“It is in the works. The Saudis want it as much as the Israelis. It all depends how far the US manages to accommodate the demands of both sides.” This was how an informed Gulf-based Egyptian source summed up the state of direct and indirect negotiations for normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Channels of communication between Saudis and Israelis, continued the source, have been open for a few years now. Discussions of normalisation have included high-level but unannounced talks in Europe, the US, and several Arab capitals in the Gulf and North Africa. He adds that political instability in Israel — squabbles within the government, the legal problems that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is facing — and Riyadh’s lack of confidence in the US administration of President Joe Biden, have contributed to the slower-than-expected pace of progress in the talks, “but things are on track and the Americans are pushing to get something announced before the end of the year or at the most early next year, ahead of the presidential electoral season in the US.”
This week, White House Spokesperson John Kirby, said that “a basic framework” for a possible normalisation deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia now exists. On Sunday, Israeli Minister of Communications Shlomo Karhi arrived in Saudi Arabia to attend the Universal Postal Union conference. The visit followed hot on the heels of a trip by Israeli Minister of Tourism Haim Katz to attend the UN World Tourism Conference. Earlier in September, an official Israeli delegation arrived in Riyadh to take part in a UNESCO World Heritage conference. Saudi Arabia has already lifted its embargo on Israeli civil planes flying in Saudi airspace.
While Kirby did not give any details of the “basic framework” to which he alluded, Arab sources say the deal will include mutual diplomatic recognition between the two countries, direct and indirect references to Arab-Israeli peace, containment of Iranian military ambitions and the inclusion of the US in long-term defence agreements. Israel and Saudi Arabia will also begin talks on security arrangements for the Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir.
“Now effectively under the sovereignty of Saudi Arabia, the two islands have not yet been fully handed over to Riyadh because of the failure to reach a three-way agreement between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel over security arrangements,” says the Gulf-based source. Proposals by Saudi Arabia and Israel were “in part” subject to Egyptian disagreement but “once Israel and Saudi Arabia are in direct talks, they can decide the details of the security arrangements themselves.”
THE BIG PRIZE
The Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir have long been integral to the Arab-Israeli struggle. In 1956 and 1967, Egypt, under Gamal Abdel-Nasser, opted to close the Tiran Straits to Israeli ships. While Egypt and Saudi Arabia have had moments of disagreement over the status of the islands, in 1990 Egypt, under president Hosni Mubarak, acknowledged Saudi Arabia’s sovereignty but fell short of executing a handover. In 2017, under President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, Riyadh’s wish for an official ratification of Saudi sovereignty over the islands was granted by Cairo, with details of future security arrangements subject to further discussion.
According to Cairo-based Western diplomatic sources, the Saudi decision to push for Egyptian agreement to hand over the two islands was a clear sign that Saudi Arabia and Israel were moving closer to a normalisation deal.
“Yes, sovereignty represented a big political gain for the Saudi crown prince who struck the deal with President Al-Sisi, but it is impossible that the Saudis would consider managing the two islands if they were not also considering a deal with Israel,” a senior European diplomat said at the time.
A couple of weeks ago, in an interview with Fox News, Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman said that his country and Israel were inching “daily closer” to a normalisation deal. Bin Salman spoke a few days after the Israeli prime minister had told the UN General Assembly that an Israeli-Saudi agreement would change the face of the Middle East.
Netanyahu’s statement was shrugged off as hyperbole by a former Egyptian peace process negotiator.
“The Israelis now speak of a normalisation deal as the big prize when in fact the real big prize was the peace treaty with Egypt,” he said. The face of the Middle East started to change in the 1970s, changes that culminated in the Egyptian-Israeli peace deal signed in March 1979 after two years of tough negotiations.
“Egypt has always been central to the Arab-Israeli struggle. For the Israelis, getting a peace agreement with Egypt was the most significant political gain in the history of that struggle, far more significant than Israel’s military victory in 1967.”
