The status of IMEC, or India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor, may be the best indicator of who’s winning the current war in the Middle East, and how prepared the region is for worse crises ahead. The basic concept — a fast-transport corridor linking India to Europe overland across the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, before entering the European market — was ahead of its time when announced at the G20 in New Delhi. In the months and years that followed, Iran and its Houthi client-proxies demonstrated how two critical global trade corridors, the Arab/Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, could be “choked.”

IMEC was, from the start, and in its framing, a way to activate and demonstrate a “peace dividend” from the 2020 Abraham Accords — the promise that physical and economic and environmental linkages will generate prosperity across the board, while solidifying a Gulf Arab-Israel front against Iran. The IMEC was soon linked to other initiatives, first Project Prosperity, a proposed water-for-energy “swap” of Jordanian solar power for Israeli-desalinated water, which aspired to eventually bring Gaza and the Palestinians in both as producers and beneficiaries. Project Prosperity has evolved with events into a prosperity and resilience strategy more closely tied to IMEC [see an interactive map produced by EcoPeace Middle East].

Technically, and in a world of collective rationality, the IMEC and its auxiliary efforts constitute a beautiful plan. They generate economic and environmental interdependencies which — if implemented — would likely greatly decrease the risk of war, not only within its catchment area, but within the broader region, all of this in the context of an encroaching threat that will soon require regional collective action to prevent collective harm on a much larger scale. In other words, even if the Middle East were not already wracked with divisions, a means would need to be found to overcome them, to face the resource deficits ahead.

The problem, of course, is that the Middle East is not driven by collective rationality. And the binding constraint was never funds, customs integration, or technical challenges, even if non-trivial. It is political will — primarily the will to resolve the Palestinian question. Everything else, in some sense, is a downstream problem.

IMEC is arguably the single most valuable piece of connective infrastructure the Abraham Accords produced. But its paralysis is a reflection of the Accords’ Achilles heel — the deferral of a notionally agreed, concrete pathway to a Palestinian state. With little progress on that front in the three years after the Accords were signed, and Israel’s over-confidence in its own understanding of dynamics on the ground, the chances of a spoiler event rose dramatically.

Iran already saw the accords as a direct threat to its regional influence; Palestinians saw them as a threat to current and future sovereignty. The result was Hamas’ massacre of Israelis on 10/7, which incited Israel’s invasion and war on Gaza and resulting mass casualties (those following my writing know I condemn both).

Netanyahu’s extension of the war on Hamas to Iran, and its other client-proxies, also followed a historical logic: Netanyahu, as part of his own political calculus, has spent decades framing Iran as Israel’s existential problem, with the Palestinian issue secondary. In line with this, he supported Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority to scuttle a unified Palestinian government. Netanyahu’s response, and its enormous civilian toll, froze the Abraham Accords in place.

The war then spilled into the water: the Yemeni Houthis, as a member of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” began striking Israel and Red Sea shipping, perpetrating what may be the cheapest de facto maritime blockade in history of one of the chokepoints IMEC was meant to relieve. Almost inevitably, the Israel-Gaza war escalated into an Iran regime-change effort by Israel and the US. This, as we know, resulted in Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, further demonstrating the value of land-based bypasses.

Under other circumstances this would have been to the benefit of IMEC, but so far it has energized competing corridor and pipeline projects, notably the Iraq-Europe Development Road which aims to connect the Iraqi Gulf port of Al Faw to the Mediterranean at the Turkish port of Mersin, nearly 300 miles north of Israel, bypassing Hormuz, Bab Al Mandeb — and Israel. Another route, the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC), transits Russia and Iran, but the war has stalled the Iran segment.

The Development Road is backed by several Gulf states (UAE — a stakeholder in IMEC—, Qatar, and allegedly Oman, who increasingly see the advantage of a route that does not put Israel literally at the center of the network. Since the collapse of the Oslo Accords around the turn of the millennium, and the rise of Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition, Israel subjugated the Palestinian question to a single overriding objective: denying Iran the bomb. That hard-coded logic culminated in the 2025–26 strikes on Iran.

Israel’s Pyrrhic Victory

Now, three years later, the Iranian regime may be both more fractured and less tempered. Even degraded, its government retains the ability to project power through proxies, missiles, and now has its hands on Hormuz. A regime with fewer restraints — and possibly, both the capacity and incentive to produce a small number of nuclear weapons (the inspections regime was never so tight as to rule out other clandestine projects, and the highly enriched uranium has not been fully accounted for) — is an outcome that suits neither Israel nor the Arab states. If allowed, Iran will almost certainly push for maximum conventional rearmament. While not at the top of Israeli concerns, Project Prosperity, as originally articulated, is moribund — with Jordan pursuing its own national desalination alternative, the Aqaba–Amman Water Desalination and Conveyance Project (AAWDC), via the Red Sea.

