For the hundreds of thousands of Israeli democracy advocates who tried to block Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial coup on Monday, the deprivation of key Israeli Supreme Court powers to rein in executive power surely feels like a stinging defeat.
I understand, but don't despair at all.
Talks between the United States and Saudi Arabia can help.
U.S. President Joe Biden departing King Abdulaziz International Airport in Saudi Arabia, July 16, 2022. Biden weighs a big deal in the Middle East. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)
Yes, you read that right.
When I recently interviewed President Joe Biden in the Oval Office, my column focused on his plea for Netanyahu not to pass judicial reform without even a semblance of national consensus.
But we don't just talk about that.
The president is torn between the possibility of a mutual security pact between the United States and Saudi Arabia, which would involve Saudi Arabia normalizing its relations with Israel, provided Israel made concessions to the Palestinians that preserved the possibility of a two-state solution.
After the conversations held in recent days between Biden; his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan; Secretary of State Antony Blinken; and Brett McGurk, the senior White House official in charge of Middle East policy, Biden has sent Sullivan and McGurk to Saudi Arabia, where they arrived Thursday morning, to explore the possibility of some kind of understanding between the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Palestine.
The president has not yet decided to proceed, but gave the green light for his team to poll with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia to see if some kind of agreement is possible and at what price.
Closing such a multinational deal would be time-consuming, difficult and complex, even if Biden decides to move to the next level immediately.
But exploratory talks are moving forward now — faster than I thought — and they're important for two reasons.
First, a U.S.-Saudi security pact that normalizes relations between Saudi Arabia and the Jewish state — while reducing relations between Saudi Arabia and China — would be a game-changer for the Middle East than the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.
Because peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, custodian of Islam's two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, would open the way to peace between Israel and the entire Muslim world, including giant countries like Indonesia and perhaps even Pakistan.
It would be Biden's important foreign policy legacy.
Second, if the United States forges a security alliance with Saudi Arabia – on the condition that it normalizes its relations with Israel and that it makes significant concessions to the Palestinians – Netanyahu's ruling coalition of Jewish supremacists and religious extremists would have to answer this question:
You can annex the West Bank or you can have peace with Saudi Arabia and the entire Muslim world, but you can't have both, so what will it be?
Wouldn't that be an interesting debate at Netanyahu's Council of Ministers table?
I would 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 – instead of normalizing ties with Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world.
A Saudi-Israeli peace could drastically reduce the Jewish-Muslim antipathy born more than a century ago with the onset of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict.
But before this option – annexation or normalization – can be posed to this extremist Israeli government, many things have to be agreed upon by many people.
That said, Sullivan is not in Riyadh today for sightseeing.
Road
The Saudis seek three main things from Washington:
a NATO-level mutual security treaty obliging the United States to come to Saudi Arabia's defense if it is attacked (most likely by Iran); a civilian nuclear program, overseen by the United States; and the possibility of purchasing more advanced American weapons, such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense ballistic missile defense system, especially useful to the Saudis against Iran's growing arsenal of medium- and long-range missiles.
Among the things the U.S. wants from the Saudis are an end to the fighting in Yemen, where the conflict has been thankfully winding down over the past year; an unprecedented Saudi aid package for Palestinian institutions in the West Bank; and significant limits to the growing relationship between Saudi Arabia and China.
For example, the United States was not amused by reports last year that Saudi Arabia was considering accepting the Chinese renminbi to price some oil sales to China instead of the U.S. dollar.
Over time, given the economic weight of China and Saudi Arabia, that could have a very negative impact on the US dollar as the world's most important currency.
That would have to be cancelled.
The U.S. also wants the Saudis to reduce their relations with Chinese tech giants like Huawei, whose latest telecommunications equipment is banned in the United States.
This would be the first time the United States has signed a mutual security pact with an undemocratic government since President Dwight Eisenhower did so with pre-democratic South Korea in 1953, and would require Senate approval.
But just as important is what the Saudis would demand of Israel to preserve the prospect of a two-state solution, just as the UAE demanded Netanyahu renounce any annexation of the West Bank as the price for his Abraham Accords.
The Saudi leadership is not particularly interested in the Palestinians, nor do they know the ins and outs of the peace process.
But if Biden's team were to reach an agreement without a significant Palestinian component, it would simultaneously deal a mortal blow to the Israeli democracy movement – by giving Netanyahu a huge geopolitical prize for free after having done something so undemocratic – and to the two-state solution, the cornerstone of US-Middle East diplomacy.
I don't think Biden will do that.
It would trigger a rebellion in his party's progressive base and make ratification of the agreement nearly impossible.
"It will be quite difficult for President Biden to sell a deal like this to the United States Congress," said Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Appropriations Subcommittee for Foreign Operations, which funds the State Department.
"But 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 fulfill 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."
I believe that, at a minimum, the Saudis and Americans could (and should) demand four things from Netanyahu for a prize as big as normalization and trade with the most important Arab Muslim state:-
An official pledge not to annex the West Bank – never.
No new settlements in the West Bank or outward expansion of existing settlements.
- No to the legalization of wild Jewish settlements.
- And the transfer of part of Palestinian-populated territory from Area C of the West Bank (now under full Israeli control) to Areas A and B (under Palestinian Authority control), as envisaged in the Oslo Accords.
In return, the Palestinian Authority would have to back Saudi Arabia's peace deal with Israel.
Indeed, the Palestinian Authority is not in a position today to enter into peace talks with Israel.
It's a mess.
The Palestinians need to remake their government, but in the meantime, far-right ministers in Israel's Cabinet are trying to absorb most of the West Bank as fast as they can.
The urgent need is to stop this immediately, but not with another dose of gestures from the State Department about how "deeply concerned" the United States is about Israeli settlements.
Rather, the best measure is a grand strategic initiative that has something meaningful to everyone except fans on all sides.
I repeat: Any deal will take months of difficult negotiations between the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and success would be a remote possibility at best.
But if Biden decides to try, and the United States can put on the table a deal that is hugely in America's strategic interest, hugely in Israel's strategic interest, and hugely in Saudi Arabia's strategic interest (admitting it into a very exclusive club of countries with an American security umbrella), and rekindle Palestinian hopes for a two-state solution, That would be a very, very important thing.
And if he also forced Netanyahu to abandon the extremists in his Cabinet and make common cause with the Israeli center-left and center-right,
Wouldn't it be the icing on the cake?
c.2023 The New York Times Company
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