Let us walk through the streets of the Arab world -from glitzy downtown Dubai to the slums of Cairo- to conduct an insightful, albeit theoretical, poll. The results might be astonishing. If the drill question is: “who is the traditional enemy of the Arab world?”, a loose term meaning the majority Sunni States, the predictable reply would be: Israel. But if the question is: “who would you consider an immediate threat to your country?”. The unequivocal answer would be: Iran, not Israel.

The commentary of armchair Middle East experts would be as patterned as the answer to our first question in the ‘virtual’ poll. Pundits would posit that such animosity towards Iran is due to the Sunni-Shia’s rivalry that ensnarls the Middle East. Others would trace such enmity back to the Persian-Arabian clash of civilizations. While such arguments have merits, they fail to grasp the gravity of the second answer to our ‘virtual’ poll. The fact that Iran has wrestled the top spot for Arab hostility from Israel, a spot held firmly since 1948.

Let us analyze this for a moment.

For decades, the Sunni-Shia’s divide did not prevent the Arab world from cooperating with Iran. Saudi Arabia established diplomatic relations with Iran in 1929. Late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and the Shah closely collaborated on the establishment of multinational Islamic institutions, including the Organization of the Islamic World Congress, the Muslim World League, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. On another level, whilst Arabs and Persians have clashed since the Sassanian Empire (224-651), they equally have interacted and cooperated for centuries. Reading the same Iranian poetry of Khayyam and the philosophy of Al Farabi and Al Ghazali, and relying on the most prominent grammarian of Arabic, the Persian-born Sibawayh (an ancient Noah Webster) to conserve the purity of their words. Persian converts to Islam naturally turned to the script of the Koran and finally, Pahlavi alphabet has been abandoned in favor of the Arabic.

Undisputedly, the Middle East has been the ‘bête noire’ of international diplomacy starting from the second-half of the 20th century. The region’s complexities have dogged experts from the UN Security Council to the US Council on Foreign Relations, and every foreign Chancellery in between. In their midst, regional conflicts have generated numerable preconceived ideas that have the ring of dogma. One such canon is deeply-rooted sectarianism that plagues the region’s different ethnic components. “They hate each other’s and they have done so for thousands of years”, is some sort of conventional wisdom not an informed analysis. But hatred between religious or ethnically diverse groups is a sad reality hardly confined to Sunnis and Shia’s, or to Persians and Arabs for that matter. It is a recurring theme from the high plateaus of Kashmir, to the Venus island of Cyprus, and from the street alleys of Northern Ireland to the neighborhoods of Marseilles, Birmingham, and Beirut. Undoubtedly, religious antagonism causes severe frictions between varied groups living side by side, but it cannot warrant an all-out war between nations. Surely, more is at stake.

What is really at stake?

The Arabs’ legitimate fear of today’s Iran –more than Israel- is premised on a myriad of reasons unswervingly related to the latter’s expansionist plans, not to its Shia branch of Islam.

The Nuclear Threat. Since the mid-1960s Israel has had a nuclear device with which it did not menace its Arab neighbors, even at the apex of Arab-Israeli wars. Conversely, Iran has frequently threatened to ‘wipe-out Israel’ and flaunted its nuclear capability to bully Arab neighbors into submission. Iran has a uranium stockpile to create eight to ten nuclear bombs. According to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA) signed on July 14, 2015, Iran must reduce its uranium stockpile below the enr...