Special Report: A Convergence for Peace // FAI ONLINE

They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. -Jeremiah 6:14

The New Global Renaissance

The young crown prince stood before his parliament in 2018, brimming with confidence, and proclaimed in a steady tone,

“I think that the new Europe will be the Middle East. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in the next five years, will be totally different…The next global Renaissance in the next thirty years will be in the Middle East, God willing. This is the Saudis’ war. This is my war, which I personally take, and I do not want to die before I see the Middle East at the forefront of the world.”

Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman al Saud (Getty Images)

Only thirty-two-years-old, Muhammad bin Salman al Saud had just ascended to the office of Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia the year before. Intelligent, driven, and progressive, he had quickly risen through the political ranks of the royal family, assisting his father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, in affairs of state and defense. He aggressively prosecuted the Saudi war against the Houthi militia in Yemen after the Iran-aligned rebels overthrew the Yemenese government, during which time the Saudi kingdom severed diplomatic relations with the Iranian regime. Unlike any Saudi royal before him, Prince bin Salman (or MBS, as he’s colloquially known) publicly opposed the radical Wahabi clerics in the kingdom who had maintained a tenuous peace with the House of Saud for over 80 years. He significantly restricted the power of the Saudi morality police, the “Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” and he also curtailed the power of conservative Wahabi judges in Sharia courts. Publicly, the prince championed a narrative of progress in the conservative Islamic kingdom, overturning the ban against female drivers, and loosening the female dress code.

Shortly after receiving the office of crown prince from his father in 2017, MBS coordinated a naval blockade of Qatar, whose ties with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime made it a pariah among the Gulf Arab kingdoms. Brash and unflinching, he then consolidated his power in November 2017, confining over 200 political opponents, mostly Saudi royalty and businessmen, to house arrest at the Ritz Carlton in the capital of Riyadh on charges of corruption and money laundering. His rise to power was solidified in 2022 after his appointment to the office of prime minister, signifying his role as the de facto head of the Saudi government, and the assurance of his eventual ascendency to the throne of the kingdom.

And yet, despite the controversy over his methods and the commendation for his reforms, Muhammad bin Salman’s greatest achievement may not yet be realized. In 2016, the crown prince announced his new economic program named Vision 2030. Critiquing the Kingdom’s economic dependence on oil, MBS advocated for the diversification of the Saudi economy away from its chief commodity and towards a Western model which provides services and attracts foreign investors through a National Transformation Program. Surrounding himself with a cadre of liberal economists and technocrats, the prince is spending foreign reserves and selling royal assets in an effort to build an economic powerhouse in the desert which would not only be the center of the Arab world, but a main hub of Eurasian travel and trade.

A conceptual model of The Line in the Neom project (via neom.com).

Then in October 2017, just as he was securing his claim to the Saudi crown, the ambitious prince announced the future crown jewel of his economic ambitions, a mega-city named Neom in the Northwestern Arabian desert near the borders of Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Combining the Greek prefix “neo” with the first letter of the Arabic word mustaqbal, or “future,” the sprawling project includes an international airport, a luxurious coastal retreat, a floating industrial complex, farms with genetically modified crops designed to survive the arid environment, and even an artificial lake and ski resort. In 2021, the flagship project of Neom was announced, a linear city stretching 140 kilometers long but only 200 meters wide. Dubbed “The Line,” the project is designed as a single, continuous structure, providing housing for almost ten million people. Public transportation will ferry the population to nearby shops, schools and workplaces, all within a few kilometers of their homes. A city-wide AI system will integrate with residents’ smartphones to facilitate basic services and customize their individual experiences, a controversial initiative which has led some experts to describe The Line as “a surveillance city.” Despite some initial setbacks in the timeline of construction, Neom’s project managers continue to assure the public that the project will be completed and online by 2039.

It is against the backdrop of Neom and his Vision 2030 that Muhammad bin Salman sat before the Saudi parliament in 2018 and announced a “new global renaissance” which will place his kingdom at not only the center of the Middle East, but the center of the world.

