Mitchell Plitnick
Mondaweiss / May 28, 2023
Saudi normalization with Israel could be used to press for Palestinian rights, but the Biden Administration will likely squander it for short-term political gain that further entrenches Israeli apartheid and endangers the region.
Once again, the buzz is growing around the idea of Israel and Saudi Arabia officially normalizing relations. The chances of this coming about are microscopically thin, however, because of the political obstacles in its path and, most of all, because there is little urgency for one of the parties — Saudi Arabia — to come to such an agreement any time soon.
In Ha’aretz on Tuesday, former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas stated :“That Israel and Saudi Arabia have a mutual interest in improving relations goes without saying. Arguing against it would be politically illogical. That the United States has an interest in such a development is a no-brainer as well.”
That’s true, as far as it goes, but it obscures the fact that each party has very different, sometimes conflicting, interests and that those interests vary widely in urgency. Oddly, the country that would seem to have the least to gain here is the United States, yet it is the Biden administration that is most passionately pursuing the Saudis and Israelis to come together.
U.S. interests ?
President Joe Biden seems to believe that getting the Saudis and Israelis together in a formal agreement will be a significant boon to his 2024 reelection ambitions. It’s frankly difficult to understand what gives him this idea, but he has it. It’s a mark of his lack of political acumen that he remains mired in a past politics where pro-Israel forces can be swayed significantly toward a Democratic party whose base is increasingly alienated from an authoritarian Israeli government.
Certainly, an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement would be a positive mark in Biden’s reelection pitch. It would give him a foreign policy win and would counter the growing concern in Washington that China—in the wake of its surprising and significant success brokering an Iranian-Saudi rapprochement—was rivaling the United States as the major foreign power in the Middle East.
But that’s about as far as Biden’s gains go, and it isn’t much. It will not convince hawkish groups like AIPAC that his administration is preferable to a Republican one that would likely try to give Israel more gifts like the ones Trump provided in such matters as recognition of Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights and moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It will not change the support of right wing Democratic groups like Democratic Majority for Israel, which will certainly support Biden with all they have as the best possible Democrat for the job in their view. It simply isn’t much of a priority, even with pro-Israel potential Democratic voters.
Even that meager gain would come at a cost. Liberal and even some moderate Democrats will be angered by the shoddy and shameful reversal by Biden of his once-lofty, though always dishonest, rhetoric around human rights and his claim that he would turn Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) into a “pariah” over his many human rights violations and especially the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Even more than Biden’s pitiful groveling before MBS last year, brokering this agreement would represent a clarity of cynicism that, while it won’t turn many to the even more amoral and immoral Republicans, will demonstrate the futility of expecting anything more from Democrats than being the slightly preferable party.
Yet Biden seems very serious about this, and it’s one of the few issues where he can find some Republican support. The GOP-controlled House Foreign Affairs Committee voted last week to advance a bill that would create an ambassador-level special envoy for the Abraham Accords and Secretary of State Antony Blinken is considering Dan Shapiro, Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Israel, for the role. This week, Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer and national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi are meeting with senior Biden administration officials to discuss Israel-Saudi normalization, among other issues. That comes on the heels of meetings last week between senior White House officials and Ronen Levy, the director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
That all indicates an urgency on the part of the Biden administration. But is it matched by similar enthusiasm among either the Israelis or Saudis?
Saudi Arabia in no hurry
Business between most Arab states and Israel has gone on for a long time, despite the existence of a technical, and largely ineffective Arab League boycott of Israel since 1945, before Israel was even created. In recent years, unofficial, clandestine cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Israel has emerged gradually from the shadows.
The downside of that for Israel is that Saudi Arabia is already getting most of what it wants from Israel. Economic and strategic cooperation mechanisms have been established and continue to function, and the military dimension will become less and less important over the coming years, assuming the new agreement between the Saudis and Iran hold up. Since the Saudi royal family, including MBS, know that full normalization with Israel outside a permanent agreement with the Palestinians will be deeply unpopular not only among the masses in the kingdom but also among a considerable portion of the royal family itself, they have every reason to proceed very slowly on normalizing with Israel.
This was what the Saudis were signaling recently when, addressing the last Arab League summit MBS stated that, “The Palestinian issue was and remains the central issue for Arab countries, and it is at the top of the kingdom’s priorities.”
The statement is false on its face, of course, as the Abraham Accords and Saudi Arabia’s own thaw in relations with Israel demonstrate. But it was intended to send a message to Israel and the United States that normalizing with Saudi Arabia would come only at a steep price.