He added that by occupying all of historic Palestine, including the West Bank that was under the control of Jordan, and Gaza that was under the control of Egypt, Sinai, and the Golan Heights, Israel might have won in military terms but it also compounded Israel’s regional isolation.
According to serving and former Egyptian diplomats who worked on the Arab-Israeli file, while unconditional US and European support of Israel underwrote its army’s supremacy — a point Israeli leaders repeatedly referred to, insisting Israel would comfortably win any future war with the Arabs — it was not a reassuring deterrent since Israel could never be certain there would not be another conflict.
A former Egyptian security source who worked on the Egyptian-Israeli file in the 1960s said that while many in Egypt, including in the diplomatic service, were unsure about what would happen following the defeat of 1967, they never discounted the possibility of a new round of hostilities “regardless of who would win”.
“I followed the Israeli press, and what Israeli diplomats were saying across Europe, closely and it was very clear to me that Israel was aware that the possibility of retaliation for the defeat, especially on the Egyptian front, could not be dismissed,” he said.
When president Anwar Al-Sadat took over in October 1970 following the sudden death of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Israel’s main concern was whether he would continue along the path Nasser had initiated with the War of Attrition.
“They thought Sadat was far too haunted by the demons of the 1967 defeat, and by his own political insecurity in the face of internal opposition, to fight. This compounded their shock when our forces started crossing the Suez Canal on 6 October 1973,” he said.
FIFTY YEARS ON
It is hard to overestimate the shock that spread through Israel’s political and military leadership when war started on both the Egyptian and Syrian fronts on the afternoon of Saturday 6 October 1973. It was Yom Kippur in Israel, and the 10th of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
The memoirs of Israeli military and political leaders make it clear that, despite mounting intelligence that a new conflict was on the cards, such was the level of Israeli confidence the evidence was ignored.
Some testimonies blame the “catastrophe” of the first few days of the war on the “arrogance” of Israeli military and political leaders who thought their country’s military supremacy a sufficient deterrent, and who believed their own propaganda that the Bar Lev Line was invincible.
This week, the Israeli press has been reliving the shock the country faced in the early days of the October War, before Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir called on Henry Kissinger to ask for help. In his own memoirs, Kissinger says it did not take much to convince US president Richard Nixon to approve a massive airlift to equip Israel with a huge arsenal of the latest arms and ammunition which was then used in a significant military push back. On 16 October, Israeli forces broke through and crossed the Suez Canal to the north of the Great Bitter Lake. By 24 October, after much pushing by Kissinger who engaged in intensive contacts with the Soviets, a ceasefire was announced.
According to the Egyptian security source, with or without the breach “which will always be blamed on Sadat’s decision to order troops to advance without the full support of his military aides,” the war was always going to end in negotiations.
“Nobody, including Sadat, thought the world would sit and watch as armies advanced into the heart of Israel. We always knew that the October War had limits. Our objective was to partially reverse the heavy defeat of 1967 to allow for a better negotiating position.”
The negotiations, however, were never going to be straightforward. “Nobody really knew how things would unfold, how negotiations would start and what they would lead to” for Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinians.
He argues that it is as wrong today as it was 50 years ago to reduce the October War to either harb tahrik (a war of movement) or harb tahrir (a war for liberation). Like many top military figures who have spoken to Al-Ahram Weekly at different points over the last decade, he argues the war was both. And while the breach allowed Israeli forces to reach Suez, neither this nor the encirclement of Egypt’s Third Field Army detracts from the initial crossing of the Suez Canal, the taking down of the Bar Lev Line or capture of Israeli soldiers as prisoners of war, images of which sent shockwaves through the heart of Israeli society.
This week, to mark the 50th anniversary of the October War, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said Israel “should never forget this war” and “must always be prepared for another”.
In a televised speech in 1973, before the start of the October War, Sadat said he was convinced Israel would not halt its aggression against the Arabs until it had achieved control of all the land “from the Nile to the Euphrates”. Later, following the October War and the launch of his peace initiative in 1977, he struck a different note, saying he hoped Israel and the Arabs could reach a fair peace that would make the October War the last in the line of Arab-Israeli conflicts.
