Just when one thinks the usual suspects have outgrown their habits of wishful thinking, along comes a whopper. Here is the New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, sharing the intelligence that the Biden administration plans some sort of Middle East grand bargain which would have Saudi Arabia and Israel normalise relations, ‘a huge geopolitical prize’. In return for Israel promising to give the Palestinians a viable state of their own (paid for in part by the Saudis) and ceasing all theft of Palestinian land, the Saudis would agree to normalise bilateral relations and (somehow) inspire the rest of the Muslim world to do the same. The Saudis would also receive state of the art military kit and a (‘civilian’) nuclear industry, as well as a mutual defence treaty. All this generosity to the Saudis is meant, according to Mr Friedman, to bring peace to Yemen and to place ‘significant limits on the growing relationship between Saudi Arabia and China’. Also, to humble and perhaps to weaken Benjamin ‘Netanyahu’s ruling coalition of Jewish supremacists and religious extremists’. He poses what seems to be a rhetorical question to that coalition: ‘You can annex the West Bank, or you can have peace with Saudi Arabia and the whole Muslim world, but you can’t have both, so which will it be?’ Peace or war, in other words. That’s not a difficult question for a Jewish or any other supremacist and religious extremist to answer. It’s hard to believe that Mr Friedman meets many of them on his commute between Aspen, Co and Potomac, Md. Sarcasm aside, this plan – if it is a real plan given that the US administration apparently thought it wise to float with Mr Friedman in advance – is at once too clever by half, and idiotic. The best result would be for the Saudis, the Iranians, and the Chinese to advance their healthy rapprochement after the Saudis collect their booty from this deal and do whatever they need to do to persuade a handful of American newspaper columnists that they are doing their bit for the Palestinians. At some point Israel, if it means to survive, will need to accommodate itself to that reality. So too must its American friends. The worst result would be the regional nuclear arms race that everyone fears. Only now the USA would be stuck in the middle of it with defence guarantees to opposing sides. In other words, the very fantasy of supremacists and religious extremists. More sensible people should be asking themselves, cui bono? Mr Friedman asserts that the ‘very, very big deal’ is ‘hugely’ in everyone’s ‘strategic interest’. He’s wrong. |