A Peace Deal That Seems Designed to Fail
Even if a highly anticipated agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia never comes to fruition, its rumored announcement seems sure to do at least one thing: further isolate Israel within the international community.
Over the past few years, the Biden administration has been working with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, on a wide-ranging deal to strengthen ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia as part of a broader agreement in which Saudi Arabia will normalize relations with Israel.
Saudi Arabia is asking for a closer defense relationship with the United States and access to Washington’s most advanced weapons systems, but it wants more than that. It wants the U.S. to help it develop a civilian nuclear-power program, relax scrutiny of the transfer of sensitive technologies, and expedite the review of Saudi investments in U.S. technology firms and crucial infrastructure.
Based on conversations with senior Saudi and U.S. officials over the past several weeks, and bearing in mind that none of us has yet seen the details of the prospective deal, I am not yet convinced that a deal would be in America’s interest—or even necessary, given the already deepening commercial links between the two countries.
[Read: The Israeli-Saudi deal had better be a good one]
But I am also not convinced that any senior Saudi decision maker—not least the one who really counts, the crown prince—believes a deal is possible. The Saudis I have spoken with have made clear they will recognize Israel only if Israel consents to creating irreversible momentum toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Those same Saudis, meanwhile, are impressively clear-eyed about Israeli politics at the moment. They understand that few, if any, Israelis are in a mood to consider the creation of a Palestinian state, and they understand that Israeli-government policies over the past three decades might have made such a state impossible in the West Bank, anyway.
So on the one hand, the Saudis deserve some credit for doing what would have been unthinkable a decade ago: making a desire to eventually normalize ties with Israel the de facto policy of the kingdom. But on the other hand, there is no real, immediate cost to the Saudis for doing so—not when they know that Israel will not accept their one condition.
This deal is setting Israel up to be the fall guy. The United States and Saudi Arabia are likely going to herald a potentially transformative agreement that Israel appears almost certain to reject—in front of a global audience that has lost patience with that country’s policies toward and treatment of the Palestinians.
The Saudis will likely not be overly disappointed, or surprised, by Israel’s rejection of their terms. They might even enjoy it. Indeed, 50 years after Israel’s then–Foreign Minister Abba Eban lamented that the Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” the Saudis and other Arabs will delight in throwing that famous quote back at Israel.
Even in the best of times, Israeli political debates can be maddeningly solipsistic. Henry Kissinger quipped that Israel “doesn’t do foreign policy—only domestic politics.” But these are not the best of times. In the seven months since the horrific attacks of October 7, the gulf between how Israel defines its security needs and how the world defines those same needs has grown like never before. My conversations with Israeli friends—almost all of whom believe that their country has basically done the right thing in Gaza, even as they now demand a strategy for concluding the campaign—are invariably tense. Israel is waging a war of punishment against the people of Gaza, and Israelis have been largely shielded from the images of the suffering and destruction that the rest of us see.
When the Biden administration made the relatively modest decision to condition some military aid to Israel in advance of an assault on Rafah, Israeli leaders responded with defiance, hurling abuse at the American president—“Hamas ❤️ Biden,” one right-wing minister tweeted—and boasting that Israel would “stand alone” if necessary.
But Israel has not stood alone for a very long time. For years, Israelis might have told themselves, and Americans, that they can provide for their own security—if only the United States would help arm them. But the Jordanian and Egyptian armies have long defended Israel’s southern and eastern flanks, while the United States provides roughly a quarter of Israel’s defense budget and has elaborate and well-rehearsed contingency plans to defend Israel in an emergency.
That U.S. troops would someday be called upon to defend Israel in a regional war has seemed inevitable. That moment arrived in April, when the United States led a coalition of nations—including Jordan, France, and the United Kingdom—in repelling an Iranian aerial assault on Israel. A precedent had been shattered: American men and women were in the line of fire, protecting Israel from its enemies.
They did so, of course, because Israel does not, in fact, stand alone, nor is Israel an island unto itself: It is part of the international community and a broader regional security system. Its decisions affect not only its own citizens but millions of people across the region, and billions of dollars in international trade. And the United States and its allies have no interest in either Israel or Iran dragging them into a wider conflagration that will affect those lives, or that commerce.
The Saudis and the Biden administration both seem determined to teach Israel this lesson. If Israel, as expected, rejects a deal, the Saudis will quickly pivot, telling Biden’s negotiators that the same long-term bilateral agreement that made sense within the context of a deal with Israel would surely make sense on its own. Riyadh’s point about Israel and its place in the region will have been made, and the Biden administration will have helped make it.