BLINKEN: SAUDI-ISRAELI DIPLOMATIC TIES POSSIBLE
Says steps toward Palestinian state would be needed
Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, and a Saudi ambassador asserted Tuesday the possibility of diplomatic recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia if the Israeli government alleviates the suffering of residents of the Gaza Strip and puts Palestinians on a path toward statehood.
During meetings in Tel Aviv, Blinken said Israel had “real opportunities” to strengthen ties with Arab nations as he sought to find a political endgame to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and calm regional violence arising from the conflict, even as Israel says it is slowing down major combat operations in Gaza.
Blinken’s comments were a reference to his assertion Monday night, after talks at a Saudi royal camp in the desert, that Saudi Arabia and other countries remained interested in eventually building normal diplomatic relations with Israel despite the destruction in Gaza. But Arab leaders insist Israel must end the war in Gaza first and work toward a Palestinian state,
Blinken said — a position at odds with the Israeli government.
A senior Saudi official made similar points Tuesday, in the strongest signal since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the start of the war that Saudi Arabia remains open to talks of normalization, as long as Israel takes concrete steps that would benefit Palestinians.
In an interview with the BBC, Prince Khalid bin Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Britain,
said that the kingdom’s talks with the United States about normalization had revolved around an endpoint that “included nothing less than an independent state of Palestine.”
“While we still — going forward, even after Oct. 7 — believe in normalization, it does not come at the cost of the Palestinian people,” Prince Khalid said.
On Tuesday night, after meetings with a range of Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
of Israel and the Israeli war cabinet, Blinken said at a news conference that Israel’s integration into the region was not a substitute for a “political horizon for Palestinians and ultimately a Palestinian state.”
“On the contrary, that piece has to be a part of any integration efforts, any normalization efforts,” he added.
What Blinken left unspoken was the reversal that would be required by the Israeli government, which is now controlled by a right-wing coalition. It has opposed Palestinian statehood and also made it an ever-dimmer prospect by expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank, undermining the Palestinian Authority there and taking steps that have helped Hamas retain control of Gaza.
In his talks with Netanyahu, Blinken told reporters, the two governments agreed to a plan to have a U.N. team assess northern Gaza to see what conditions were needed for Palestinians to return to their homes there. “This is not going to happen overnight,” he said. “There are serious security, infrastructure and humanitarian challenges.”
But Blinken said he insisted to Netanyahu that Palestinians return home as soon as conditions allowed and that the United States opposed any efforts to resettle Palestinians outside Gaza, as some far-right Israeli Cabinet officials have proposed.
Forging normal diplomatic ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a leading Arab power and Muslim nation, would be an important political victory for both Israel and the United States.
Before Oct. 7, the main discussions about a longshot normalization deal had taken place between Saudi Arabia and the U.S., with the Saudis asking for important security commitments from
Washington. But Blinken’s statements reveal the terms have shifted, marking the first time since talks began in earnest last year that a top American official has explicitly linked Palestinian statehood to normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
The prospects for the kind of three-way agreement among those two countries and the United States, floated by the Biden administration early last year, have dimmed because of the war: Citizens of Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arab world are incensed at Israel, given the destruction of most of Gaza and the deaths of around 23,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
And many Israelis are reluctant to give the Palestinians greater rights or concede to a Palestinian state, with its own military and arsenal, given the horrors of Oct. 7, when Hamas fighters killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians, according to Israeli officials.
But Blinken pressed forward Tuesday, dangling the potential for normalized ties in an apparent effort to try to get Israel to curtail military operations in Gaza and consider a wide-reaching political solution.