nature of discourses means that the inherent connections they establish can be broken, and identities can be altered. The ‘villa in the jungle’ discourse and the identities constructed by it are never permanently fixed. Moreover, they can be uncoupled and eventually rearticulated in different, perhaps novel, ways. In essence, alternative representations are always possible. As Stuart Hall argues,

A connection or link is not necessarily given in all cases as a law or a fact of life, but requires particular conditions of existence to appear at all, which has to be positively sustained by specific processes, which is not ‘eternal’ but has constantly to be renewed, which can under some circumstances disappear or be overthrown, leading to the old linkages being dissolved and new connections – re-articulations – being forged.⁵¹

The second central feature of dichotomic discourses lies in their relational nature, hence in their capacity to operate both positively and negatively. The latter – the detachment from the ‘other’ – is what Herbert C. Kelman refers to as the ‘negative interdependence’ between identities.⁵² In other words, asserting a group’s identity implies negating the other group’s identity. It is not enough to portray itself as a democratic, stable, reliable actor; it has the additional burden of portraying the other as an undemocratic, unstable, unreliable actor, ultimately rendering each identity hostage of its opposite. As Jutta Weldes and her colleagues write, ‘as each subject seeks to perform its identity, it threatens others, whose identities are consolidated in response’.⁵³ This approach partially echoes William Connolly, who argues that difference and otherness stand in a ‘double relation’ in that ‘they constitute it, and they threaten it’.⁵⁴

The notions of fluidity and negative interdependence are central in this context. First, understanding dichotomic discourses as fluid allows us to see how the constructed meanings embedded within Israel’s nuclear orientalist discourse might shift and destabilise over time, following historical, social, and spatial transformations. Second, recognising the interconnectedness between the identities underscores the inherent interdependency between them. In other words, was the Israeli predication of the ‘Arab’ – the jungle – to change, pushed by a shift in the regional security complex, the integrity of Israel’s identity as a ‘villa’ would be affected, precisely because of their co-constitutive nature.

Nuclear aspirations amid a changing regional security complex

As previously mentioned, Israel’s nuclear orientalist discourse and the identities constructed by it are rooted in a regional security complex in which Israel is entangled in a prolonged war with a hostile and violent Arab neighbourhood. It is this security condition that enabled Israel to fix a dichotomic discourse wherein it is portrayed as an acceptable, reliable, legitimate nuclear actor, whereas the Arab countries are depicted as unreliable and dangerous entities that must be stopped by any means.

Over the last decades, changes in the power structure, changes of leadership and changes in patterns of amity and enmity have substantially shaped the dynamics of the Middle Eastern regional security complex. A notable example of this evolution is Israel’s elite-driven process of regional integration, most notably exemplified by the normalisation process with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain. What made the Abraham Accords particularly well-received was the perception of a process that extended beyond bilateral or case-specific agreements, a process of real integration that signalled the readiness among Arab elites to transform their covert acceptance of Israel into a formal one. The sight of Israeli, Egyptian, Emirati, Bahraini, and Moroccan policymakers meeting ordinarily in various multilateral summits demonstrated the degree of Israel’s increasing integration into the Middle East, a process entirely antithetical to the ‘villa in the jungle’ long-standing mindset. As of the time of writing, the Abraham Accords have withstood the Gaza war and the atrocities it has engendered.⁵⁵ Despite the war reaffirming the centrality of the Palestinian issue in regional politics, and exposing the limitations of the Accords’ premise – that reverting the sequencing of normalisation would produce a more sustainable outcome – no Arab state that has formalised relations with Israel has, as of yet, abrogated its normalisation agreement. This is in spite of growing domestic frustration in the UAE and Bahrain, and a more prominent condemnatory rhetoric from neighbouring countries, particularly Qatar, Kuwait and Oman, regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza.’⁵⁶

