National Post (National Edition)
Trump’s Saudi gamble for Mideast peace
President sees promise in 2002 formula
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA • For 15 years, Saudi Arabia has been pitching its formula for peace among Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab world, with little response from Israeli leaders.
And for months now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asserted Israel’s increasing strategic alignment with Persian Gulf States over their shared enmity toward Iran.
But it took President Donald Trump just a couple of hours after he landed in Israel on Monday to suddenly and quite publicly combine those two ideas as the centrepiece of his plan for a peace deal. With the gusto of a salesman pushing a limitedtime offer, he cast the Saudi monarch in a leading role and invoked his name to push Netanyahu toward progress with the Palestinians.
It was a case study in wheeler-dealer diplomacy, aimed at unlocking progress in a conflict that has bedevilled decades of peace efforts. And even though it remained unclear what, if anything, the Saudi monarch had actually agreed to and whether Israel would make an offer acceptable to Arab states, Trump has used his entire trip so far to signal that he sees the Saudis as central.
Breaking with precedent, Trump chose the Saudi capital, Riyadh, as the first foreign destination of his presidency and told leaders of dozens of Muslim countries gathered there that he considered the kingdom a crucial ally in fighting terrorism and confronting Iran.
This reliance on Saudi Arabia recognizes the kingdom’s unique place in the Arab and Islamic worlds, which Trump hopes to leverage. Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth gives it wide-ranging influence and makes it one of the few states that could have hosted such an ornate, international gathering on such short notice. And its status as the birthplace of Islam and home to its holiest sites gives it religious legitimacy in much of the Muslim world.
The kingdom had also already proposed a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, named the Arab Peace Initiative, which the 22 members of the Arab League adopted in 2002. It called for peace between Arab states and Israel in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal to truce lines before the 1967 war; the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital; and a “just” solution to the Palestinian refugee issue.
Skepticism remains high that Trump can achieve a breakthrough.
“Despite their frustration with Israeli behaviour regarding the Palestinians, the Gulf states recognize that Israel is a strong, advanced country with a military that could act against their common foes and that has intelligence capabilities that could mesh very well with the needs and capabilities of Gulf agencies,” said Jason Isaacson, an associate executive director of the American Jewish Committee, who has been visiting Arab countries for two decades.
He doubted, though, that such links would develop much without concrete moves toward peace.
Upon arriving in Jerusalem, Trump sought to build new momentum for a regional grand bargain by claiming the Arabs were already on board.
Israel dismissed the Arab proposal as soon as it was announced in 2002, and the violence of the second Palestinian uprising, which was raging at the time, put neither side in the mood to negotiate and further ingrained the view of Israel in the Arab world as an aggressive usurper of Palestinian rights.
Subsequent Israeli governments have spoken positively of parts of the initiative, and in 2015, Netanyahu offered a partial endorsement, saying that the “general idea — to try and reach understandings with leading Arab countries — is a good idea.”
But a stark, rightward drift in Israeli politics and society stands as a significant obstacle to any twostate peace deal, and Netanyahu has shown little inclination toward concessions, especially on the status of East Jerusalem, an emotional issue for many Arabs and Muslims because of its holy sites.
At the same time, the Palestinians are profoundly divided, with a weakened Palestinian Authority administering parts of the occupied West Bank and Hamas, which the United States and Israel consider a terrorist organization, controlling the Gaza Strip.
Jordan and Egypt have longstanding peace agreements with Israel, but the most significant changes in recent years have been in Gulf countries, where a younger generation of leaders, like Mohammed bin Salman, the deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, have recognized the role Israel could play in their economic and security policies.
“This younger generation sees Israel much more in terms of practical alliances,” said Stephen A. Seche, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen and the executive vice president of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “So suddenly Israel is not seen in that one-dimensional term of being the occupier of Palestinian land, but rather as a potential partner against the greater evil, if you will, which is Iran.”