The scene: Two combat jets race through the night sky on opposite sides of the Saudi-Jordanian border. In one cockpit, a pilot from the Royal Saudi Air Force. In the other, one of Israel’s top air commanders. For most of modern Middle East history,
this might have been the prelude to a mid-air dogfight waged by combatants in one of the region’s multiple wars pitting the Jewish state against its Arab neighbors. But on the evening of April 13, 2024, a radically different scenario was unfolding. Rather than enemies, these pilots were part of a remarkable multinational coalition,
mobilized under American auspices, to defend Israel against a massive Iranian aerial assault involving more than 300 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones—among the largest barrages in the history of warfare. Rather than firing at each other, the Israeli and Saudi jets were on a shared mission of hunting down and neutralizing hundreds of incoming Iranian projectiles.
More than a year later, fully comprehending and assessing the monumental nature of what transpired that evening remains something of a challenge. Since the shocking Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, Israel has been at war for 20 months, fighting at times on up to seven fronts against Iran and its network of heavily armed proxy groups in Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.
The rush of daily events, battles, death, destruction, and geopolitical disruptions has been relentless and oftentimes overwhelming. No sooner does one extraordinary development occur only to be overtaken or overshadowed by the next day’s crisis. In the face of that kind of information onslaught, it’s all too easy, especially with the passage of time, to lose sight of the history-making nature of any given moment in the conflict’s extended timeline.
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