Foreign Policy: Netanyahu has drawn Saudi-US roadmap Opinion by James Traub

The Foreign Policy magazine has published an article claiming that Prime Minister Netanyahu cares about bringing Israel’s isolation in the Middle East to an end by recruiting Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreement Israel signed with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been prime minister of Israel for six weeks. In the normal course of things, he’d be coming to Washington any day now. But this is no normal time; senior officials around U.S. President Joe Biden are said to be wary of inviting Netanyahu while he is engulfed in controversy over his treatment of Palestinians and a proposed judicial reform that will subordinate Israel’s Supreme Court to its parliament.

When he does come, which he will before long, Netanyahu is likelier to get a stern lecture from his old friend Biden than the usual arm around the shoulder. But Netanyahu will have an answer to any exhortations about Israeli domestic politics. The dialogue could run something like this:

Netanyahu: “I can restrain the right-wing nuts in my coalition if you give me what I really need.”

Biden: “What’s that?”

Netanyahu: “I want you to make up with the Saudis.”

That would be a head-spinning ask. Yet the regional experts I have talked to in recent weeks all agree that the one thing Netanyahu cares about—besides staying in power and not getting thrown in jail over bribery and corruption charges—is bringing Israel’s isolation in the Middle East to an end by recruiting Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreement Israel signed with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

Netanyahu believes that Washington can deliver Saudi Arabia. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, has told both Israeli and American officials that he wants Washington to treat Saudi Arabia as the major regional force he believes it is by resuming arms sales halted last fall and by offering the kind of security commitment it extends to close allies. Netanyahu will argue that Biden can sink a triple bank shot by bringing the Saudis back in from the cold. That is a terrible idea, though it contains the germ of a not-so-terrible idea.

The Abraham Accords are built around a genuine reorientation of Arab political culture. Arab regimes long propped up their shaky legitimacy by expressing implacable hostility toward Israel; states like Egypt and Jordan that ended their wars with Israel nevertheless adopted the cause of the Palestinians as their own. But while the Palestinian demand for a state slid into an exhausting stalemate over the last 30 years, the revolutionary Shiite regime in Iran came to pose an increasingly dire threat both to its Sunni neighbors and to Israel. The logic of the shared enemy trumped an ideological commitment that had lost its binding force—at least among ruling elites. In August 2020, the UAE, prodded by the Trump administration, signed a treaty with Israel that pledged both countries to peace, the normalization of relations, and cooperation on a wide range of economic and technical fields. Other states soon followed suit.

The agreement has produced many an Instagram moment. In September 2022, UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan made a five-day visit to Israel, meeting all major figures and paying the obligatory visit to the Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. I knew the accords had become a reality when, last fall, on one of my regular visits to the campus of New York University Abu Dhabi, I saw a gathering of ultra-Orthodox Jews down the hall from my classroom. As it happens, this past weekend, my Emirati students held a debate on whether Israel was a good partner for the Arabs. The affirmative side, which argued that the Arab world should look to the future rather than the past, won. When I asked the students afterward what they actually thought, six out of 11 students said they regarded the accords as a good thing. That’s only slightly ahead of Emirati public opinion, according to a recent poll.

The hard core of the Abraham Accords is regional security cooperation against Iran. Israel has now signed security agreements with Bahrain and Morocco and is helping the UAE with missile defense in the aftermath of attacks on Abu Dhabi launched by Iranian-supported Houthi rebels in Yemen. Those strikes, which have targeted Saudi Arabia as well, have helped drive Persian Gulf countries further into Israel’s orbit, whose Iron Dome system constitutes the state of the art in missile defense.

Netanyahu is surely right in thinking that the Middle East would be a different place if Saudi Arabia—the custodian of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina, the giant of the Persian Gulf, and (for many years) the champion of the Palestinian cause—joined this circle of cooperation. The prospect is openly discussed in Riyadh. Mohammed bin Salman is no more sentimental about the Palestinians than is Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the Emirates; he did not object when then-U.S. President Donald Trump agreed to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a decision that enraged Palestinians and their supporters. David Schenker, a former Trump Middle East official, told me that the Saudi leader didn’t even mention the Palestinians in the course of a long conversation with visiting experts last fall.

So what’s the problem with the triple bank shot? First of all, the crown prince’s father, King Salman, is very attached to the Palestinian cause—as is his entire generation. If Netanyahu throws the religious zealots in his coalition a bone by expanding or formalizing illegal settlements, much less by annexing part of the West Bank, then Mohammed bin Salman, a cynical opportunist but no fool, will not accede to the accords. Second, “the Biden administration has no juice with Saudi Arabia,” as Schenker said. When Biden humbled himself this past summer to ask the crown price to increase oil production to bring down the price, the crown prince turned him down flat. The Saudis increasingly regard themselves as a rising power of the global south, working with the United States, China, and Russia according to their own interests. They are, they insist, no longer in the American orbit.

But the real reason Netanyahu’s dream needs to be quashed is because Biden shouldn’t, and won’t, make the concessions that bin Salman wants. Even leaving aside the crown prince’s highhanded and brutal behavior at home—including, but hardly limited to, authorizing the murder and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi—he has spent years pursuing a savage and self-destructive war in Yemen. It would be unthinkable for the United States to accept a NATO-like relationship with Saudi Arabia. What if MBS responded to another Houthi attack with a strike against Iran—and then invoked the United States’ security commitment once Tehran struck back? Even Trump, the best friend the Saudis ever had in the White House, would pause at that rubicon.

And Biden, unlike Trump, doesn’t share the Israeli and Saudi view that Iran can be intimidated into silence. Israel and Saudi Arabia helped persuade Trump to junk the nuclear pact with Iran, which (as a consequence) has now become an all-but-nuclear state, far more dangerous than it was when the deal was first reached in 2015. Biden needs the help of Israel and Saudi Arabia to contain Iran, but he can’t let them drag the United States into hostilities that would only make the Iranians more intractable.

Biden is not going to do Netanyahu any favors on Saudi Arabia—and the U.S. Congress wouldn’t let him if he wanted to. Maybe it won’t matter, since Israel and Saudi Arabia are bound to be drawn together by the shared Iranian threat and common economic interests. It’s dismaying to recognize that an increasingly illiberal Israel won’t cavil at Mohammed bin Salman’s casual brutality. But neither can the United States wash its hands of Saudi Arabia, as Biden hoped to do when he first took office. The president has discovered to his dismay that the Saudis’ status as the world’s “swing producer” of oil gives the country tremendous leverage over markets. And Washington does need the Saudis as well as the Israelis to stop Iran from spreading its tentacles across the Middle East. (See this report from the Council on Foreign Relations for an explanation as to why Washington can’t afford to disentangle itself from Saudi Arabia.)

Insofar as they embody a forward-looking vision of the Middle East based on human and economic development, the Abraham Accords are a blessing both to the region and to the United States. Insofar as they incorporate Israel into a Sunni-Shiite battle for supremacy in the region, they are no such thing. When Netanyahu finally makes his way to Washington, Biden will need to tell him that the United States is prepared to help shape a new order in the Middle East—but not one based on humiliating the Palestinians and forcing regime change in Iran.