A New Middle East

The seasoned prime minister stood triumphantly before the world’s delegates at the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2023. Touting his foresight of an Iranian threat and the success of Israeli-Arab peace accords in recent years, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu confidently announced,

“I believe that we are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough: a historic peace with Saudi Arabia.”

News of the Israeli-Saudi talks had been circulating in the media ever since the beginning of the Abraham Accords in 2020, when two of the Saudi kingdom’s Gulf neighbors, UAE and Bahrain, forged a deal for diplomatic normalization with the Jewish State. However, Bibi’s public declaration on the world stage promoted such a deal from the realm of possibility to probability, even certainty.

Israeli-Saudi relations have not always been so friendly. The Saudis voted against the 1947 Partition of Palestine resolution in the United Nations, which divided the Holy Land into Jewish and Arab states. Afterwards, the Kingdom committed troops to the Arab war against the newly independent State of Israel in 1948. The kingdom once again joined the Arab coalition against Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 before leading the OPEC cartel in an oil embargo against the United States for that nation’s support of the Jewish State during the war. When Egypt signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979 for the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian control, the Saudi government accused the Egyptian government of “betraying” the Arab world and severed diplomatic relations. Just forty years ago, peace between the House of Saud and the Jewish State seemed impossible.

However, a common enemy in Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein began to change the calculus between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom tacitly endorsed Israel’s Operation Opera in 1981, allowing Israeli warplanes to fly over the Saudi airspace unmolested while en route to destroy Saddam’s unfinished nuclear reactor in Iraq. It was the first time that the two nations, technically still enemies, had secretly worked together against a common foe, and it was only the beginning. After the Kingdom restored diplomatic relations with Egypt in 1987, Saddam invaded Kuwait three years later, massing his troops on the Saudi border and firing his Scud missiles into Israel. The two nations found themselves on the same side of a regional conflict during the First Gulf War.

But it would be the events of September 11, 2001, which would set the Saudis and Israelis on a course for open peace. The subsequent US invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam’s regime created a power vacuum in that fragmented nation, which the Iranian regime sought to fill. Kickstarting its nascent nuclear weapon program while developing advanced missile technology, Iran began building a network of allied Shi’a proxies across the Middle East. Already the patron of the powerful Shiite Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) built similar homegrown Arab militias across the region. As the Arab Spring of 2011 toppled dictators and ignited civil wars across the Middle East and North Africa, the ayatollahs in Tehran perceived an opportunity to cast their shadow all the way to Israel’s doorstep. The resulting pipeline of weapons, money, and fighters has been dubbed the Shi’a Crescent, stretching across the Middle East from Tehran to Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and the Palestinian territories. Despite thousands of unclaimed Israeli airstrikes in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon over the past decade, the IRGC continues to operate with its allies, funneling missile technology to Hezbollah in Lebanon, firearms to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and billions of US dollars in cash to everyone.

At the same time, the Iranian regime has also been the main patron to the Houthi movement in Yemen, an offshoot of Shi’a Islam. With support from Tehran, the Houthi rebels in cooperation with part of the Yemeni government and military captured most of Northwestern Yemen and the capital of Sana’a in the fall of 2014, ousting the Saudi-backed president. In response, then defense minister Muhammad bin Salman formed a military coalition with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), including the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Sudan. Launching Operation Decisive Storm in Spring, 2015, the Arab Coalition pounded the Houthi rebels with airstrikes in an on-again-off-again air war that lasted several years. The Houthis responded with rocket fire into Saudi Arabia (using rocket parts manufactured in Iran), targeting government, military and oil installations. The conflict reached a fever pitch in September 2019 when the IRGC launched asuicide drones from Iranian territory into the Saudi kingdom. They targeted state-owned Aramco oil refinery installations, causing millions of dollars in damage and temporarily spiking oil prices. Less than twenty years after the 9/11 attacks, it became clear that both the Jewish State and the Gulf Arab kingdoms were on different fronts of the same war against Iran.

