A top official from the Biden administration arrived in Saudi Arabia this Friday to discuss possible ways for normalization of relations between Riyadh and Tel Aviv.
According to a new report by Axios, Brett McGurk, President Biden’s senior Middle East adviser, arrived in Saudi Arabia this Friday to hold meeting s with Saudi officials on the matter of normalization of ties between Saudi Arabia and Isabel.
A day before on Thursday, the US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan addressed the issue and noted that brokering a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia would not only be useful to the stability and peace in the Middle East region, but it will also benefit the US national security as both Israel and the Kingdom are US partners.
“We have the interest and bandwidth to promote normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and in fact, it’s this administration that has produced the first tangible step of these two countries coming close together with the opening of the airspace over Saudi Arabia for civilian flights from Israel,” Sullivan said during a press conference at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “But ultimately getting to full normalization is a declared national security interest of the United States, we have been clear about that,” he added.
While it was former US president Donald Trump who broke out normalization of Arab states with Israel in the form of the Abraham Accords back in 2020, the Biden administrations has also had some progress in this regard.
To give some examples, it was last year in May that the White House brokered the final stages of a deal to transfer control over a pair of Red Sea islands from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, a move that could get Riyadh’s agreement to open its airspace for civilian flights to and from Israel. The same happened with Oman later in July, reducing the time required for Israelis to fly directly from Israel to the Far East.
Can the Biden administration accomplish this seemingly impossible mission?
That Saudi Arabia and Israel are close partners to the US is beyond questioning. But what makes this important task of normalization between Riyadh and Tel Aviv almost impossible for Washington is that both Saudi and Israeli leaders are currently having huge conflicts with the Biden administration on different areas.
Saudi Arabia is displeased with Biden mostly because of the humiliating language that the US president has used against Saudi leaders, especially Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, since he came to power in January 2021.
Biden entered the White House promising to treat the Saudis as a pariah regime because of their human rights abuses, the most notable of which was the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, which the US intelligence community has concluded was ordered by bin Salman.
Biden’s anti-Saudi rhetoric then led to reaction from Riyadh, where the oil-rich country decided three times during the past two years to cut its oil production, which caused huge rising gas prices inside the US.
The same story is true about US-Israel relations. Since the inauguration of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister of Israel and hard-liners from far-right parties as members of his government, relations between the United States and Israel have been remarkably cold and even tense at some points.
Among the disputes between these two years-long allies are Israel’s plans to limit the power of its Supreme Court, the expansion of illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories, and serious differences of opinions regarding regional policies. To make matters worse, Israel now believes that the Biden administration is secretly working on a nuclear agreement with Iran, a move that Netanyahu and his far-right government would never be interested in.