THE PALESTINIAN FACTOR
Sadat was proven right, in part at least, on both accounts. The October War saw Egypt engineer the crossing of the Suez Canal that then allowed Sadat to pursue negotiations for a political settlement. But following the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in March 1979 Sadat faced a barrage of criticism. Egypt was placed under an Arab boycott, expelled from the Arab League and the headquarters of the pan-Arab organisation was moved from Cairo to Tunis.
According to two former Egyptian foreign ministers who were serving diplomats in the late 1970s, the price Egypt paid for its peace treaty with Israel, irrespective of the legal and political qualities of the final text, was high, undermining Egypt’s leadership of the Arab world.
“I don’t think that the question was whether Sadat should or should not have pursued a political settlement. It was unrealistic to think that, after the October War, it was possible to regain all Egyptian territories without a political deal,” said one. “The question is whether or not it was possible for Sadat to have done things differently and to have secured at least partial Arab support for the deal. But Sadat was impatient. He felt it was his call and his alone.”
Both former foreign ministers agree that Sadat’s unilateral peace deal was at the time perceived as a stab in the back of the “central cause of all Arabs”, ie the Palestinian cause. They both blame Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for lacking the vision to seize the opportunity when Sadat requested self-rule for the Palestinians as part of the Egyptian-Israeli settlement.
Arafat, who appeared totally shellshocked while sitting in a front seat in the Egyptian parliament when Sadat announced his intention to go to Israel in pursuit of peace in 1977, and who subsequently labelled Sadat a traitor, ended up pursuing peace talks with the Israelis himself, first openly in the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference and the subsequent Washington talks, and later in the secret talks hosted in Norway that resulted in the Oslo Accords, signed at the White House in September 1993 in a ceremony that concluded in a handshake between Arafat and both Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres.
“Just as Arafat labelled Sadat a traitor in the 1970s, Arafat’s adversaries labelled him a traitor. And just like Sadat’s aides protested the nature of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, so Arafat’s aides questioned the Oslo Accords and the deals that followed, including the Gaza-Jericho Agreement signed in Cairo in 1994,” said an Egyptian diplomat who was member of the negotiating team that worked on the Camp David Accords.
According to this diplomat, while it is wrong to argue that Israel chalked up political losses in the agreements reached with Egypt and with the Palestinians, and with Jordan following the signing of the Wadi Araba Treaty at the White House in October 1994, it is also true that Israel was in a weaker position on 24 October 1973 than on 5 October 1973, and a long way from where it was on 4 June 1967.
The same diplomat says Sadat was pragmatic. He wanted to close the chapter of wars with Israel and usher in an era of economic prosperity for Egyptians. And with “Egypt out of the military equation” it became clear that the Palestinians could not think of a new war with Israel. Then came the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, making negotiations the only possible route to a settlement.
It is an analysis that not only never gained a Palestinian or Arab consensus, but for many years it was considered defeatist. In the 1970s, it was the left that consistently opposed any political deals with Israel. The subsequent rise of Islamism across the Arab world and the foundation of Hizbullah in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and of Hamas and other Islamist resistance movements in Gaza in the late 1980s, shifted that opposition, which was now spearheaded by Islamist movements.
A former European foreign minister argued that the emergence of these resistance movements alarmed Israel and helped prompt deals like the Oslo Accords and the Wadi Araba Treaty. Israel, he said, could not countenance the spate of settlements that began with its peace treaty with Egypt to be reversed.
THE GULF FACTOR
Senior Arab diplomats agree that the collapse of the established Arab dispensation following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 acted as a catalyst for the second wave of Arab Israeli normalisation.