Former Saudi general Dr. Anwar Eshki (center, in striped tie) and other members of his delegation, meet with Israeli Knesset members and others during a visit to Israel on July 22, 2016. (via Twitter)

Recent back-channel relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel have been obvious, but unconfirmed. It was reported that Bibi Netanyahu’s government offered the Israeli Iron Dome missile defense system to the Saudis in 2015 to neutralize Houthi rockets. If true, it would have been a major advance in relations between the two nations, but the Saudis reportedly declined. Then in 2016, Egypt transferred control of two islands in the Red Sea to the Saudi Kingdom, which it had been prevented from doing since signing the peace accord with Israel in 1979. Bibi’s government raised no objection, in a tacit nod to the deal, while the Saudis agreed to maintain the status quo on the islands as stipulated by the Israeli-Egyptian treaty. The deal was followed months later by a goodwill visit to Israel by a retired Saudi general, with an entourage of Saudi academics and businessmen in tow. It was the first Saudi trip to the Jewish State in its 70 year history, returned in kind by Shlomo Karhi, Israeli Minister of Communications, who visited Saudi Arabia on October 2, 2023 to inspect a Torah scroll on display in a Saudi museum.

Beginning in 2017, Israeli officials began speaking publicly about an Israeli-Arab partnership against the Iranian regime, including a former defense minister and the IDF chief of staff, who shockingly asserted that, “there is complete agreement between [Israel] and Saudi Arabia.” Israeli cabinet members began to publicly admit that the two nations were cooperating behind-the-scenes, while reports leaked that a joint center for Israeli-Arab intelligence sharing and military coordination had been established in Jordan which included bin Salman’s defense ministry. Signs of an Israeli-Saudi partnership had become obvious, and both parties appeared happy to let their private detente become public, even if they didn’t confirm it.

At the same time, diplomats in the Trump Administration were working feverishly behind the scenes beginning in 2017, attempting to achieve Mideast peace in a revolutionary way. Since the early 1990’s, Arab nations besides Egypt and Jordan had refused to normalize relations with the State of Israel until the Arab Palestinians had achieved statehood as outlined in the Oslo Accords of 1993. That historic agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yassar Arafat had legitimized the leadership of Arafat, created the autonomous Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and had created a framework to achieve a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace within five years, including an independent Palestinian state. However, several attempts to hammer out the details of a final peace deal had failed, most famously at Camp David in 2000 and again in 2008. Meanwhile, Arafat had incited the Second Intifada in 2000, a five-year-long campaign of shootings and suicide bombings which took the lives of over 1,000 Israelis and over 3,000 Palestinians in retaliatory Israeli military action.

After Arafat died in 2004, the Israeli military unilaterally pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, evacuating Israeli settlers there and leaving the territory to direct PA control. But elections in Gaza two years later facilitated the rise of the Iran-sponsored Hamas party to power in Gaza, rivals to the PA’s dominant Fatah party. Violent infighting between Palestinian factions, in tandem with a series of wars between Hamas and the IDF, left Israel and the Gulf Arab kingdoms with an understanding that the Oslo Accords were all-but-dead. If Israeli-Arab peace were to move forward, it was clear by 2017 that it would have to move forward without a Palestinian state. This was exactly what Trump’s Mideast team, led by his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kurshner, hoped to achieve. Amazingly, the strategy paid off. Throughout 2020, American mediation (with some concessions to both parties) managed to secure agreements for the normalization of relations between the State of Israel and several Arab nations, collectively known as the Abraham Accords. Participants included the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. Each deal included diplomatic ties, trade and travel, and military cooperation. It was the biggest step in Mideast peace since the Israeli-Egyptian treaty in 1979, and the Trump Administration boasted that several more deals were on the way. The Saudi government also made concessions in the wake of the deals, including a public concession to allow Israeli commercial flights over Saudi airspace between Israel and the Emirates. However, at least publicly, Saudi King Salman continued to maintain that a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement was necessary for his government to normalize relations with the Jewish State. Then in November 2020, Trump’s defeat in the presidential election stalled the accords, followed by Bibi Netanyahu’s defeat in Israeli parliamentary elections in June 2021. The setbacks put hopes for an Israeli-Saudi peace agreement on ice, but not for long.

