Dangerous push for Israeli-Saudi normalization
By Maria Fantappie and Vali Nasr
Scholars
During his first three years in office, US President Joe Biden based his Middle East strategy on a single, straightforward project: normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such a deal, Washington thought, would stabilize the tumultuous region and constrain an increasingly emboldened Iran. The United States would then be free to shift its resources away from the Middle East and toward Asia and Europe. The Arab world might even become part of an ambitious Eurasian trade corridor connecting the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, an enterprise that could compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
By the fall of 2023, US officials seemed close to brokering an agreement. Saudi Arabia indicated it was ready to normalize ties with Israel if, in exchange, Washington would strike a security pact with Riyadh. The United States was prepared to grant the Saudis their wish. Although the pact would theoretically deepen the United States’ regional commitments, American officials hoped that, thanks to a newly strong Israeli-Saudi relationship, Saudi Arabia would rarely need US military assistance.
Then came Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. The assault, which killed roughly 1,200 people, shattered the notion that the Middle East’s actors could simply ignore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When Israel responded by launching a devastating invasion of Gaza — one that, so far, has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians — it enraged the Arab world’s citizens and cast Iran and its regional allies as frontline defenders of the Palestinian cause. Arab rulers were forced to change course. Saudi Arabia pulled back from the normalization agreement, insisting that Israel first accept Palestinian self-determination. Its neighbors also distanced themselves from Israel.
American officials are aware that the facts on the ground have shifted, but they are still clinging on to their pre-October 7 vision. Despite the mass demonstrations, they are shuttling back and forth to Riyadh to peddle a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In fact, US officials seem to think that an agreement is timelier than ever. American policymakers have suggested that Riyadh should normalize ties with Israel if the latter agrees to a cease-fire in Gaza. To Washington, Israeli-Saudi normalization remains the solution to the Middle East’s ills.
But this view is, increasingly, a fallacy. Saudi Arabia will not establish relations with Israel in exchange for an end to the war. At this point, Riyadh will establish relations with Israel only if the Jewish “state” takes clear and irrevocable measures to create a Palestinian one. And Israeli officials have shown absolutely no interest in doing this.
If the United States still wants an Israeli-Saudi deal, it will have to lean hard on the Israelis to change their position. It needs to secure not only a cease-fire but also a positive, long-term plan for Gaza’s future that ends in Palestinian statehood. It needs, in other words, to show Arab leaders that working more closely with Israel will not further inflame the region with conflicts that undermine their own credibility while strengthening Tehran and its partners. Otherwise, the United States is wasting its time by pushing for normalization — and jeopardizing the security of besieged Arab governments.
Won’t back down
Since the war in Gaza began, the United States has had a decidedly mixed diplomatic record in the Middle East. On the one hand, Washington pulled Israel back from the brink of direct confrontation with Iran, after the two exchanged missile fire in April. It is now scrambling to prevent Israel and Hezbollah from entering into all-out conflict. But when it comes to the heart of the matter — the fighting in Gaza itself — American diplomacy has achieved very little. Washington has failed to influence the conduct of the war, to secure a cease-fire, or to obtain any commitments from Israel about the future of Gaza or a Palestinian state. These failures jeopardize Washington’s successes in other domains. So long as the fighting continues, for instance, Israel’s standoff with Hezbollah will intensify. Shelling between the two has displaced tens of thousands of Israelis since the onset of the war in Gaza, and so Israel now views securing its northern border as part and parcel of its campaign to destroy Hamas. Such an escalation could invite Iran and its regional actors to intervene to assist their Lebanese partner.
It is not hard to see why the United States has failed to stop the bloodshed. US officials have been pressuring Arab states, particularly Egypt and Qatar, to secure Hamas’s acquiescence for a cease-fire deal, but it has barely exercised its considerable leverage over Israel. Instead of threatening to curtail or end offensive aid, Washington’s main approach has been to tell Israel that, should it stop fighting, it can have formal relations with Saudi Arabia. This is not a promise that the United States can deliver. The Saudis have refused to offer normalization in exchange for just a cease-fire, and it is unlikely that they will reconsider.
Even if Riyadh were to accept such a deal, there is no guarantee that Israel would consent. The country has rebuffed every call, whether from Washington or the UN, to end the conflict. It has considered pulling back its forces only temporarily, in order to free Israeli and foreign captives. Israel has proved so committed to the war that it has even jeopardized its ties to the Arab states with which it does have relations. Egypt and Jordan — which normalized ties with Israel in 1978 and 1994, respectively — have cooled diplomatic ties, put their military forces on alert, and warned that their peace treaties with Israel are at risk. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, which both normalized ties in 2020, have reduced diplomatic contacts and business relations.
