WhatsappFeigning interest in peace with Jerusalem has long been a tactic for extracting concessions from Washington and diverting attention from Riyadh’s extremism.
The most important thing to know about Saudi Arabia is that its leaders’ principal motivation is self-preservation—to ensure their royal heads stay connected to their royal shoulders. This context is essential for understanding the discussion of normalization with Israel. While Riyadh could profit from ties with Israel—as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have—the Saudi flirtation with normalization was driven not by a desire for peace, but by the imperative of regime survival.
The Saudis have long feared Iran, which has shown it can threaten Saudi oil. In 2019, the Iranian-backed Houthis fired drones that struck oil facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia, causing significant damage and disrupting exports. A direct Iranian attack could be worse.
This covert relationship with Israel is transactional: The Saudis sought Israeli intelligence to counter Iran. To keep it one-sided, Riyadh only allowed overflight rights and demanded progress toward a Palestinian state, knowing Israel wouldn’t agree.
What the media rarely confronts is Saudi Arabia’s deep, persistent antisemitism, which dates back to the kingdom’s founder, Ibn Saud.
In 1937, for example, he told a British official, “Our hatred for the Jews dates from God’s condemnation of them for their persecution and rejection of Isa [Jesus] and their subsequent rejecting of His chosen Prophet [Muhammad]. He added, “that for a Muslim to kill a Jew, or for him to be killed by a Jew ensures him an immediate entry into Heaven and into the august presence of God Almighty.”
In the mid-1940s, Saud threatened to execute any Jew entering the kingdom. In 1943, he wrote to then-President Franklin Roosevelt: “Jews have no right to Palestine.”
He later wrote again, describing longstanding hostility between Muslims and Jews since the beginning of Islam, which he claimed arose from “the treacherous conduct of the Jews towards Islam and the Muslims and their prophet.” Saud then sent his son to Washington to try to “liberate U.S. policy from the influence of local Jewish elements and Zionist propaganda.”
In 1951, he urged U.S. diplomats to create and fund a pro-Arab lobby to counter what is now AIPAC, and the CIA obliged.
For decades, America ignored Saudi Arabia’s practices, including discrimination against U.S. citizens, to prioritize oil supplies and regional stability. The catalyst for congressional anti-boycott legislation came only after it was revealed that the Saudis had placed 1,500 American companies on a boycott list for doing business with Israel.
Feigning interest in peace with Israel has long been a Saudi tactic for extracting concessions from the United States and diverting attention from Riyadh’s extremism. In 1981, King Fahd floated a “peace plan” to ease opposition to the Reagan administration’s sale of AWACS radar planes. It worked. The sale was approved, and almost immediately afterward, the Saudis hosted an Islamic conference denouncing the Camp David Accords, rejecting U.N. Resolution 242 and calling for jihad against Israel.
After the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil on Sept. 11, 2001, exposed Saudi involvement in global jihadism, the kingdom dusted off the same playbook. The crown prince invited New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to dinner and fed him a fantasy of Saudi moderation and normalization in exchange for demands Israel could never accept. Friedman dutifully laundered the narrative, helping deflect scrutiny from Saudi Arabia’s role in exporting radical Islam.
Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) has sold a modernized version of that same snake oil. He touts social reforms while silencing clerics when convenient, though his true character was exposed when he ordered the brutal murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and imprisoned rivals. These were not aberrations, but part of a long pattern of repression and human rights abuses that Washington has repeatedly excused to preserve access to Saudi oil.
U.S. President Joe Biden briefly thought he could break that pattern by treating MBS as a pariah, only to realize that Saudi control over the oil spigot could harm the U.S. economy and, with it, his re-election chances. Biden subsequently went to Riyadh and groveled.
Still, he convinced himself that he could succeed where Trump failed by offering the Saudis a security guarantee, advanced weapons and civilian nuclear technology—despite the obvious question (also asked of Iran) of why an oil superpower needs atomic energy at all—in exchange for normalization with Israel. What Biden failed to appreciate was the prince’s vindictiveness and unwillingness to help a president who maligned him.
The Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, backed by Iran, provided Riyadh with a convenient excuse: The Saudis would not normalize while Israel was fighting in Gaza. Though the kingdom has always looked down on Palestinians and never offered them refuge, MBS revived the Palestinian state demand to shield himself from domestic unrest. Some analysts mistakenly believed that he would put Saudi interests first and abandon the Palestinians, as the other Abraham Accord signatories did.
The ceasefire briefly reopened the door. U.S. President Donald Trump thought he could force normalization and had ample leverage to do so. Instead, he repeated the American error of treating Saudi Arabia as the indispensable power. He gave Riyadh everything it wanted—without extracting a single concession toward Israel—satisfied with promises of $1 trillion in U.S. investment, alongside unspoken benefits to his family’s business interests.
The Saudis’ immediate strategic interests no longer require Israeli cooperation. U.S. and Israeli actions have weakened Iran, and Saudi Arabia has obtained assurances of its security, as well as additional proposed arms sales, including the recent $9 billion offer of Patriot interceptors.
With its fears eased and demands met, the kingdom has reverted to its antisemitic roots.
State-controlled media have resumed antisemitic attacks on Israel. Clerics have been unleashed. One prominent imam recently prayed: “Oh, Allah, deal with the Jews who have seized and occupied … send upon them your punishment and misery.”
Will Trump confront his friend MBS? He has one trillion reasons not to. Israelis already appear on a growing list of Trump betrayals, alongside Ukrainians, Afghans, Kurds and other groups who once believed that American assurances actually meant something.
Ultimately, Israeli-Saudi normalization was not a realistic breakthrough but a strategic illusion. Riyadh used the prospect of normalization as a tool to secure its interests, knowing that the arrangement would be disposable once its aims—stability, security guarantees and weapons—were met.
