Saudi Arabia has refused to recognize Israel since the Jewish state’s founding in 1948. The Sunni kingdom backed other Arab countries in their early wars with Israel and was long a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause. In recent years, however, as the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate has dragged on and
Iran’s regional influence has grown, Saudi priorities have shifted. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, now Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, is also
reportedly less attached to the Palestinian cause than his father, King Salman. Riyadh
has also cut its financial aid to the Palestinian Authority.
Just last September, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu announced in a speech at the United Nations that his country was “at the cusp” of a “historic peace” with Saudi Arabia and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told
Fox News that “every day we get closer” to normalization. The stumbling block that prevented it from happening back then was the Palestinian issue: While Netanyahu badly wanted the deal, it wasn’t clear he was willing or politically able, given his hard-right coalition, to give enough ground on the issue of a two-state solution to satisfy either the Saudis or the Americans.
(The September speech was the probable cause for the attacks in Israel on October 7th.)
The sought-after prize for Biden's administration’s Mideast diplomacy has been, as it was for Trump’s, an ambitious three-way normalization deal. As part of the agreement, the US would give Saudi Arabia security guarantees modeled on the defense pacts it has with non-NATO countries like Japan and South Korea. According to a column this week from the New York Times’ Tom Friedman, the US and Saudi sides are “
90 percent done with the mutual defense treaty.” The deal also reportedly includes US assistance to help Saudi Arabia build a civilian nuclear program, something that the country has long sought for its own economy, but which critics fear could be converted quickly into a weapons program. The deal may also include US investments in Saudi Arabia’s technology sector and a pledge by the Saudis to continue pricing their oil in US dollars rather than Chinese currency.
A deal like this with the United States would be a big ask for any country; the US hasn’t agreed to a pact like this with any
country since Japan in 1960, and much less one as controversial as Saudi Arabia, which only recently extricated itself from a long and brutal war in neighboring Yemen and has had diplomatic crises with several other countries in recent years. The Biden administration may believe the deal is worthwhile on purely realist
national security grounds, but likely the only way it could be sold in
Congress — particularly among members of Biden’s own party, who have generally been more critical of the Saudis — is if it’s tied to meaningful progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The official Saudi position, dating back to a
2002 agreement known as the Arab Peace Initiative, is that it will establish relations with Israel only after the “establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state.” Israel wouldn’t have to go quite that far in the deal under discussion — nor is there any chance it would — but it would have to commit to what Blinken has called a “
practical pathway” toward a Palestinian state. It’s not clear exactly what this pathway would look like in practice, but to satisfy the Saudis, the Israeli commitment toward restarting two-state talks would have to be “very serious,”
Ali Shihabi, a Saudi commentator and analyst close to the royal court, told
Vox
This was the main stumbling block when the three parties appeared close to an agreement last fall. Netanyahu
has boasted of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state and at times has
supported fully annexing the
West Bank. Still, as strident as he can sound, Netanyahu’s firmly held positions should be taken with a grain of salt: He also
briefly accepted the idea of Palestinian statehood, in principle, with significant conditions and limitations, back in 2009.
But the same cannot be said of his right-wing coalition partners. In particular, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a West Bank settler, “would rather jump off the Azrieli Tower than agree to land transfers,”
David Makovsky, an expert on Arab-Israeli relations at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy,
told me last September, referring to a well-known Tel Aviv skyscraper. Accepting this deal could mean Netanyahu losing his coalition and then his job, which, given his
current legal troubles, could land him back in court or even jail.
Maybe they have bits fall off as per their aircraft.