The momentum characterising relations between Israel and the Arab countries has been rising in parallel with the nuclear ambitions of two Gulf monarchies – notably the UAE and Saudi Arabia. In 2020, the first of four nuclear reactors commissioned by the South Korean Power Corporation, KEPCO, became operational, thereby formalising the UAE’s status as the first Arab country to have developed and opened a nuclear power plant.⁵⁷ As of today, three out of four units are connected to the grid. Ever since it initiated its nuclear programme in 2009, the UAE has been completely transparent about its scope and scale, which remains geared towards civilian use only. Among the arguments that support the UAE’s desire for nuclear power, there is the domestic necessity to meet increasing energy needs for an ever-expanding population and the broader interest in economic diversification amid the reconfiguration of global energy supplies. From an economic perspective, developing nuclear power demands long-term financing and no guarantees of future commercial sustainability, involving potential collateral costs and complex political hurdles.⁵⁸ Yet, the Emirati preference for nuclear power over more cost-effective and rapidly deployable forms of renewable energy must be analysed within the context of the region’s longer-term challenges, including demographic growth, water scarcity and environmental deterioration. The UAE population has been steadily increasing over the last decade, edging over 9.4 million in 2022, resulting in a boost in energy demand, which has more than doubled in the past ten years.⁵⁹ More than this, as Barry O’Neill argues, nuclear programmes are ‘public events’, and as such, they can be ‘natural bearers of prestige’.⁶⁰ The quest for ‘prestige’ – integral to the concept of regime legitimacy and stability – must be regarded as an important variable in the UAE development of a nuclear programme. As underlined by Professor Clive Jones, ‘the UAE regarded the acquisition of nuclear power as a key indicator of its developing technical prowess and growing regional influence, a necessary ingredient as seen from Abu Dhabi in the pursuit of modernity’.⁶¹ In this light, on the occasion of the opening of its first reactor in March 2020, a commentator argued:

[It] is more than an energy plant; it brings prosperity and value to the UAE with new industrial and human capacity; it significantly improves the carbon footprint and energy security of the nation, and accelerates the decarbonisation of the power sector to contribute to alleviating global climate change.⁶²

To ensure its complete transparency, the UAE initiated its civilian nuclear programme by signing an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards agreement in 2002. As already a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), in 2009, the UAE additionally concluded with the US the so-called ‘123’ nuclear cooperation agreement. Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 delineates the procedures and criteria for the negotiation of nuclear cooperation agreements. These agreements establish the framework for the US export of specific nuclear materials, equipment, and components of nuclear reactors for civilian purposes. The section also encompasses nine non-proliferation conditions, designed to ensure that these transfers are not utilised for military purposes.⁶³ The agreement signed by the UAE, however, included one additional condition that requires a broader restriction on any enrichment and reprocessing, rather than just US–obligated material.⁶⁴ This threshold, set as the so-called ‘Gold Standard’, opened the door for the UAE to engage in international nuclear cooperation, ultimately signing agreements for the transfer of technology, know-how, human capital, nuclear material, and facilities with Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom.⁶⁵ Moreover, by adhering to a US-led regime on nuclear technology, the UAE is aligning with its system of nuclear norms, thus guaranteeing the sole civilian scope of its programme.

