ANALYSIS:
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President Biden has said a goal of Hamas’ terrorist assault against Israel was to derail a historic normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia that was in the works, an assessment that fits with analysis promoted by many regional experts in the wake of the Palestinian militant group’s Oct. 7 rampage that killed more than 1,400 Israelis and foreign nationals.
The conflict surging during the weeks since has thrown into question the U.S.-led push for an Israel-Saudi alliance that sources say involved discussions about granting Riyadh control over security in Palestinian areas such as Gaza in exchange for formal recognition of Israel and U.S. security guarantees for Riyadh.
The prospect of such an agreement was seen to outrage Iran and Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza and has long operated within the thorny geopolitical space between Iran, the Middle East’s Shiite Muslim powerhouse, and Saudi Arabia, the region’s most powerful Sunni Muslim monarchy.
Mr. Biden told a campaign fundraising event on Friday that Hamas was motivated to attack Israel partly by a desire to stop the country’s move toward an alliance with the Saudis, an alliance some analysts say would put Hamas’ very existence in danger and be a major threat to Iran.
“One of the reasons Hamas moved on Israel … they knew that I was about to sit down with the Saudis,” Mr. Biden told an audience at the event in Washington. He said he believes Hamas militants launched their deadly assault because — “guess what? The Saudis wanted to recognize Israel” and were near being able to do so formally.
Inching closer
Jerusalem and Riyadh have been steadily inching closer to normalization, with Biden administration officials nurturing efforts in recent months to help bring the two countries together through security and economic collaboration.
It would, in many ways, be the culmination of the Abraham Accords, the string of normalization deals the Trump administration fostered between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. The Saudis voiced approval for those normalizations in 2020 but did not join them when they came to the fore.
While critics, including many Republicans, say Mr. Biden dropped the ball on the Trump-era initiative with a diplomatic outreach to Iran, administration officials say they have worked behind the scenes on Israeli-Saudi diplomacy and will continue to do so in the face of an escalating regional conflict.
Jacob Lew, Mr. Biden’s nominee to be ambassador to Israel, has said he intends to push the Saudi-Israeli rapprochement if he is confirmed by the Senate. A committee vote on the nomination of Mr. Lew, who served as a Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, is set for Wednesday.
If the negotiation “was in the national interest of Israel and Saudi Arabia two weeks ago, it’s in the interests of Israel and Saudi Arabia when this war ends, and we’re a critical part of that conversation,” Mr. Lew said at a Senate Foreign Relations Confirmation hearing last week. “I would pledge my utmost support to making that conversation one that can get back on track.”
Several committee Republicans were skeptical. Some criticized Mr. Lew’s role in the Obama White House when it negotiated the Iran nuclear agreement in 2015, among other foreign policy moves. The deal with Iran — the chief sponsor of Hamas — was scuttled by President Trump in 2018.
Mr. Biden subsequently sought to resurrect the pact, which would provide Tehran with billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for the country agreeing to roll back its nuclear program, but that critics say would do little to address Iran’s status as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” a designation the State Department has kept on the Islamic republic since 1984.
An elusive diplomacy
U.S. officials say the notion of Saudi-Israel normalization gained momentum in September when Mr. Biden announced plans at the Group of 20 summit in India to develop a shipping corridor to expand trade and energy connectivity among Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UAE, Jordan, India and the European Union.
The prospect of a breakthrough was then boosted when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Mr. Biden on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 20, saying publicly that normalization was “within our reach.”
The details of Saudi-Israel-U.S. negotiations on normalization are closely guarded. The Saudis are reported to have insisted on protections and expanded rights for Palestinian interests as part of any broader agreement with Israel.
Some analysts say negotiations have been specific, with both sides putting the prospect on the table that Saudi Arabia could take control over the Gaza Strip — the stronghold of Hamas and other militant anti-Israel forces — as a condition for normalizing with Israel.
“Part of the conversation within Israel and Saudi Arabia was that the Saudis and possibly the Egyptians and possibly other Sunni-led governments could take over the security and the running of Gaza and other Palestinian areas,” said Andrew Marr, a British journalist who is the political editor at the New Statesman.
Citing parliamentary sources in the United Kingdom, Mr. Marr suggested in a video this week that the notion of a Saudi takeover of security in Gaza might find support among ordinary Palestinians and is being watched with intense concern by both Iran and Hamas.
