Mitchell Plitnick
Mondoweiss / August 2, 2023
The Biden administration’s reported efforts to broker a normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel are cause for genuine alarm and could make the already horrifying situation for Palestinians much worse.
Talk of the United States brokering a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel has heated up again. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan visited Saudi Arabia last week, just days after Mossad chief David Barnea held secret meetings in Washington with top White House and CIA staff. Those events prompted Tom Friedman to try asserting his relevance again and brought the normalization idea back into the public discourse.
Friedman’s latest piece on the subject revealed no facts that have not been discussed by many, including this author, for months. But while Friedman may have lost much of his stature in Washington in recent years, some older Washington hands — often those who are out of touch with the more recent state of play in foreign affairs — still see him as a prime pundit on policy. U.S. President Joe Biden falls into that category, and if any of the wild speculation Friedman put out was in any way based on something he might have heard from Biden, it is cause for genuine alarm.
Friedman takes the normalization talks — which are being pressed by the Biden administration far more than by either Israel or Saudi Arabia — to new heights and presents them as a way to not only resolve the current crisis over Israel’s Jewish-only democracy, but even to finally put a stop to all settlement expansion. As we will see, Friedman’s idea is pure fantasy, but if it is even pursued in the smallest way by Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, it could make the already horrifying situation for Palestinians much worse.Onderkant formulier
An initiative based on a fantasy
The chances of a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia being consummated are so long as to be almost invisible. Yet they are not zero for one reason: the possibility that Biden is willing to pay an astronomical price to get the Saudis to agree.
The Saudis have set the price for normalization so high it is tantamount to charging a million dollars for a used Honda. Friedman listed their demands accurately:
- A mutual security agreement that would commit the United States to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense if it is attacked;
- A civilian nuclear program, monitored by the United States;
- The ability to purchase more advanced U.S. weapons.
Friedman glossed over the fourth demand the Saudis would have, and that would be something tangible for the Palestinians that would make a real difference and that Israel could neither renege on nor revoke. While he correctly noted that the Palestinians would be expected to support Saudi Arabia’s normalization with Israel (another unlikely proposition, especially after their fuming at the UAE when they entered the Abraham Accords), he expects them to do so for his typically condescending reasons.
“Truth be told, the Palestinian Authority is in no position to engage in peace talks with Israel today,” he wrote. “It’s a mess. The Palestinians need to remake their government, but in the meantime, the far-right ministers in Israel’s cabinet are trying to absorb as much of the West Bank as fast as they can.”
Friedman does not mention how the mess came to be, the decades of the United States undermining the Palestinian Authority at every turn, and no agreement between the PA and Israel ever being worth the paper it was printed on unless Israel could use it for its own ends. That Mahmoud Abbas and the PA have gone along with this and continued to work as subcontractors of the occupation is shameful, but it is precisely that which Friedman is counting on. Because without a full resolution that granted the Palestinians their rights and freedom, a Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement would mean they have no leverage in the Arab world left at all.
Yet even getting to the point where the PA would be pressured to give its rubber stamp on a deal is unrealistic. For one thing, no matter how sweet the deal was for Israel, a real commitment to anything more than a token nod to the Palestinians will certainly lead to the collapse of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, and he cannot allow that to happen. Down that path lies a prison sentence for the corrupt head of state.
It should also be noted that normalization with Israel is not the enticing prospect it may once have been. As I reported in June, the countries that entered the Abraham Accords feel an ever-increasing sense of buyer’s remorse. A report this week in Bloomberg confirms the regrets the Abraham Accords states are feeling.
“This is not part of the vision some in the Abraham Accords had — Israel wanted it as an anti-Iranian axis,” Bloomberg quotes Aziz Alghashian, a Saudi analyst who studies Saudi policy toward Israel. “The region is moving in a different direction now.” He later added that the UAE’s experience with Israel has made Saudi Arabia more cautious. “It realized the limitations of working with Israel,” he said.
And the Saudis have no reason to lower their asking price for the foreseeable future. In terms of principle, they have no more devotion to the Palestinian cause than other Arab states, but they are in a very different position on the issue than, for example, the UAE or Bahrain. Unlike those countries, Saudi Arabia fancies itself a leader not only of the Arab world but the whole Muslim world. Many Muslims don’t see the kingdom that way, but in any case, the Saudis would be crippled by completely abandoning the Palestinians.
The Saudis also have time. They already coordinate, through the U.S., with Israel on security and clandestinely do business with the Jewish state. They are in no hurry to take this diplomatic step that carries more risk than potential benefit.
As Firas Maksad of the Middle East Institute put it, “This new push for normalization, because…the U.S. administration would like to deliver before next year is I feel divorced from the political reality on the Israeli/Palestinian side.”