MBS understands that the Saudis hold all the cards. The weakness Joe Biden demonstrated with his complete reversal on his attitude toward MBS means that Washington has few sticks to use with the Saudis, allowing MBS to ask for as many carrots as he can dream of. Now that a direct conflict between the kingdom and Iran is much less likely, MBS is free to hold out for the best deal possible in exchange for normalizing with Israel.
Will Saudi demands include Palestine ?
It is hard to imagine that anyone believes that MBS really cares about the Palestinian cause. Of course, if he were to win something significant for the Palestinians, it would add to his status in the Muslim and Arab world. Still, fully realizing Palestinian rights and freedoms, whether in an independent Palestinian state or in a single democratic state between the river and the sea, is far too much to hope for even if the Saudis get the proverbial king’s ransom for normalizing with Israel.
More likely, Palestine is a negotiating tactic for them. They know that the current Israeli government will collapse immediately if any concession that is more than cosmetic is made to the Palestinians. There is no way Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could make such a bargain at this time, even if he wanted to, which he likely does not.
The Saudis mostly want access to higher-scale U.S. weapons, enhanced military partnership with the United States, and U.S. aid in setting up a fully independent nuclear program with full enrichment capabilities. That’s an ambitious wish list, and doubtless, the Saudis know they will have to compromise on those demands if they want to get a deal done. And that’s where Palestine can enter the picture.
MBS is clearly envisioning a deal with Israel netting him the kind of benefits that will catapult both his kingdom and him into a position of unprecedented regional power. By setting his sights so high in terms of military and nuclear benefits from the U.S., MBS can justify compromises on those points in exchange for concessions to the Palestinians. Thus, he would gain not only strategic advantages, but also the prestige of having won something meaningful for the Palestinians, which would count for a lot in the Muslim world. He could also thus contrast Saudi normalization with Israel with those of the other Arab states, which netted nothing for the Palestinians, from Egypt in the 1980s to the Abraham Accords today.
MBS knows this Israeli government won’t give him that. But, unlike Netanyahu or Biden, MBS does not face popular elections every so often. He can afford to think in longer terms, and he has no reason to believe future elections in either the U.S. or Israel will bring in leaders less willing to grant him great gifts in exchange for his cooperation. On the contrary, it is very likely that future Israeli and American governments will have an easier time politically agreeing to his demands than the current ones do.
In and of itself, Pinkas was right to say that normalization benefits the Saudi, Israeli, and American governments’ interests. But there are costs for all of them as well. The Netanyahu government, which depends on the far-right Religious Zionism and Jewish Power parties, has red lines, which are so strict in terms of giving nothing to the Palestinians it puts all the burden for paying off the Saudis on Washington. For Riyadh, the benefits are clear, but they, much more than the UAE or Bahrain, have some stake in not appearing to abandon the Palestinian cause, so they can afford to wait for the right deal to come along.
The smallest benefits, ironically, accrue to the Biden administration. Their investment here is the result of a political miscalculation by the White House that overestimates the boon Saudi-Israeli normalization will be for Biden in 2024, combined with the correct assessment of some members of Congress—most notably Democrat and AIPAC shill Ritchie Torres of New York—that their efforts on Capitol Hill will benefit their own, more limited and narrow political ambitions.
The most important question is how badly Biden is misreading the political map, and, therefore, how willing he is to accommodate MBS’ demands. A true military alliance between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, as MBS desires, is a pipe dream, but upgraded access to U.S. weapons is a real possibility. That would be dangerous, and a nuclear program in Saudi Arabia that could produce a weapon would surely spur a competition with Israel and Iran, regardless of the improvements in relations between them and the Saudis.
Is Biden so deluded about the political significance of Israeli-Saudi normalization that he’d do such things? It’s hard to put it past him, given his horrific performance in the Middle East thus far. It makes far more sense for the United States to play a longer game, get MBS to reduce his military demands from Washington and, with a potential future Israeli government that might have some stake in finding some diplomatic steps with the Palestinians, supplant those demands with tangible gains for the Palestinians, such as ending the siege of Gaza.
Such thinking is both much too long-range and far too thoughtful and clever for Biden. The more likely outcome is that the United States will fail to understand that Saudi normalization with Israel is one of the last levers they have to press Israel to recognize Palestinian rights, and Washington will instead squander it for some short term, perceived political gain that will further entrench Israeli apartheid, make the region more dangerous, and possibly even draw the U.S. right back into the middle of regional conflict. Par for the course for U.S. Middle East policy.
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy; he is the co-author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
