Saudi Crown Prince fears Assassination if he Recognizes Israel without getting a Palestinian State
Juan Cole 08/16/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Nahal Toosi at Politico reported on Wednesday that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, has emphasized to the Biden administration that the “grand bargain” they want him to make with Israel could result in his assassination. She says he instanced the late Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat, who was shot to death by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1981, after Sadat made a peace treaty with Israel.
It is worth mentioning that Saudi royalty are also no strangers to assassination. In 1975, King Faisal was shot to death by his disgruntled nephew, whose motives remain murky. Former crown prince and former Minister of the Interior Mohammed Bin Nayef survived several assassination attempts, the last in 2009 when al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula targeted him with a suicide bomber who hid his bomb in his butt cheeks.
MBS is, of course, leaking these concerns to put pressure on Biden administration diplomats Brett McGurk and Antony Blinken, who have been attempting to pressure him to join Jared Kushner’s Abraham Accords and recognize Israel.
The Saudis have repeatedly underlined that they can only recognize Israel if a Palestinian state is created. A rapprochement with Tel Aviv that throws the Palestinians under the bus would be enormously unpopular among the public in Saudi Arabia, and could indeed lead to unrest. Peoples’ blood in the region is boiling over Israel’s killing of over 40,000 Palestinians, a majority of them women and children, in Gaza.
Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, concluded accords with postage stamp countries such as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Bahrain is a set of small islands a little larger than Rhode Island with a Shiite majority and a hard line Sunni monarchy, which is desperately afraid of Iran. Iran ruled Bahrain in the early modern period and Iranian parliamentarians occasionally give speeches in which they make claims on the islands. Bahrain’s population is about 1.5 million, similar to that of Hawaii, and only 46% of the country’s residents are citizens. The rest are guest workers.
The United Arab Emirates likewise has 9.4 million residents but only 1.14 million citizens, in a territory slightly larger than South Carolina.
It is possible for these monarchies, with their iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove security apparatuses, to keep their small citizen populations in line when they do something unpopular. The guest workers who make trouble are summarily deported to their home countries.
In contrast, Saudi Arabia is a real country. Its territory is a little over a fifth of the US, equivalent to Texas, California, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada taken together. Its citizen population is 18.8 million, comprising 58.4% of the residents of the country. That population is a little larger than the Netherlands’ and a little smaller than Chile’s.
Saudis can rise up against their government. In 2003-2006 and again later in that decade, the kingdom was wracked by political violence spearheaded by Saudis who had enrolled in the peninsula’s branch of al-Qaeda and who directly targeted Riyadh and the royal family. In 1979 a millenarian movement Saudis briefly took over the grand mosque in Mecca.
So, Bin Salman’s trepidation is perfectly reasonable and the Biden plan for Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel at all costs is daft. As Bin Salman pointed out, if a Palestinian state is not created, there just will be endless trouble in the Levant. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is dead set against any such Palestinian state, and his parliament actually passed a law against recognizing a Palestinian state, last month.
Morocco, another Abraham Accords signatory, has witnessed demonstrations demanding the expulsion of Israeli diplomats from the country.
If the Biden administration manages to pressure the Saudis into recognizing Israel, without making any provisions for the Palestinians to escape their status as stateless people with no real basic human rights, it will only destablize the region and set it up for another round of wars in the future.