In a televised speech on Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu revealed that Israeli intelligence spirited tens of thousands of documents, both physical and digital, out of Iran’s secret nuclear archive. Among these data, said the prime minister, is evidence that the Islamic Republic had been working on developing atomic weapons long after 2003, contrary to the claims it made as part of the 2015 nuclear deal. David Horovitz explains why these revelations matter:

Netanyahu did not seek to claim that Israel had attained smoking-gun evidence that Iran has breached the terms of the . . . 2015 agreement with the ayatollahs. The critics sneering at his ostensible failure to produce a post-2015 smoking gun are—deliberately, as is their wont—missing the point. . . .

It is Israel’s deeply unhappy assessment that the deal is so negligent, so misconceived, so badly constructed, that the Iranians have no need whatsoever to breach it. . . . Why, after all, would they violate the terms of an agreement that, while ostensibly designed to ensure they cannot achieve a nuclear-weapons arsenal, nonetheless entitles them to continue research and development of centrifuges to enrich uranium so that when the deal’s terms expire, they will have mastered an enrichment process ten times faster than the process they had managed before the deal came into force? (They’re already boasting, not incidentally, that they have accelerated the process since they signed the accord.)

Why would they violate the terms of an agreement that does not prevent them from continuing to develop their ballistic-missile program—the means of delivery for their anticipated nuclear devices—to bring Europe and the United States into range? Why would they violate the terms of an agreement that left significant parts of their nuclear program intact? . . . Israel’s contention is not that Iran is breaching the deal. It is, rather, that this agreement, far from preventing Iran from attaining a nuclear-weapons arsenal, paves Iran’s path to it. . . .

Netanyahu’s critics further assert that there was nothing new in the material he presented—nothing new in the showcasing of Iran’s own evidence of its deceit, and of the specifics of its nuclear-weapons program. First of all, that criticism is patently false. The International Atomic Energy Agency, in its own reporting, has never claimed to have attained remotely comparable access to Iran’s own documentation. . . . [S]econdly, if it is the [deal’s Western negotiators’] contention that they knew every detail of the program as now conclusively presented by Netanyahu, and knew therefore the precise extent of Iran’s duplicity, then how could they possibly have negotiated so lax an accord with the ayatollahs?

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.