Biden weighs a big deal in the Middle East

2023-07-28 17:05:34

For the hundreds of thousands of defenders of Israeli democracy who tried to block the judicial coup of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu On Monday, the stripping of the Israeli Supreme Court’s key powers to rein in the executive branch surely feels like a stinging defeat.

I get it, but don’t despair entirely.

Talks between the United States and Saudi Arabia can help.

US President Joe Biden leaving King Abdulaziz International Airport in Saudi Arabia on July 16, 2022. Biden weighs a big deal in the Middle East. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

Yes, you read it right.

When I recently interviewed the president Joe Biden in the Oval Office, my column focused on his request to Netanyahu that will not approve judicial reform without even a semblance of national consensus.

But we don’t just talk about that.

The president debates between the possibility of a mutual security pact between the United States and Saudi Arabia, which would entail Saudi Arabia normalizing its relations with Israel, on the condition that Israel make concessions to the Palestinians that preserve the possibility of a two-state solution.

After the conversations held in recent days between Biden; his national security adviser Jake Sullivan; the secretary of state, Antony Blink; y Brett McGurkthe senior White House official in charge of Middle East policy, Biden has sent Sullivan and McGurk to Saudi Arabia, where they arrived on Thursday morning, to explore the possibility of some sort of US-Saudi Arabia understanding. , Israel and Palestine.

The president has not yet decided to proceed, but gave the green light for his team to probe the crown prince. Mohammed bin Salman Saudi Arabia to see if some kind of agreement is possible and at what price.

Closing such a multinational deal would be time consuming, difficult and complex, even if Biden decides to go to the next level immediately.

But the exploratory talks are moving forward now – faster than I thought – and they are important For two reasons.

First, a US-Saudi security pact that results in the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and the Jewish state – while reducing relations between Saudi Arabia and China – would be a game changer for the Middle East, greater than the peace treaty of Camp David between Egypt and Israel.

Because peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, custodian of the two holiest cities of Islam, Mecca and Medinawould open the way to peace between Israel and the entire Muslim world, including giant countries like Indonesia and maybe even Pakistan.

It would be an important foreign policy legacy for Biden.

Second, if the US forges a security alliance with Saudi Arabia – on the condition that it normalizes relations with Israel and Israel makes significant concessions to the Palestinians – Netanyahu’s ruling coalition of Jewish supremacists and religious extremists would have to answer this question:

You can annex the West Bank or you can have peace with Saudi Arabia and the whole Muslim world, but you can’t have it both ways, so which will it be?

Wouldn’t it be a interesting discussion at the table of Netanyahu’s Council of Ministers?

I would love to see Israel’s far-right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrichgo on Israeli television and explain to the Israeli people why it is in Israel’s interest to annex the West Bank and its 2.9 million Palestinian inhabitants – forever – instead of normalizing ties with Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world.

A Saudi-Israeli peace could drastically reduce the Jewish-Muslim antipathy born more than a century ago with the start of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict.

But before this option – annexation or normalization – can be put before this extremist Israeli government, many things have to be agreed upon by many people.

That being said, Sullivan is not in Riyadh today for sightseeing.

Camino

The Saudis are looking for three main things from Washington:

a treaty of mutual security at the level of the I’LL TAKE forcing the United States to come to the defense of Saudi Arabia if it is attacked (most likely by Iran); a civilian nuclear program, overseen by the United States; and the possibility of buying more advanced US weapons, such as the ballistic missile defense system Terminal High Altitude Area Defenseespecially useful for the Saudis against Iran’s growing arsenal of medium- and long-range missiles.

Among the things the United States wants from the Saudis is an end to the fighting in Yemen, where the conflict has thankfully been declining over the last year; a Saudi aid package unprecedented for Palestinian institutions in the West Bank; and significant limits to the growing relationship between Saudi Arabia and China.

For example, the United States was not amused by reports last year that Saudi Arabia was considering accepting the renminbi Chinese currency to price some oil sales to China instead of the US dollar.

Over time, given the economic weight of China and Saudi Arabia, that could have a very negative impact on the US dollar as the world’s most important currency.

That would have to be cancelled.

The United States also wants the Saudis to reduce their relations with Chinese tech giants like Huaweiwhose latest telecommunications equipment is banned in the United States.

This would be the first time the United States has signed a mutual security pact with a undemocratic government since President Dwight Eisenhower did so with pre-democratic South Korea in 1953, and would require Senate approval.

But just as important is what the Saudis would require of Israel to preserve the prospect of a two state solutionjust as the United Arab Emirates demanded that Netanyahu renounce any annexation of the West Bank as the price for his Abraham Accords.

The Saudi leadership is not particularly interested in the Palestinians nor does it know the ins and outs of the peace process.

But if Biden’s team were to reach a deal without a significant Palestinian component, it would simultaneously deal a death blow to the Israeli democracy movement – by giving Netanyahu a huge geopolitical prize for free after doing something so undemocratic – and to the two-state solution. , the piedra angular of diplomacy between the United States and the Middle East.

I don’t think Biden would do that.

It would trigger a rebellion in the progressive base of his party and make ratification of the agreement almost impossible.

“It’s going to be pretty hard for President Biden to sell a deal like this to the United States Congress,” said Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, which funds the Department of State.

“But I can assure you that there will be a strong core of Democratic opposition to any proposal that does not include meaningful, clearly defined and enforceable provisions to preserve the option of a two-state solution and meet President Biden’s own demand that Palestinians and Israelis enjoy equal measures of liberty and dignity. These elements are essential to any sustainable peace in the Middle East.”

I think that, at the very least, the Saudis and the Americans could (and should) demand four things from Netanyahu for a prize as big as normalization and trade with the most important Muslim Arab state: –

An official promise not to annex the West Bank – ever.

– No new settlement in the West Bank or outward expansion of existing settlements.

– No to the legalization of wild Jewish settlements.

– And the transfer of part of the territory populated by Palestinians from area C of the West Bank (now under full Israeli control) to areas A and B (under control of the Palestinian Authority), as provided for in the Oslo Accords.

In return, the Palestinian Authority it would have to back Saudi Arabia’s peace deal with Israel.

To tell the truth, the Palestinian Authority is not in a position today to enter into peace talks with Israel.

It is a disaster.

The Palestinians need to remake their government, but in the meantime, Israel’s far-right Cabinet ministers are trying to absorb as much of the West Bank as fast as they can.

The urgent need is to stop this immediately, but not with another dose of State Department waving about how “deeply concerned” the US is about the Israeli settlements.

Rather, the best move is a big strategic initiative that has something meaningful to everyone but fans on all sides.

I repeat: any agreement will lead months of difficult negotiations between the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and success would be a long shot, at best.

But if Biden decides to try, and the United States can put a deal on the table that is in the strategic interest of the United States enormously, the strategic interest of Israel enormously, and the strategic interest of Saudi Arabia enormously (admitting it to a very exclusive club of countries with an American security umbrella), and rekindling Palestinian hopes for a two-state solution, that would be very, very important.

And if it further forced Netanyahu to abandon the extremists in his Cabinet and make common cause with the Israeli center-left and center-right,

Wouldn’t that be the icing on the cake?

c.2023 The New York Times Company

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