From right to left: Sheikh Mohammed Al-Issa, secretary-general of
the Mecca-based Muslim World League; Abdullah bin Al-Sheikh Al-Mahfouz
bin Bayyah, head of the Emirates Council for Sharia Fatwa and the Forum
for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies and the Al-Muwatta Foundation in
Abu Dhabi; Sheikh Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, Chief Imam of the Grand
Mosque in Mecca and President of the General Presidency for the Affairs
of the Two Holy Mosques; an Israeli official.
“Without Senate approval, this is a non-starter, and without the
Israel piece of this, a Senate approval is non-starter,” said Matt Duss,
a former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders now the
executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy.
South Carolina Republican Lindsay Graham - who has become an unlikely
diplomatic ally to White House officials negotiating with Saudi leaders
– was more bullish. “I don’t think anybody on the Republican side is
going to undercut the deal,” he told
CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.” Graham continued “If we can
get a deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel, it ends the Arab-Israeli
conflict, it isolates the Iranians, it creates some hope for the
Palestinians, it provides security in a real way to Israel.”
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argued
that Israel is now facing a historic choice between “Rafah or Riyadh”,
meaning an invasion that would not only result in a humanitarian
catastrophe in front of an increasingly hostile world but also fail to
"eliminate Hamas" and achieve the much heralded "total victory"
Netanyahu has vowed to deliver; or, conversely, Israel could choose to
end the war, help introduce an Arab peacekeeping force to govern Gaza,
begin a process of normalisation with Saudi Arabia and Qatar and engage a
revitalised Palestinian Authority in a process that would ultimately
lead to a Palestinian state that would become a central part of a
U.S.-led regional security alliance to counter Iran.
This, in essence, is Biden’s plan: an Arab peacekeeping force in
Gaza, a U.S.-Saudi defence pact, and an integrated "security
architecture" that would include Israel, the Americans, the European
Union, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and the
PA.
But as the Washington Post
reported on Monday it faces plenty of obstacles, not least reticence
among the Arab nations U.S. officials envision will help oversee the
devastated territory in Washington’s “day after” blueprint.
“Whoever goes there, if they are seen or perceived to be there to
consolidate the misery that this war has created, then they will be seen
as the enemy,” said the Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman al-Safadi. “I
think nobody would want to be part of that configuration.”
“Of course, we’re willing to play a role fully in whatever [form] it
takes,” said Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry . “But that role
and what we will accept in terms of risks and rewards will be subject to
the overall evaluation of the end result and whether it is consistent
with our aims.”
What happened this week was not a change in the Saudi position, just a reiteration of what the Saudis previously said in February
after US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby suggested that
Riyadh was prepared to normalise relations before there is a ceasefire
in Gaza and without progress toward Palestinian statehood.
What is most remarkable about all this is that Israel / Saudi
normalisation is back on the table given that the US-backed Israeli
genocide in Gaza continues in full swing.
As we wrote in our newsletter
of February 9, the real reason for all this is MbS’s desire to help
Israel as well as deflecting accountability for the ongoing genocide and
the funnelling
of the Palestinians back into a make-believe world otherwise known as
apartheid or the status quo ante. Saudi-Israeli relations are already
more than normalised. Putting it on the agenda again now represents a
last ditch push by the Saudis to get a deal with Biden before November’s
election while tossing a political lifeline to Netanyahu to try and
stop him sinking further into the Gazan quagmire, as war crimes
prosecutions loom and Israel faces defeat both on the battlefield and in
the forum of public opinion around the world.
The real question now is not whether Saudi and Israel are going to
establish diplomatic relations or even whether there is going to be a
two state solution. The real question now is for how much longer can the
Zionist project survive before it collapses into the dustbin of history as other colonial settler regimes have done in the past?
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