Saudi Arabia Will Find It a Bit Harder Than the UAE and Bahrain to Unconditionally Embrace Israel
By
Mahir Ali
09 Dec 2020
AT last
Sunday’s concluding session of the IISS Manama Dialogue hosted by Bahrain,
Saudi prince Turki bin Faisal offered a stinging critique of Israel. A few
years ago, a rebuke of this nature would barely have been newsworthy, but in
the context of recent developments it is decidedly intriguing.
It is
highly unlikely that Turki’s reasonably accurate description of Israel as a
“Western colonising” power that relentlessly brutalised Palestinians would have
been endorsed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), whose eagerness to
follow the UAE and Bahrain in establishing full-fledged diplomatic relations
with Israel was underlined late last month when he secretly hosted Benjamin
Netanyahu in Neom.
Turki, a
long-time former chief of Saudi intelligence who subsequently served as the
ambassador to London and Washington (with the late Jamal Khashoggi as his
spokesman), declared in Manama that he was speaking in his personal capacity.
It was nonetheless interesting to hear him claim that the so-called Abraham
Accords were meaningless without the participation of the custodians of Makkah,
and that “normalisation” would require Israeli acceptance of the 2002 Saudi
peace initiative.
Turki no
longer holds any government post, but as a senior member of the royal family
his words pointed to a rift within the House of Saud. MBS has built up a
formidable reputation as a monarch-in-waiting who brooks no dissent, even from
once powerful cousins, as illustrated by the uncertain fate of his predecessor
as crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef. Yet there may be limits to his capacity to
silence everyone who disputes his blinkered vision — particularly if Turki’s
views echo those of the ailing King Salman.
Saudi
Arabia, it seems, will find it a bit harder than the UAE and Bahrain to
unconditionally embrace Israel. But it’s also worth noting that some of the
supposedly profound recent shifts in the Middle East are hardly a novelty. Contacts
and, in some spheres, close collaboration between Israel and certain Arab
states go back years.
That they
are now out in the open is a welcome change. The same could be said about the
once half-hidden anxieties and deeply ingrained prejudices that have surfaced
in the US during the Trump years. Neither instance offers any cause for
celebration.
It has
credibly been argued that actions such as the purportedly high-tech
assassination late last month of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh,
almost certainly carried out by Israel with American connivance, are intended
to make it harder for the Biden administration to rejoin the multilateral
nuclear deal with Tehran, and to prioritise diplomacy over the belligerence
that has made it so much harder for Iran to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.
Yet the
very notion that a somewhat less unreasonable US administration could somehow
help ‘fix’ the Middle East reeks of a neocolonial mindset. For far too long the
region’s fate and fortunes have been determined by extraneous powers guided
primarily by their own interests — which invariably focused on access to
natural resources.
The
diminishing value of oil on a planet beset by the consequences of over-reliance
on fossil fuels is gradually but inexorably changing that dynamic — even though
petrodollars so far remain a precious means of arms sales to a region bristling
with lethal weaponry. A lot of that has been deployed in the Saudi-Emirati
aggression against the Middle East’s poorest state. Yemen today stands on the
brink of a famine; Covid-19 has barely registered in a nation afflicted by a
multiplicity of competing woes.
The concept
of a reasonably stable and uniformly prosperous Middle East will remain a
fantasy until the region unequivocally regains its independence from the
external powers that have moulded and manipulated it through the 19th, 20th and
early 21st centuries. It will then have to work out how to thwart the designs
of potential regional hegemons, from Turkey and Israel to Iran, Saudi Arabia and
its Gulf allies.
That may
seem like fantasyland at present. But things do change. Nothing decrees that
the cradle of civilisation must eventually serve as its burial ground. And
notwithstanding its status as a colonial-settler state, Israel can play a significant
role in its transformation.
Yet the
plan that Prince Turki trotted out at Manama is an anachronism, and it was
probably belated even in 2002. The two-state solution has effectively been
buried under the illegal settlements that have proliferated over the past
half-century. Ultimately, the choice for Israel is between consolidating the
existing proto-apartheid state that is now being enabled by some of the most
reprehensible regimes in the region, and a binational democracy that could
potentially serve as a Middle Eastern exemplar.
I certainly
wouldn’t bet on the latter outcome. However, as the late American folk singer
Pete Seeger used to say: “There is no hope, but I may be wrong.”
Original
Headline: Shifting sands
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan
URL: https://newageislam.com/the-war-within-islam/saudi-arabia-find-bit-harder/d/123705