In the case of Saudi Arabia, the interest in civilian nuclear technology dates back to the late 1970s. In 1977 the first nuclear research plant – the King Abd Al-Aziz Centre for Science and Technology (KAACST) – was constructed in Riyadh, marking the start of its civilian nuclear programme. In 1988, the Atomic Energy Research Institute was established, and soon after, the Kingdom signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was only in June 2011 that Saudi Arabia announced its extraordinarily ambitious plan to build 16 nuclear reactors over 20–25 years and therefore increase its nuclear production capacity to 17 GWe by 2040.⁶⁶ The structural factors behind the interest in nuclear power are quite familiar: energy security, economic diversification, demography, regional environmental challenges, but also the enhancement of domestic and regional prestige.⁶⁷ However, the Kingdom’s regional rivalry with Iran underlines an inherent element of securitisation within the nuclear programme. As the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz reportedly warned US officials in 2010, ‘if Iran succeeds in developing nuclear weapons, everyone in the region would do the same, including Saudi Arabia’.⁶⁸ The same narrative was further stressed by former Saudi Director of General Intelligence Prince Turki al-Faisal the following year, noting that in the event of an Iranian bomb, ‘It is our duty toward our nation and people, to consider all possible options, including the possession of these [nuclear] weapons.’⁶⁹ As noted by a commentator, ‘For Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the reactors are a matter of international prestige and power, a step towards matching the nuclear program of Shia rival Iran while quenching some of the Kingdom’s domestic thirst for energy.’⁷⁰ This logic helps explain the Kingdom’s intention to develop a front-end nuclear fuel-cycle infrastructure, with both a domestic and an international dimension, as reiterated by Saudi Arabian Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman last January.⁷¹ As a party to the NPT, Saudi Arabia signed a bilateral Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA in 2005 that encompasses all the country’s nuclear material; additionally, the Kingdom has in force a so-called ‘small quantities protocol’ (SQP) that ‘exempts the country from the obligation of hosting IAEA safeguards inspections, on the basis that the country has very little nuclear material and very few nuclear activities’.⁷² However, Saudi Arabia has so far been unwilling to adopt the IAEA Additional Protocol and, unlike the UAE, has refused to sign a ‘123 Agreement’ with the US. Taken together, the Saudi exercise of speech act vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear program, the insistence on fiercely claiming its right to enrich, and the status of Saudi Arabia’s nuclear safeguards make the Saudi a less linear case than the Emirati one.

The security-discourse trade-off

The effects of this changing regional security complex, and particularly Israel’s increasing integration in the region, have reverberated in the Israeli traditional nuclear orientalist discourse. The linguistic choice adopted by Israeli policymakers with regard to the emerging Arab nuclear programmes is strikingly different from the traditional one, based on relational comparisons aimed at delegitimising the ‘other’. Moreover, the emergence of the UAE civilian nuclear program and the Saudi nuclear plans to develop nuclear fuel-cycle independence have met relatively poor resistance from Israeli policy and security elites in stark contrast with its traditional maximalist stance. In the case of the UAE nuclear programme, Israel refrained from opposing the deal for peaceful nuclear cooperation that the Emiratis signed with the United States in 2009, which comprised the transfer of nuclear technology to the UAE for the building of a civilian nuclear plant. The UAE’s commitment to complete transparency regarding the programme’s scope and direction and its adherence to the ‘Gold Standard’ represented a sufficiently credible guarantee for Israel. In fact, according to testimony before a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, ‘It is worth noting, however, that every large reactor in the region – Iranian, Syrian, and Iraqi – has either been bombed or targeted with aerial attacks. In each case, the attacking state was concerned that weapons plutonium or uranium was either being or might be produced. This worry, perhaps more than any other, is why the United States insisted in 2009 that the UAE forswear enriching or reprocessing in the text of the nuclear cooperative agreement. It was understood that without such a legally binding pledge, the UAE’s program would be viewed warily by its neighbours.’⁷³

Nevertheless, even though the UAE has refrained from explicitly threatening so, the language in the current nuclear cooperative agreement with the US stipulates that if the latter seals an agreement which is more ‘favorable in scope and effect’ than the one secured by Abu Dhabi, the UAE has the right to demand ‘equal terms and conditions’.⁷⁴ In the past, Israel would not have tolerated a similar risk. However, the current relationship between Israel and the UAE seems to have altered Israel’s traditional narrative and, thus, modus operandi on the existence of an Arab civilian nuclear program.