Cui bono ?
Maksad touches on an important point here. The press for this normalization to happen soon is entirely coming from Washington. Existing Israeli-Saudi cooperation works well for both of those countries, and both face significant political obstacles in pushing normalization too far too fast. But Joe Biden incorrectly sees major political gain in a normalization deal.
The U.S. has, by far, the least to gain out of such a deal, yet Biden is pressing forward with an almost fanatical zeal. His desperation to do this soon can only be driven by perceived electoral interests. That should be a major concern for every American for several reasons.
First, every one of Saudi Arabia’s demands should be a non-starter. The fact that they aren’t is not only a betrayal of everything Biden has said about Saudi Arabia and his foreign policy in general since he was first campaigning for the White House but also deeply antithetical to genuine U.S. and global security concerns.
Saudi Arabia has demonstrated that it will not hesitate to turn to devastating military force to defend its perceived interests, and the result has been the utter devastation of the poorest country in the region, Yemen. The United States was a willing partner in that effort, but the Saudis resisted later U.S. efforts to draw down the war. Granting that country access to a much higher level of U.S. weaponry than it already has will only embolden an already aggressive Saudi regime. Plus, it will create great pressure on Saudi rivals in the region (Iran, obviously, but also the UAE) to upgrade their own capabilities in response.
The Saudi demand for a civilian nuclear program is an on-ramp to a potential dual-use program, and it should not be lost that the Saudis are insisting on U.S., not international, monitoring of such a program. Mohammed Bin Salman is playing the long game here, recognizing that subsequent American administrations might be willing to allow higher enrichment of uranium and research into potential weapons delivery systems. That means Saudi could become a nuclear threshold state in short order, given the right politics in Washington.
The demand for a security pact that would, like NATO’s Article 5, commit the United States to defend Saudi Arabia in the event of an attack against it is an actual non-starter. It would require a treaty-level commitment, and Congress would never agree to it. Even Israel doesn’t enjoy that kind of commitment from the U.S. Still, the fact that it is even still being discussed is a worrying indicator of just how much of the U.S. interest Biden is willing to sell out here.
Biden is not only playing with U.S. interests here but also global ones. If he were to agree to any part of the Saudi demands, he would surely expect them to pull back from their growing relationship with China. Israeli journalist Tal Schneider suggests that, “What the U.S. really wants is a complete severance of the growing ties between Saudi Arabia and China, and between the Saudis and the Iranians.” While this may not be as central to Biden’s thinking as the potential electoral benefits he thinks he’ll get, it certainly plays into his generally belligerent approach to China. It is very much in line with Biden’s approach to foreign policy to reverse the reduction in tension in the Gulf that the Chinese deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia recently created. That it would greatly increase the possibility of conflict in the Gulf would be of little concern, apparently.
Even all of that isn’t the most irrational part of Biden’s behavior. The political gain that he apparently thinks he can win if he accomplishes his goal is simply not what he believes it to be.
Democrats have created a situation where Biden, a deeply unpopular incumbent, cannot be realistically challenged in a primary election. Between the party’s refusal to hold debates and the pressure on Democratic politicians to essentially anoint Biden the nominee, the only challengers are two outsiders, Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who cannot muster the sort of political and financial backing to challenge Biden in a primary campaign.
Yet Biden polls in a virtual dead heat with Donald Trump, a worrying figure since the oddball electoral system in the United States generally requires Democrats to win the popular vote decisively in order to win the electoral vote even barely. Hence Trump’s election in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by a decent margin.
As a result, Biden feels he needs to find every political edge he can. Biden believes Israeli-Saudi normalization will win him votes and backing.
He’s wrong, and the reasons are obvious. While Israeli-Saudi normalization would certainly be a foreign policy win for him and a positive (the harm it would do to the Palestinians is unlikely to register for the vast majority of Americans) among supporters of Israel, they are not going to change their allegiance much because of it. Biden, of course, already has the support of liberal Zionists and the casual pro-Israel Democrats and centrists. But pro-Netanyahu sectors — even those who might support a hard line but stop short of the extremism of the current government — prefer Republicans, not because of a specific policy but because Republicans support Israel’s repression of Palestinians and its generally aggressive and hubristic stances.
None of that will change because of normalization, any more than it did with the Abraham Accords. Trump’s conclusion of that deal didn’t move the needle, and neither has Biden’s support for the deals. For the vast majority of Americans, Palestine and Israel are not voting issues, and for those for whom it is, they are committed to one side or the other.
Biden is frantically trying to subvert American interests — even as they are defined in cold, geo-political terms — for delusional gain. And it is that delusional thinking that should be concerning all of us, inside and outside of the United States and the Middle East.
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