“Arafat made a gross miscalculation when he decided to side with Saddam Hussein over his invasion of Kuwait, a country that hosted many diaspora Palestinians,” said one of the former Egyptian foreign ministers. It was a watershed moment in terms of Arab Gulf support for the Palestinians. “There was a pall of fatigue around the Palestinian cause, and a realisation that the Palestinian leadership was abusing Arab financial and political support.”
The second minister states blankly that Egypt was tired of “the games that Arafat was playing”.
“He would come and tell Mubarak something and then go and do something else. Mubarak was always aware that the Palestinian issue was very important for Egypt, but he was often furious with Arafat and could not defend Arafat’s decision to side with the invasion of Kuwait.”
It became clear to Israel, say Arab diplomats, that the Palestinians were losing their clout in Arab capitals. Israeli leaders “realised that they no longer had to fear the Arabs adopting retaliatory positions to avenge Israeli attacks on Palestinians,” says a Lebanese diplomat, adding that while it was fashionable to blame Israeli intransigence towards the Palestinians on the marginalisation of Egypt’s role, the truth is that “affluent Arab Gulf countries were growing disinterested in the Palestinian cause”.
In March 2002, as Israel was keeping Arafat under siege in his Ramallah headquarters, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia proposed the Arab Peace Initiative to the applause of the Arab summit that had convened in the Lebanese capital. Abdullah was being praised for his initiative, and Sadat was remembered for his visionary approach to managing the Arab-Israeli conflict on the same foundations as the 2002 Arab land-for-peace initiative.
“There is no real difference between what Sadat did and what Abdullah was proposing 25 years later,” argues the Lebanese diplomat, adding that Sadat’s pursuit of a unilateral peace with Israel is exactly what other Arab Gulf countries opted to do when they decided they were tired of worrying about the Palestinian cause.
And with Saddam Hussein out of the picture, Gulf countries that had supported Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran during the 1980s were becoming increasingly apprehensive about Iranian influence which by the mid-1990s and early 2000s was growing in Gulf countries with Shia minorities.
“In 2006, when Israel was attacking Lebanon and hitting Beirut, Arab Gulf countries did not mind because they saw Hizbullah, which for them is nothing but an Iranian stooge, as the target of Israel’s aggression,” says the diplomat. And the same goes for Israeli attacks on Gaza, where Hamas and Jihad are perceived as the targets. “For Arab Gulf countries, Hamas and Jihad are the tools of Iran or of Syria.”
Arab Gulf and Israeli officials suddenly had a shared adversary, Iran.
“When [former Israeli foreign minister] Tzipi Livni said in Cairo in 2008 that the era of Arabs and Israelis is over and now is the time of moderates and fundamentalists people did not like it but it turned out to be true,” notes an Israeli diplomat who served in Cairo.
The signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in the White House in September 2020 can very much be viewed through the prism of the moderate vs fundamentalist lens, as can the subsequent inclusion of Sudan in the normalisation scheme and the reactivation of Israel’s peace with Morocco, whose monarch is head of the Jerusalem Committee, at a time when Israel is openly attacking Palestinians in Jerusalem.
Critics of Sadat’s peace deal with Israel argue that by using the October War as a way to reach a unilateral settlement with Israel, Sadat compromised not only Egypt’s military gains but the Arab unity that had been expressed in the oil embargo spearheaded by Saudi Arabia.
THE US ROLE
In Master of the Game, published in October 2021, US diplomat Martin Indyk, who was closely involved in the management of US policies on Arab-Israeli relations in the 1990s and early 2000s, said Henry Kissinger was planning to start a negotiation process between the Arabs and Israelis before the October War. Caught off guard when the war started, Kissinger then used the management of the war, especially after the big American airlift of weapons to Israel, to turn the war into a starting point for negotiations that allowed the US to be the lead player in the Middle East to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union.
In President Carter: The White House Years, Stuart Eizenstat writes that while motivated by the principles of peace and justice, US president Jimmy Carter, who oversaw the making of the Camp David deal, also wanted to avoid another Arab-Israeli war and possible oil embargo.