“[It] is clearly an existential threat to Hamas, but it would allow there to be a Muslim-run authority in those areas, both giving security to Israel, but also giving some kind of financial and moral and military security to the people living there,” Mr. Marr said in the video. “And that was the threat that I think may have explained the timing of this particular attack.”
As for Iran, “it’s a threat of course to Iran because it opens up this Sunni vs. [Shiite] division right across the region,” he noted.
The prospect of a Sunni-Shiite clash — and with it a potential war between Saudi Arabia and Iran — has long defined much of Middle East geopolitics. So has the prospect of growing normalization between Arab powers and Israel, a process that could bring about wider alignment between those powers and Israel against Iran.
Within that context, Mr. Biden has spent recent years cautiously taking Mr. Trump’s approach, shifting U.S. policy away from long-elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives to focus instead on ending Israel’s decades-old diplomatic isolation in the region.
Analysts say the idea that oil-rich Saudi Arabia is moving toward joining the accords rankles Iran, which has championed the Palestinian cause while underwriting an anti-Israel “rejectionist front” that includes Hamas, Shiite militias in Iraq and Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah movement.
Iran’s theocracy is an enemy of Israel and has long positioned itself as the primary regional rival of Saudi Arabia. Iranian leaders are widely seen to fear the prospect of an Israeli-Saudi alliance against Tehran.
Iran has denied knowing about or helping plan the deadly and stunningly successful Hamas Oct. 7 uprising against Israel, and the U.S. and Israeli governments said they have seen no intelligence that Tehran had a direct role in the surprise attack. Still, many say the gruesome Hamas rampage fits the Iranian goal of derailing Israel’s normalization with the Arab world.
“Who opposes normalization? Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on a trip to Israel last week. “I think that speaks volumes.”
Still, Mr. Blinken said he could only speculate about the goals of Hamas. “The simplest explanation may be the most compelling,” he said. “This is pure evil.”
Alex Traiman, Jerusalem bureau chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, said in an interview that Saudi Arabia and other Arab powers seek normalization with Israel precisely because of Iran’s regional security threat.
“A major impetus for the Abraham Accords is the potential rise of a nuclear Iran,” Mr. Traiman said. “Iran is the head of the terror snake in the Middle East with proxies in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, and of course its main proxies Hezbollah and Hamas.
“Arab countries are looking to Israel to be the only power that can deter or protect against the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran,” he said. “They don’t trust the United States to protect against that threat. On the contrary, they see the U.S. as actually funding Iran and paving Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon.
“This is now a big test for Israel,” Mr. Traiman said. “Saudi Arabia is looking to see whether Israel can essentially be defeated by Hamas, in which case, why does Saudi Arabia need to normalize with Israel? Or will Israel establish itself as the regional superpower and dismantle Hamas? If Israel does that, I think it brings normalization closer.”
Saudi Arabia’s move
Others say the ball is now largely in Saudi Arabia’s court with regard to normalization.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “is the wild card in the Middle East’s new conflict,” George Hay, a top editor at Reuters, wrote in a commentary for the news service last week, noting that in its official statement following the Hamas attacks, Saudi Arabia called for restraint but also implied Israeli policies toward the Palestinians over the year were ultimately responsible for sparking them.
The Saudi royal family has otherwise remained guarded in its response to the escalating tensions since Oct. 7.
Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, the kingdom’s former intelligence chief and a widely respected elder statesman, has expressed frustration toward both Israel and Hamas.
“I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians of any age or gender, as it is accused of. Such targeting belies Hamas’ claim to Islamic identity,’’ Prince Turki told an audience at Rice University in Houston last week, a rare public admonishment of the Palestinian militant group by such a prominent figure of the Arab world.
“I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people,” Prince Turkey said, according to The Times of Israel.
“But equally, I condemned Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian innocent civilians in Gaza, and the attempt to forcibly drive them into Sinai,” he said. “I condemn Israel’s targeted killing and the indiscriminate arrest of Palestinian children, women and men in the West Bank. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Further, he criticized “Western politicians for shedding tears when Israelis are killed by Palestinians, but refus[ing] to even express sorrow when Israelis [kill] Palestinians.”
“There are no heroes in this complex, only victims,” the prince said.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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