After the failure of Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s fragile unity government in June, 2022, Netanyahu’s Likud Party came roaring back, winning decisively in snap elections and catapulting Bibi into a third term is Israel’s premier. This was followed by Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s appointment to Prime Minister of the Saudi Parliament in September, cementing his role at the head of the Kingdom’s government. Despite the disdain of the new Joe Biden Administration for both Netanyahu and bin Salman, US diplomats nonetheless saw the return of Israel’s most seasoned leader and the ascendency of Saudi Arabia’s most progressive prince as a golden opportunity to score a major diplomatic victory. Israeli-Saudi negotiations, with US mediation, were revived once again, reaching a level of stability that made Bibi Netanyahu confident enough to laud a “dramatic breakthrough” on the floor of the UN just two weeks ago.

A Convergence for peace

However, the triumph of MBS and Bibi weren’t the only factors in the rival of Israeli-Saudi negotiations. By early 2023, multiple geopolitical realities had combined together to create a confluence of forces for Mideast peace:

The Iranian Threat: The Saudi government finally reestablished diplomatic relations with Iran in 2023 after a seven-year hiatus due to the conflict in Yemen. But the IRGC’s continuing activity in Iraq and Syria, combined with Tehran’s march toward a nuclear weapon, ensures that the Iranian regime is still an existential threat to both the State of Israel and the Saudi Kingdom. In a recent interview, Muhammad bin Salman admitted that the completion of an Iranian nuclear bomb would force the Saudis to undertake their own nuclear weapons program. The cold war between Iran and the Israeli-Arab conglomerate is far from over.

Chinese Engagement: Iran-Saudi normalization in March 2023 was brokered by the People’s Republic of China, which has taken an increasingly influential role in Mideast politics and trade as the United States military has disengaged from the region. This development, combined with the announcement that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, and Egypt would join the BRICS economic group led by Russia and China, led the Biden Administration to aggressively pursue both diplomatic and economic engagement with Israel and Saudi Arabia.

West Bank Instability: Yasser Arafat was succeeded by his deputy, Mahmood Abbas, after his death in 2004. The inability of the elderly Abbas to achieve any diplomatic or economic victories on behalf of the Palestinian people over the course of two decades has generated discontent with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. At the same time, the Israeli military’s use of Iron Dome to neutralize rocket fire from Gaza, as well as the use of classified technology to locate and destroy underground tunnels from the Gaza Strip into Israel, have forced jihadist groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) to take advantage of disaffection with the PA in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in order to remain relevant in the struggle against their Zionist enemy. Since 2021, branches of Hamas and PIJ have been popping up in formerly benign West Bank cities such as Nablus and Jenin. They have used funds and arms from the IRGC, smuggled through Jordan, to conduct a series of terrorist attacks against Israelis in Jerusalem and areas along the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank. These attacks have provoked an escalating response from the Israeli government and military, catapulting Bibi Netanyahu back into office in 2022 as the head of the most right-wing government in Israeli history, and bringing into question the legitimacy of Mahmood Abbas’ government. As jihadists continue to gain steam in Jerusalem and the West Bank, both Israel and the Palestinian Authority have discovered a renewed impetus to cooperate against a common enemy.

Thousands of Israelis march along a highway toward Jerusalem in protest of plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to overhaul the judicial system, near Abu Gosh, Israel, on Saturday.(Ohad Zwigenberg, AP).

Israeli Social Upheaval: Among other things, Netanyahu’s victory in 2022 came with the promise to reform the Israeli legal system. The Jewish state is just one of three liberal democracies in the world without a written constitution. In its place, successive Israeli parliaments have enacted eleven “basic laws,” which have mostly established political and legal precedents which were popularly accepted in Israeli society. However, the growth of conservative religious and ultra-Orthodox parties in Israeli politics have challenged the traditionally secular Israeli establishment. This divide was highlighted in 2022 when a decidedly right-wing governing coalition in Israel’s parliament announced its intention to curtail the authority of the Israeli Supreme Court, comprised mostly of liberals and secularists appointed by a combination of Israeli government and academic institutions. The court had repeatedly provoked the more conservative elements of Israeli society, both religious and secular, by its activism in thousands of individual cases every year. The current government’s stated intention to limit the court’s ability to overturn laws and to appoint supreme court justices ignited a massive public protest movement in 2022, which continues in mostly secular Israeli cities such as Tel Aviv to this day. Although Netanyahu’s government backed down and is working to pass only modest reforms, the cracks between the secular and religious elements in Israeli society have become painfully apparent, and some would argue that they are irreparable. Therefore, the push for Israeli-Saudi peace has become all the more consequential for Bibi’s government, which is seeking a diplomatic victory amidst domestic upheaval.

