NY Times pundit Thomas Friedman revealed on Thursday that neither Saudi Arabia nor Israel cares a hoot about the future of a Palestinian State, and the only one pushing for the 2-state solution as a condition for peace between Riyad and Jerusalem is President Joe Biden.
“When I interviewed President Biden in the Oval Office last week,” Friedman wrote on Thursday, it turned out that in addition to meddling in Israel’s internal affairs and judicial reform legislation, “The president is wrestling with whether to pursue the possibility of a US-Saudi mutual security pact that would involve Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel, provided that Israel make concessions to the Palestinians that would preserve the possibility of a two-state solution.”
According to Friedman, “the president still has not made up his mind whether to proceed, but he gave a green light for his team to probe with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia to see if some kind of deal is possible and at what price.”
Arab News confirmed on Thursday that Crown Prince bin Salman met with White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Jeddah, and “they also discussed regional and international developments of common interest.”
Nothing whatsoever about a deal with Israel, but that’s to be expected given the nature of the kingdom.
But Friedman already switched to fantasy mode, living the dream: “A US-Saudi security pact that produces normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and the Jewish state — while curtailing Saudi-China relations — would be a game changer for the Middle East, bigger than the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Because peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, would open the way for peace between Israel and the whole Muslim world, including giant countries like Indonesia and maybe even Pakistan. It would be a significant Biden foreign policy legacy.”
That was the carrot. Now the stick. As Friedman put it: “The Saudis would demand of Israel to preserve the prospect of a two-state solution — the way the United Arab Emirates demanded that Netanyahu forgo any annexation of the West Bank as a price for their Abraham Accords.” He insists on that proviso, even though he writes one paragraph later: “The Saudi leadership is not particularly interested in the Palestinians or knowledgeable about the intricacies of the peace process.”
According to Friedman, the insistence on the 2-state is not coming from the Saudis, but from President Biden’s progressive advisors, because if the Democratic president helps make peace between Israel and the Saudis without any reference to a Palestinian State, “it would spark a rebellion in the progressive base of his party and make ratification of the deal well-nigh impossible.”
Friedman quotes Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, which funds the State Department, who told him: “I can assure you that there will be a strong core of Democratic opposition to any proposal that does not include meaningful, clearly defined and enforceable provisions to preserve the option of a two-state solution and to meet President Biden’s own demand that Palestinians and Israelis enjoy equal measures of freedom and dignity. These elements are essential to any sustainable peace in the Middle East.”
Of course, if Biden wants to push peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia through Congress, he’ll have ample Republican support, more than enough to push it past the angry progressives. But Friedman doesn’t have much to say about that, although he admits that “truth be told, the Palestinian Authority is in no position to engage in peace talks with Israel today. It’s a mess.”
Friedman does take time out of his busy op-ed piece to attack the Israeli right: “I’d love to see Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, go on Israeli television and explain to the Israeli people why it is in Israel’s interest to annex the West Bank and its 2.9 million Palestinian inhabitants — forever — rather than normalize ties with Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world.”
And Biden’s jester presses on: “A Saudi-Israeli peace could dramatically reduce the Muslim-Jewish antipathy born over a century ago with the start of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict.”
Here’s the rub: back in 1978, Israel gave back two-thirds of its territory in return for a peace treaty with Egypt. And yet, despite 45 years of peace, Egyptian antisemitism never subsided, and vile attacks by Egyptian media on the Jewish State have continued as if the two countries are still in a state of war. Very few Egyptian tourists bother to visit Israel, and contact between Israeli and Egyptian academics, intellectuals, and entertainers invariably ends with boycotts on the Egyptians, if not worse.
And so, peace with the Saudis would certainly be an important asset for Israel, but Friedman is in La-la land if he expects it to reduce Muslim hatred of Jews.
The best hope for a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia is that a Republican or a centrist Democrat wins the White House in 2024. Biden just can’t, regardless of Friedman’s claptrap.
