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President Biden’s top advisers rushed Sunday to reaffirm their commitment to the idea of possible normalization of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, even as Israel prepares for the start of a full-scale war against Palestinian militants.
On several American talk shows, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken presented normalization as a choice between regional peace and terrorism carried out by Hamas, the militant group in Gaza.
“It would really change the prospects of the entire region going forward,” Blinken said on CBS News of expanding Israel’s relations with Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, the region’s most powerful Sunni Muslim nation. “Now, who is opposed to that? Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran. So, I think that says a lot. And there are really two paths before the region.”
Blinken added an important caveat: The push for a diplomatic deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia could not replace a two-state solution to address the needs of the Palestinians.
But U.S. officials have been unable to make progress in that direction for decades. Thus, in both the Trump and Biden administrations, a major diplomatic effort in the Middle East has been to promote normalization between Israel and Arab nations, without Palestinian officials and representatives playing any real role in the talks.
The theory of some American and Israeli officials and Arab leaders was that such agreements, in the form of the Abraham Accords, would help isolate and suppress the Palestinian question, which they considered an intractable problem. Jared Kushner, son-in-law of former President Donald J. Trump and a White House adviser who helped forge the agreements, was a leading proponent of that thinking.
For critics, that has been the crux of the problem and one of the reasons the United States and Israel were blindsided by the Hamas attack on Saturday. The crowds of civilians in Gaza cheering Hamas fighters underscored the extent of anti-Israel hostility among Palestinians, hostility that American, Israeli and Arab officials have tried to ignore for years as they pushed normalization talks and what the administration Biden has called it “regional integration.” .”
“Before the Hamas attack on Israel, there was a bipartisan agreement, shared by most of the American foreign policy establishment, that the question of Palestine no longer matters in the Middle East,” said Nader Hashemi, a professor of Middle East politics. Half in Georgetown. University. He added that he believed Arab leaders had conveyed the same message privately because they did not like how their citizens were mobilizing around Palestinian issues.
“The masses of Arabs and Muslims had a different view of this equation, but who in DC cares?” Mr. Hashemi said. “All the assumptions that underpinned US policy toward the Middle East have been upended by recent events. The question of Palestine once again occupies a prominent place on the regional and global agenda. “I think that was the goal of the Hamas attack.”
In recent months, Biden and his top advisers have attempted to negotiate with both Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel a complex tripartite normalization deal by the end of the year. The new war will almost certainly alter that timeline, but U.S. officials have been telling Saudi and Israeli officials in calls over the weekend that they are hopeful discussions can continue.
They are also closely watching the Saudi reaction and assessing whether Prince Mohammed might change his stance, especially if the Israeli army kills many Palestinian civilians in an offensive in Gaza, sparking outrage across the Arab world.
On Saturday, after the Hamas attack, the Saudi Foreign Ministry issued a statement that did not explicitly denounce the attack and instead blamed Israel, saying that the Saudi government had repeatedly warned “of the dangers of the explosion of the situation as a result of the continued occupation, the deprivation of the Palestinian people and their legitimate rights and the repetition of systemic provocations against their sanctities.”
The statement caught Biden and several of his top advisers by surprise, people with knowledge of the events said, and angered U.S. lawmakers who have supported the negotiations.
One of them, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in an interview that he had spoken to a senior Saudi official on Saturday and told him: “If you want a normal relationship with the United States, this is not a normal statement. “
“You don’t want to be in the cheering section with Iran and Hezbollah,” he told them, as he recounted on Sunday.
Graham said an Israeli official told him on Sunday that Israel wants to continue the normalization process because it would be a way to weaken Iran, the main supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militant group that fought a war with Israel in 2006. .
It is unclear whether Hamas carried out the attack in part to undermine the talks. A Hamas military commander did not mention the talks in a sentence, although Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran oppose any normalization with Israel. A Biden administration official said Saturday that it was too early to know whether Iran was involved in the operation.
In a phone call on Saturday with Prince Faisal bin Farhan, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Blinken said the kingdom should clearly condemn the attack, a State Department official said. But in a description of the call, the Saudi Foreign Ministry did not include any criticism of the attack or Hamas, saying only generically that civilians should not be attacked and highlighting “the need for all parties to respect international humanitarian law.” ”.
Saudi officials appear to be taking a wait-and-see stance before continuing normalization efforts. Dennis Ross, who helped formulate several U.S. presidents’ Middle East policy, said in an interview that he had spoken with a Saudi official after the attack and that “at the moment, everything is on hold.”
“There are two basic variables: the number of victims and the atmosphere related to that, and secondly, whether the Israelis come out of this as if they have decimated Hamas as an organization,” he added. “The point is that, in the coming weeks, as Israel focuses on dealing with Hamas in Gaza – and whether it also confronts Hezbollah in the north – the results may well determine whether the Saudis will want to move forward.”
Martin Indyk, former US ambassador to Israel, said the Israeli military response would complicate Prince Mohammed’s rapprochement with Israel.
Images on social media of an Israeli offensive “will exacerbate anger in the Arab world and I think particularly in Saudi Arabia,” he said during a call with reporters Saturday hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. “This is going to be very difficult for Mohammed bin Salman to control.”
Talks so far have focused on what Prince Mohammed demands from Biden: a mutual defense treaty, building a civilian nuclear program and access to more weapons. Although Prince Mohammed said in an interview with Fox News last month that the Palestinian issue is “very important” and must be resolved, he has not made it a priority in talks with U.S. officials, including Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security chiefs. the White House. adviser, U.S. officials said.
For some experts, this is emblematic of the whole problem around these talks and the Abraham Accords.
“While Jake Sullivan and Secretary Blinken have sold the agreements as a magic formula for stability in the region, the only thing it will really ensure is strengthening – with an unprecedented American security guarantee – an axis of dictatorships that will ally themselves with the apartheid government of Israel and Say Nothing About the Palestinians,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now. The group was founded by Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was murdered by Saudi agents in 2018.
Although an Israeli government “will now be more capable and more desperate to reach an agreement with Saudi Arabia, it is difficult to imagine that even MBS’s absolute government can bear to move towards normalization now,” he said, using the Saudi prince’s initials. . “It’s a good opportunity for the Biden team to reflect on their completely failed approach to dealing with autocrats as a path to stability in the Middle East.”
In Saudi Arabia, some analysts have been skeptical that Netanyahu’s right-wing government would grant enough concessions to the Palestinians to satisfy the Saudi leadership. With a war starting, that’s even less likely now.
“The Kingdom is aware that Israel’s current extremist government cannot deliver on the issue of peace,” said Hesham Alghannam, a Saudi political scientist. “In reality, Israel was not really prepared to reach an agreement with the Palestinians that would give them the minimum of their needs.”
Abdulaziz Alghashian, a Saudi researcher who studies Saudi foreign policy toward Israel, said any normalization deal would not end Arab enmity toward Israel as long as the Palestinian issue remains unresolved. “Israeli integration in the region will never happen without an agreement,” he said. “And the way things are going, frankly, it will be a perpetual war that will spread. So I don’t see it.”