Last summer, Turkey and Israel, at American urging, concluded a reconciliation agreement that ended over six years of hostility between the former allies. Pursuant to that agreement, Ankara pledged to end its support for Hamas and expelled Saleh al-Arouri, the country’s most senior Hamas official. Yoav Zitun notes that President Erdogan has nevertheless not lived up to his end of the bargain:

Hamas’s main activity in Turkey is coordinating terror cells in the West Bank. . . . Arouri’s successors are [also] recruiting Palestinian students to study in Muslim countries in general and Turkey in particular. The students are then sent for military training to Lebanon or Syria and from there return to the West Bank to carry out attacks against Israel.

For example, two months ago, the IDF and Shin Bet, [Israel’s internal security service], detained a Palestinian who had been living in Turkish Cyprus for several years. In August 2015, [he] was recruited in Jordan by Hamas [and] given military training and explosives expertise. During a meeting with Hamas operatives in Istanbul last January, he was instructed to recruit terrorists in the West Bank using encrypted memory cards.

Another highly publicized case concerns Muhammad Murtaja, who was head of a humanitarian aid organization in Gaza run by the Turkish government. According to the Shin Bet, following his arrest Murtaja was accused of transferring to Hamas operatives millions of dollars that were donated by Ankara.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.