The perceived cure-all for the Middle East is normalisation between Saudi Arabia and Israel, or so the US administration will have us believe. That alone would bring peace, prosperity, and security to the region.
In recent months, senior US officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) visited the Middle East to explore the prospects for a grand bargain to normalise relations between the two countries.
Last week US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan held talks with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman and other senior Saudi officials in Jeddah to explore the possibility of diplomatic breakthroughs in the region. After the meetings, the White House said that Sullivan and the crown prince discussed bilateral and regional matters “including initiatives to advance a common vision for a more peaceful, secure, prosperous, and stable Middle East region interconnected with the world.”
Last June US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Saudi Arabia with the objective of promoting normalisation with Israel after declaring it a “national security interest” of the US. The exact details of that grand bargain remain unclear, but the New York Times reported that exploratory talks involved a US-Saudi security pact and normalising diplomatic relations in exchange for an Israeli pledge to stop settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories and enter negotiations to improve the conditions of Palestinians.
Another facet of the grand bargain involves supporting Saudi ambitions to establish a peaceful nuclear programme under the supervision of the Atomic Energy Agency and providing Riyadh with advanced US weapons systems.
US President Joe Biden does not have many achievements to brag about before the US presidential elections in 2024, and any diplomatic breakthrough in the Middle East will be a great gain for him. But in contrast to the American enthusiasm for the idea of a grand bargain Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Palestinians, and other regional powers, including Iran have given the initiative a cautious, lukewarm welcome.
“Biden would like to have a major foreign policy success. And in his view having a grand deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia would certainly help going into the elections in 2024. So I think there is a motivation to build on the Abraham Accords and to expand it. However, I think that there is resistance to doing this within the Middle East itself because what we are seeing now is an extremely vicious far-right Israel coalition that is building settlements faster than ever with record levels of settler violence, aided and abetted by the army. And this is not the right moment as far as most Arab states are concerned,” Chris Doyle, the director of the London-based Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu), told Al-Ahram Weekly.
Any major agreement for the Middle East requires full US involvement and difficult, long, and complex negotiations in which Washington must play all its cards and use its leverage to influence all concerned parties.
Doyle believes that such full US involvement may be difficult, noting that since former US president Barack Obama, all US administrations have sought to reduce their involvement in the Middle East.
“There is of course a desire in Washington to reset the relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia which have been going through a rocky period. Nevertheless, I think the US is just being somewhat unrealistic. I think that even if there was a grand deal, it won’t resolve the core of the conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians,” he said.
Another obstacle facing Biden’s effort is how willing Saudi Arabia is to give his administration such a spectacular diplomatic achievement. It is no longer a secret that there is no chemistry between the officials in Riyadh and the current Democratic administration in the White House.
Even if that diplomatic breakthrough occurred before the 2024 presidential election, it is not certain that it would have the support of the US Congress, especially giving Riyadh a permanent US security umbrella or a joint defence agreement along the lines of NATO, or supporting a Saudi civil nuclear programme. Without these guarantees, Saudi Arabia has no interest or incentive to normalise relations with Israel.
As for Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right Israeli government, it is difficult to see them making promises such as never annexing the West Bank or freezing new settlements. Relations between Biden and Netanyahu are also tense due to US criticism of the changes introduced by the Israeli government in the way the Supreme Court in Israel operates.
Seeking more details regarding issues that could affect Israeli security, including possible US support for a Saudi nuclear programme and potential US arms sales to Riyadh, the US news website Axion reported that Mossad Director David Barnea secretly visited Washington two weeks ago for talks with senior White House and CIA officials about the issue.
Two US sources told Axion that Barnea met with Sullivan at the White House before the trip Biden’s adviser made to Saudi Arabia last week. Barnea also met with Brett McGurk, the White House Middle East czar, and Amos Hochstein, Biden’s senior adviser for energy and infrastructure.
McGurk and Hochstein, who have been working on improving US-Saudi relations for the last 18 months, joined Sullivan on his recent trip to Jeddah according to Axion. Barnea and CIA Director Bill Burns also discussed the Saudi initiative as well as Iran, one US source said.
The CIA refused to comment on the meetings, while a White House National Security Council spokesperson refused to comment specifically on the talks between Sullivan and Barnea, emphasising, “We continue to support normalisation with Israel, including with Saudi Arabia, and continue to talk to our regional partners about how more progress can be made.”
Nonetheless, the noises from Israel are not encouraging. Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi told public broadcaster Kan on Monday that the road to normalising ties with Saudi Arabia is “still long”, ruling out concessions to Palestinians as part of any deal, adding that Israel is not involved in the US-Saudi discussions. “I can say that Israel will not give in to anything that will erode its security,” he said.
Orit Strock, the minister of Settlements and National Missions in Netanyahu’s government, also rejected any concessions to the Palestinians as part of a pact. “We certainly won’t agree to such a thing. We are done with withdrawals. We are done with freezing settlements in Judea and Samaria,” Strock said, referring to the occupied West Bank.
Talk of a major diplomatic breakthrough in the Middle East leading to the normalisation of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel has been on the table since 2020 when the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain launched full diplomatic relations with Israel.
At that time, there was an American-Israeli desire to benefit from that momentum by bringing about closer relations with Saudi Arabia. But there has been much water under the bridge since then.
On the one hand, there is dissatisfaction in Abu Dhabi with the policies of the Netanyahu government towards the Palestinians. On the other hand, Emirati and Bahraini officials have expressed frustration in high-level contacts with Israel about the commitment to implement all aspects of the 2020 Abraham Accords.
For its part, Iran is watching recent US moves with the conviction that they will not yield positive results. “Normalising relations with Israel is a Saudi decision in the first place. Iran does not interfere in the sovereign decisions of neighbouring countries, and yet we believe that this is difficult to achieve in light of the policies of the current Israeli government,” an Iranian diplomat in London told Al-Ahram Weekly.
He added: “However if any Saudi-American-Israeli understandings are reached, this will not affect the significant improvement in relations between Tehran and Riyadh, nor the deepening of relations in all fields.”
This is an assessment that Chris Doyle agrees with, explaining that he does not believe that the recent US efforts will negatively impact the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement: “I think there are very good reasons why Iran is happy with the deal with Saudi Arabia, especially after the improvement of the situation in Yemen. I think that probably both Iran and Saudi Arabia see it in their mutual interest to have relations. There’s not a huge trust between Tehran and Riyadh. It’s not a perfect relationship. Nobody is suggesting that, but I’m not sure that it would necessarily fall apart just because Saudi Arabia and Israel reached a deal.”
For decades, many US administrations, Democratic and Republican, have tried to achieve a grand bargain that will end all the problems of the Middle East and normalise relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours, to no avail.
Biden is trying to do the same in the last few months of his presidency but from a much weaker position compared to previous US presidents, for America has never been more vulnerable in the Middle East than it is today.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 3 August, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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