According to Eizenstat, Carter knew that without a peace deal involving Egypt it would be impossible to end the series of Arab-Israeli wars. Though Carter was also keen to promote a deal for the Palestinians with whom he sympathised, once comparing their plight to that of African Americans in an earlier period of US history, his most pressing motivation was to prevent a repetition of the October War by securing an Egyptian-Israeli peace.
In The Man who Ran Washington: James Baker, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser argue that as Secretary of State between 1989 and 1992 Baker had no desire to become bogged down in the Middle East, not least because he assumed that following the Egypt-Israel peace agreement nothing big was on the horizon. It was Dennis Ross, a US diplomat specialised in Arab-Israeli relations, who persuaded Baker that it was impossible for the US to ignore the Middle East. Then came the August 1990 Iraqi invasion and the subsequent US-led war to liberate Kuwait and Baker had no choice but to become fully engaged in the region.
On 6 March 1991, a few days after the end of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, US president George Bush told Congress that “it was time to end the Arab-Israeli conflict”. Baker spearheaded a round of intensive diplomacy that culminated in the Madrid Peace Conference, an event that dismally failed to end the conflict.
Egyptian and Palestinian diplomatic sources say no American president came closer to ending the conflict, not just on the Palestinian but also on the Syrian front, than Bill Clinton.
“I think president Clinton could have done it,” says a former Palestinian negotiator. He argues that there was “a real chance” during the Camp David talks that Clinton hosted with Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, and the talks between Barak and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Al-Sharaa. “If president Clinton had had more time and more power he might have been able to pressure Barak to act seriously but it was practically the last mile of his second term and Barak would not have wanted to sign an agreement with an outgoing president.”
In office following Clinton, George W Bush was good at hosting talks but not good at delivering deals, according to Egyptian diplomatic sources. According to one diplomat, part of the problem was that Bush viewed the Arab-Israeli struggle through the lens of the war on radical Islamist groups. “This complicated the situation, especially given he was viewed by the Palestinians as a neocon US president.”
The 2007 Annapolis talks between Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who succeeded Arafat, are described by several Arab diplomats as a total waste of time. According to the same diplomats, following the assassination of Rabin in November 1994, Israeli leaders ceased to be interested in a peace deal with the Palestinians and worked solely to manage the occupation rather than to bring it to a partial end.
A partial end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory was the essence of the “deal of the century” promoted by former American president Donald Trump.
“Trump had considerable Arab support for this deal because in 2017 it was clear that the chances of Palestinians having a quasi — let alone a real — state were close to zero,” says a Cairo-based European diplomat, adding that Trump’s focus was not on the Palestinians but Arab Gulf states that had opted for a more self-interested agenda.
With Joe Biden in office, the same diplomat says, there was no interest whatever to work on the Arab-Israeli struggle. “The attention now is on Arab-Israeli normalisation, especially with countries that had wars with Israel.”
In the summer of 2022, Biden attended the I2U2 summit in the UAE, an event bringing together Israel, India, UAE and US to discuss technological cooperation.
“The Emiratis said that the signing of the Abraham Accords secured an Israeli commitment to freeze a plan to annex Palestinian territories. They then moved to widen cooperation with Israel, not just at the bilateral but also at the regional and international levels,” says the Gulf-based Egyptian source. And now the Saudis want Israel to give offer some concessions to the Palestinians, “and they have to be bigger than any concessions the Emiratis secure.”
“The problem now is that Israel, with its current radical government, is not going to give the Palestinians anything significant. The Israeli government will oppose most Saudi demands, not least on armament and nuclear technology acquisition.” And whatever the Palestinians get as “a side-order” of the Saudi deal with Israel “is unlikely to be enough for the Palestinian people, even if accommodated for lack of other options by the Palestinian leadership”.
This, he adds, means that Israel will continue to get peace deals with Arab governments, like the peace deal brought about by the October War, away from the consent of Arab populations, even though the vast majority of Arabs today were born at least two decades after that war.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 5 October, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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