These moves have clear antecedents. Israel’s conduct has inflamed the Arab world and threatened its stability. Egypt has seen mass domestic protests in support of Palestinians, and the country’s leaders worry these demonstrations might turn against them. Cairo has, meanwhile, come under direct pressure from Israel, which violated the countries’ 1978 agreement by seizing Gaza’s Rafah border crossing. Israel did so without even giving Egyptian officials adequate notice. Other Arab governments that have relations with Israel, including Jordan and Morocco, have also witnessed large-scale street demonstrations. They fear that this popular outrage could eventually explode into an Arab Spring-type uprising or prompt a recrudescence of extremism and terrorism.
Israel’s disregard for the interests of its Arab allies is explained, in part, by its all-out drive to destroy Hamas, but it also comes from a sense among Israeli officials that their country does not need regional peace treaties to be secure. Israel assumes that, if the need arises, Washington will control the behavior of Arab states. It also figures that these countries’ anger toward Israel is balanced by their fear of Iran. When Tehran lobbed missiles and drones at Israel in April, for example, Jordan and the Persian Gulf countries cooperated with the United States to intercept nearly all of them. Israeli officials expect that, as escalation with Iran continues, the Persian Gulf monarchies will have no choice but to close ranks with Israel and the United States, and that Abu Dhabi and Riyadh will terminate their own normalization deals with Tehran.
But Israeli officials are mistaken. Although it is impossible to discern their exact motivations, Jordan and the Persian Gulf states likely helped down Iranian drones and missiles not to protect Israel but to prevent the larger war that would surely have ensued if Israel had been seriously hit. Since normalizing ties with Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have become more secure. (Before those deals, Iranian-backed groups routinely struck both countries’ territories.) They have no interest in reneging on their agreements, especially because their people do not see Iran as the enemy right now. Instead, their nemesis is Israel.
Deal or no deal
To overcome Arab governments’ qualms about working more closely with an unchanged Israel, the United States could try to make its partners an offer they can’t refuse. In exchange for increased Israeli-Saudi cooperation, for example, Washington might promise the Saudis not just a security pact but one in which Riyadh can maintain close ties to China. The United States could promise Amman that it will respond if Jordan is attacked by Iran, and that it will keep Palestinians from flooding across the Jordanian border. It could extend to Egypt additional economic support as well as guarantees that Israel will pull back from Rafah and desist from any actions that could push Palestinians into the Sinai Peninsula.
But these promises would be financially and politically costly for the United States, which is already stretched thin, and they are still unlikely to have any effect. Arab governments would, no doubt, love more US support, but there is nothing that Washington can directly provide that would protect them from the rage of their citizens. There is only one workable path to greater Arab-Israeli cooperation, and it entails ending the war in Gaza and setting up a sovereign Palestinian state.
Washington must therefore stop focusing on how it can deliver normalized relations and start focusing on what will happen to Gaza in both the near and long term. In this, it has much work to do. The United States has not put forth a credible plan for the day after the conflict ends, risking anarchy and an endless humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip. In the absence of US pressure, Gaza could even end up being indefinitely ruled by the Israel Defense Forces. The Israeli cabinet might then direct the IDF to gradually push Gaza’s population into Egypt, opening the territory to Jewish settlers. Should that succeed, Israel could force Palestinians out of the West Bank as well. It may not even need the military to do so. Instead, it could simply defund an already enfeebled Palestinian Authority, rendering it unable to deliver services, and then let violent settlers run rampant. Until these scenarios are firmly off the table, no Arab state will agree to normalize relations with Israel.
To save the Palestinians and promote Arab-Israeli ties, the United States must promote an alternative pathway for Gaza’s future. It can start by presenting a strategy for how Gaza can be reconstructed and how its security can be ensured. Such a plan must have buy-in from Arab states, which is essential to securing an intra-Palestinian consensus that can keep the strip safe. But only Washington can pressure Israel into ending the war and accepting such a proposal, and only Washington can mediate between Israeli and Arab leaders over a security arrangement for Gaza. Arab states might be hesitant to work with Israel at all, but US leaders should remind them (and the Israelis) that no one benefits from continued turmoil, and that they have a shared interest in creating a sustainable post-war plan. The alternative, after all, is a forever war in Gaza and possibly the West Bank and Lebanon, which would destabilize the entire region.
After there is a viable plan for reconstructing Gaza, the United States can begin to work on its bigger mission: creating a Palestinian state. It must get Israel to recognize the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, commit to creating a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and create a diplomatic track to realize it. This process would have to begin with a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, one in which Israel agrees to end its occupation of Gaza and let a unified Palestinian Authority govern over both Gaza and the West Bank. Such commitments could be enough to win over the Saudis and other Arab governments and open the door to deeper connections.
To be sure, this process will be extremely difficult. Israel is governed by hard-right politicians who have disavowed Palestinian statehood; the gulf between them and Arab governments is massive. But the United States must still make a serious effort to bring these parties together. Until there is a clear path to a Palestinian state, the Middle East will be caught in a continuous cycle of conflict. There will be no hope for regional stability, and there will be little chance that Israel and Saudi Arabia can normalize relations.
The article first appeared on Foreign Affairs.