Saudi Arabia yesterday sent an official delegation to the occupied West Bank, for the first time in more than 30 years, to assure the Palestinians that it will continue to defend their cause even in the event of the expected normalization between Riyadh and Jerusalem. The Government of Muhammad bin Salman, represented in Ramallah by Ambassador Naif al-Sudairi, took this step at the same time that Israel announced that its head of Tourism, Haim Katz, had just started a two-day trip to Arabia Saudi Arabia in what constitutes the first public visit of an Israeli minister to that country.
Katz’s expedition is the latest sign of the rapprochement between Israel and Riyadh, which in recent days has been promoted both by the Prime Minister of the Jewish State, Benjamin Netanyahu, and by BinSalman: the Head of Government and Prince Saudi heir affirmed in an interview with Fox that both countries are “every day closer” to an agreement for the normalization of relations; a statement that Netanyahu seconded by saying that both are “on the cusp of a spectacular breakthrough”.
With just over a year to go before the elections in the United States, President Joe Biden is looking to score a major diplomatic triumph with the normalization of relations between his two key allies in the Middle East. The milestone would culminate the stabilization goals that Washington has been seeking for decades, goals that were put on track three years ago under the leadership of Donald Trump with the Abraham Accords, under which Israel established diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and later joined by Oman and Morocco.
The Palestinian National Authority described this process as a “stab in the back” that ended the Arab League’s facade of unity on the Palestinian issue.
The arrival of the Saudi ambassador Naif al-Sudairi in Ramallah, yesterday, has no precedents since the Palestinian-Israeli peace agreements of Oslo, which date from September 1993 and allowed the establishment of the Palestinian Authority.
After a meeting with the Palestinian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Riad al-Maliki, Al-Sudairi assured: “The Palestinian issue is a fundamental pillar” of Saudi foreign policy. “It is certain that the Arab peace initiative presented by the Kingdom in 2002 is the cornerstone of any future agreement,” he added to the press, referring to a plan that, adopted by the Arab League, advocated an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967 in exchange for normalization between the Arab countries and Israel.
