Saudi deal
War-scarred Syria similarly welcomed the agreement as a move toward easing tensions that have exacerbated the country’s conflict. Iran has been a main backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government, while Saudi Arabia has supported opposition fighters trying to remove him from power.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry called it an “important step that will lead to strengthening security and stability in the region.”
In Israel, bitterly divided and gripped by mass protests over plans by Netanyahu’s far-right government to overhaul the judiciary, politicians seized on the rapprochement between the kingdom and Israel’s archenemy as an opportunity to criticize Netanyahu, accusing him of focusing on his personal agenda at the expense of Israel’s international relations.
Yair Lapid, the former prime minister and head of Israel’s opposition, denounced the agreement between Riyadh and Tehran as “a full and dangerous failure of the Israeli government’s foreign policy.”
“This is what happens when you deal with legal madness all day instead of doing the job with Iran and strengthening relations with the U.S.,” he wrote on Twitter. Even Yuli Edelstein from Netanyahu’s Likud party blamed Israel’s “power struggles and head-butting” for distracting the country from its more pressing threats.
Another opposition lawmaker, Gideon Saar, mocked Netanyahu’s goal of formal ties with the kingdom. “Netanyahu promised peace with Saudi Arabia,” he wrote on social media. “In the end (Saudi Arabia) did it … with Iran.”
Netanyahu, on an official visit to Italy, declined a request for comment and issued no statement on the matter. But quotes to Israeli media by an anonymous senior official in the delegation sought to put blame on the previous government that ruled for a year and a half before Netanyahu returned to office. “It happened because of the impression that Israel and the U.S. were weak,” said the senior official, according to the Haaretz daily, which hinted that Netanyahu was the official.
Despite the fallout for Netanyahu’s reputation, experts doubted a detente would harm Israel. Saudi Arabia and Iran will remain regional rivals, even if they open embassies in each other’s capitals, said Guzansky. And like the UAE, Saudi Arabia could deepen relations with Israel even while maintaining a transactional relationship with Iran.
“The low-key arrangement that the Saudis have with Israel will continue,” said Umar Karim, an expert on Saudi politics at the University of Birmingham, noting that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank remained more of a barrier to Saudi recognition than differences over Iran. “The Saudi leadership is engaging in more than one way to secure its national security.”