As mentioned in the previous section, the Saudi case is more complex and more explicitly interrelated to the Iranian nuclear programme. Israel’s unofficial strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia is a central element in Israel’s shifting nuclear orientalist discourse. While Israel’s government has remained relatively quiet in response to various speculations of Saudi Arabia’s construction of yellowcake factories and uranium-conversion facilities in cooperation with China,⁷⁵ its counterproliferation policy has shifted towards a less conspicuous lobbying effort to prevent the Kingdom from enriching uranium on its territory. While the Obama administration had shown inflexibility on the Gold Standard commitment, the Trump administration signalled a willingness to soften its position on Saudi uranium enrichment in order to boost the US nuclear industry. It was in that context that Israel’s new counterproliferation policy was tangibly articulated. In March 2018, Prime Minister Netanyahu told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the President, and the Israeli cabinet that the United States should cut no nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia unless it clearly prohibits enrichment and reprocessing.⁷⁶ Israel’s position was further articulated in June 2018 by Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s former energy minister, when he claimed he ‘would support Saudi Arabia’s development of nuclear power only if it included the gold standard protections and if the kingdom purchases uranium from the United States’.⁷⁷ Steinitz expressed full confidence that the US would not relax non-proliferation standards in any deal with the KSA, tacitly implying that such a proposal would meet strong opposition in Congress. ‘Once you allow one country to enrich uranium or reprocess fuel, it will be extremely difficult to tell other countries in this vicinity or elsewhere in the world not to do so,’ he concluded. Some commentators suggested that through its media campaign, Israel was signalling to Saudi Arabia that it might be willing to bargain its influence in Congress to obtain increasing political, economic, and military ties with the Kingdom.⁷⁸ According to an Israeli report released on August 2020, ‘the Prime Minister’s Office was treating the matter with high levels of sensitivity due to concerns about harming Israel’s unofficial ties with Saudi Arabia’.⁷⁹ The same argument has been reiterated more recently. In May 2023, a senior Israeli political source declared to Al-Monitor, ‘Netanyahu is willing to pay a heavy price for an agreement with Saudi Arabia. This may include willingness to compromise on the issue of contacts and messengers, because time is pressing and there is a lot of work to be done.’⁸⁰

Conclusion

The emergence of a new regional security complex has contributed to altering the ‘villa in the jungle’ discourse, by which the civilised and democratic Israel and its barbaric and undemocratic Arab neighbourhood were entangled in an enduring conflict. Israel’s gradual formal integration in the region has entailed a radical change in Israel’s discourse towards the Arab ‘other’. In a speech at the INSS conference, former head of Mossad Yossi Cohen declared, ‘Normalization with Saudi Arabia is certainly possible. There is a new era in the Middle East of courageous leaders like Mohammed bin Zayed, like the Moroccan king, the Bahraini king – we can create something bigger and more important with them.’⁸¹ This, in turn, has caused the uncoupling and re-articulation of its nuclear orientalist discourse and the identities, role, and threats constructed by it. The Emirati and Saudi civilian nuclear projects have been immune from attributes such as ‘unreliable’, ‘threatening’, or ‘dangerous’. In the same way, their respective leaders have not been portrayed as ‘irresponsible’, ‘irrational’ or ‘unrestrained’. The ‘Islamic or Muslim bomb’ tropes no longer colour the descriptions of these countries’ nuclear aspirations. This has contributed to the reconstruction of their identities as legitimate, entitled nuclear actors. As a consequence, Israel’s counterproliferation policy has substantially shifted from a maximalist policy to a more pragmatic, low-profile lobbying one.

As mentioned above, a central feature of dichotomic discourses is the ‘negative interdependence’ between the identities. As Israel re-articulates the Arab nuclear identity, it threatens its own identity, which is consolidated in response. Premised that Israel’s identity within the nuclear order is rooted in a condition of regional isolation and existential threat, the exceptionality of its nuclear status and of its counterproliferation policy stand on the preservation of this status quo. However, as Israel’s predication of the ‘Arab’ changes, pushed by a reconfiguration of the regional security complex, the integrity of Israel’s identity as a ‘villa’, its nuclear exceptionality, its entitlement to preserve its regional nuclear monopoly and its immunity from scrutiny might slowly but significantly mutate.

Funding Statement

The author’s work on this article was funded by the European Research Council under grant number 866155.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.