Israel has not captured the Abraham Accord premia for a simple reason: it never paid the fee. And six years on from the Accords, both the Iranian and the Palestinian problems are different, but not at all clearly better — certainly not for the Palestinians, or the Iranian people, but possibly for the Iranian leadership, that of which remains. Rationally, the best way to treat the Iranian problem, I have argued, is to tackle the Palestinian problem directly and humanely, and support the Gulf in treating the Iranian problem (see [”The Split Hinge”] summary below). I know this is a tall ask, but historical forces are often opaque until visible, and IMEC is relevant.

Without direct Israeli involvement in a Palestinian deal, the Arab Gulf States (principally the UAE and Saudi Arabia) have fewer options to manage their own Iranian dilemma, having been fired upon by Tehran and more or less told by Washington to fend for themselves. The alternative is hedges, side deals, deepening Gulf rifts, an Israel further ostracized, and an Iran reconstituting its powers — which the current US framework seems to encourage, or at least, doesn’t strictly discourage or meter.

But these concerns are, and always have been, a major argument for integration, not against it. Atomization — every state focusing on its own objectives, and eschewing cooperation — is the condition in which Iran and its proxies thrive, because it leaves each actor isolated at its most vulnerable point.

Integration does the opposite: a corridor that binds the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Europe into shared infrastructure raises the cost of disruption for everyone and gives a widening circle of states a stake in keeping the region stable. Connectivity is not the soft alternative to security. Over time, it is the more durable form. And the encroaching threat behind all of it is environmental: as climate pressure builds, the regional choice narrows to collaborate, migrate, or perish.

A Choice

It is telling that the strongest support for IMEC comes from the origin and destination states: India, which deepens market access and connectivity with its key trading partners, and various European countries, who stand to benefit from associated renewable energy production and distribution. In the corridor’s broader energy vision, Gulf-produced renewable power and green hydrogen could one day supply a meaningful share of Europe’s needs. The US has been a supporter, but a qualified one. Commitments are weakest at the center — Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan — where there’s a $5 billion hole. Detractors point to that gap as proof of poor viability, but that is a red herring: $5 billion is a trivial sum against what the corridor represents in future trade and investment, and it is exactly the kind of hole that political will fills automatically. The funding was never the constraint. The will to embrace the full framework is.

There is a further point, largely unspoken: through Project Prosperity and the broader energy-export links, IMEC amounts to a more concrete plan for the economic regeneration and resource sustainability of Gaza than almost anything produced since the ceasefire. The infrastructure that would bind the region economically is also, not incidentally, the infrastructure that could give Gaza power, water, and a place in a regional trade corridor — rather than permanent dependency.

The Runaround Is Happening

For Israel, the outcome of the war in Iran complicates things, as insecurity feeds isolationism; but the IMEC also represents the physical manifestation of a choice: give up a connectivity architecture that includes Israel and decreases insecurity — or go it alone. Netanyahu signed the Abraham Accords, not because he believed in the vision of regional integration, but because he could sell a broader Arab ‘acceptance’ of Israel to his constituents — as long as he didn’t have to pay real political currency for it. Now, everyone in the region has to pay — including tankers and containerships that used to transit Hormuz for free.

Even if others aren’t making decisions, the Israeli public is critical to the IMEC’s future. At least in theory, it has the capacity to decide what kind of future it wants — connected and prosperous, or isolated and vulnerable. What that choice requires is almost certainly is leadership, with a vision that starts with outreach and focuses on the practical means of facilitating reconstruction in Gaza, building strong infrastructure while preserving Israeli security interests.

That is a hard thing to sell to a public that has experience its own version of collective trauma, sees itself as an island, and deeply mistrusts the Palestinians, of course Iran — and its own leadership . Whether Israel “won” in Iran or not, a decision would still need to be taken, whether actively or passively. An unambiguous victory in Iran, always unlikely, would only have provided the temptation to ignore what wasn’t working closer to home. It’s always easier to be against something than for it.

But as a growing number of Israelis are pointing out, loss of the IMEC may be evidence of something much more problematic: a regional bypass of Israel — which is, incidentally, exactly what Hamas and Iran were after from the start. Without an American safety net, Israel is in a similar position as the Gulf states — it will have to live with the consequences of its own decisions. Under those cir