.IChotiner and tomfriedman discuss what a U.S.-brokered peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel could look like, and what each country would stand to gain.
that the Biden Administration was “wrestling with whether to pursue the possibility of a U.S.-Saudi mutual security pact that would involve Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel.” The pact, Friedman wrote, would entail Israeli “concessions to the Palestinians that would preserve the possibility of a two-state solution.
At some point, and I can’t tell you where, these two things fused into the notion of a kind of three-way deal. This was being discussed on a low burn for, say, six months or so. And when I interviewed President Biden, I simply asked where it stood. It was very clear that the President was struggling with whether to go ahead with this. He has a complicated relationship with Saudi Arabia, given M.B.S.’s involvement in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. And so he was obviously wrestling with it.
The reason I was interested in M.B.S. when he took power was because he was clearly out to reverse 1979. It’s hard to imagine something more geopolitically important to both the Middle East and the West. Saudi Arabia is not a democracy. It has nothing to do with that. But it does have to do with fundamentally reshaping what is broadcast and exported from the keeper of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina.
Exactly. It would have to do with all the conditionality on all the issues you just outlined. And I don’t think we’re anywhere near knowing that yet.The Saudis see an interest strategically and economically in forging closer ties with Israel, most important as a counterweight to Iran. And access to Israeli cyber technologies, which I’m sure are good for controlling people at home.And as a trading partner.
You write, “If the United States forges a security alliance with Saudi Arabia—on the conditions that it normalize relations with Israel and that Israel make meaningful concessions to the Palestinians—Netanyahu’s ruling coalition of Jewish supremacists and religious extremists would have to answer this question: You can annex the West Bank, or you can have peace with Saudi Arabia and the whole Muslim world, but you can’t have both, so which will it be?” It is just very, very hard for me to...
Let me ask you a broader question. When you go back to the Camp David Accords, or when you think about the history of Israel and the Muslim world, specifically the Arab world, the idea that you could have normalized relations between Israel and the Arab world in exchange for some sort of resolution of the Palestinian issue, where Palestinians would be able to control their own destiny, strikes me as an incredibly valuable thing.
Isaac, I’ve spent thirty years trying to rip the face off that fiction and get our government to speak out much more forcefully. As I said in the last column, could we get away from “I'm deeply troubled about your settlements.” I hate it all. It’s all been a disaster. I think it’s bad for Israel, bad for the Palestinians, bad for the Arab world, bad for America.
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