Israel needs divorce from the Palestinians much more urgently more than a wedding with Saudi Arabia.
To understand the depth of cynicism Israel is dealing with, consider the following: Before the November 2022 election candidate Netanyahu scuttled a deal to get a major Haredi subsect to adopt a core curriculum enabling its youngsters to be employable. He promised reckless rabbis eager to keep their flock dependent that if victorious he would demand no such thing, and for a change it is a promise he has kept.
Polls in Israel are fairly accurate, and all of them show that Netanyahu would be crushed in an election today . The authoritarian project, with its attendant economic and societal damage, are proving a bridge too far for the electorate. At least a fifth of the right-wing vote has migrated to centrist parties eager to remove the prime minister.
Israel's face to the world would become that of the current finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a"minister in the defense ministry"; he is a zealot who yearns for Jewish-Arab segregation in maternity wards, wants religious law to reign supreme, recently called for a Palestinian village to be"erased," and in recent days cancelled significant funding to Israeli Arab towns claiming that was his"ideology.
So, sure: Israel could benefit from having an additional friend in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia is an important and oil-rich country, and if it joined the Abraham Accords this would go a long way towards making acceptance of the Jewish state the norm in the Middle East, achieving a key goal of Zionism.
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