An American Election Year: Despite multiple legal indictments, Donald Trump remains the political frontrunner vis-a-vis Joe Biden in advance of the 2024 US presidential election. While President Biden remains unpopular with a majority of Americans, his diplomatic corps is eager to prove that their leader can be just as successful in securing Mideast peace deals as his political rival. Therefore, the crown jewel of an Israeli-Saudi peace deal is not only a priority for the Biden Administration, but an urgent priority. Diplomats are reportedly working towards the announcement of a deal in early 2024, with the spokesman for the US National Security Council announcing on October 1, 2023 that a “framework” for negotiations has been achieved. Soon afterward, it was announced that US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken will visit Israel, the West Bank, and Saudi Arabia in late October, highlighting the Biden Administration’s effort to facilitate a deal in the coming months. Israeli officials have even publicly stated that the clinching of an Israeli-Saudi deal would allow for “six or seven” other Arab governments to follow suit, suggesting that the next round of the Abraham Accords could be much larger and more consequential than the first.

The Contours of Peace

Although the exact details of the “framework” for the Israeli-Saudi peace deal have not yet been confirmed publicly, the basic tenants of such a deal have become increasingly clear. Avoiding the pitfalls of rumor and speculation, the following pillars would be essential to such a deal:

Diplomatic Recognition: Like the Abrahamic accords with the UAE and Bahrain, the Saudi government would be required to officially recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel for the first time since its declaration in 1948. Diplomatic missions would be established, and ambassadors exchanged between the two nations.

Economic Partnership: Political normalization would give way to economic cooperation. This could follow the precedent of the other 2020 Arab-Israeli agreements, including trade deals, tourism, and a loosening of restrictions on Palestinians to make Islamic pilgrimage (or hajj) to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government is also the custodian of an archaeological site which is increasingly accepted as the Biblical Mount Sinai, meaning that such a deal could facilitate not only Muslim pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, but Jewish pilgrimage as well. Travel of Israelis and Palestinians to the Saudi Kingdom, and vice-versa, would be substantial.

Military Coordination: Already an undisclosed reality, an Israeli-Saudi peace deal would allow for an open and official partnership between the IDF and the Armed Forces of Saudi Arabia. This could include the exchange of weapons systems, such as the Israeli Iron Dome missile defense system, or other advanced Israeli military technology. It most assuredly includes the sale of American military technology to Saudi Arabia, such as the F-35 stealth fighter jet.

Israeli-Palestinian Peace: The unique aspect of an Israeli-Saudi peace deal would be the inclusion of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. Despite his enthusiasm to secure a deal with Israel, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman is still publicly toting the royal family’s line, stipulating that a peace deal must include a solution for Palestinians. As such, the Saudi government has taken several steps in recent weeks to outflank Iran and Turkey as the champion of the Palestinian people, including the appointment of a Saudi ambassador to Palestine, as well as the resumption of financial support to the Palestinian Authority. Although the Israeli government has publicly opposed both developments, it undoubtedly supports the growing Saudi influence over the PA in private, which is seen as a moderating force compared to the Islamists in Ankara and Tehran. The Saudis have even tempered their expectations, reportedly only demanding increased autonomy for the PA in the West Bank and assurances of East Jerusalem as a future Palestinian capital, without the prerequisite of a Palestinian state in advance of a deal. This sort of practical compromise would allow the far-right Israeli government to endorse an Israeli-Saudi peace deal without alienating their constituency, especially religious Jewish settlers in the West Bank. For his part, an elderly Mahmood Abbas has reportedly endorsed such a compromise. Seeing that his PA government is on the ropes and his time is short, Abbas has reversed his previous opposition to the Abraham Accords, now seeing them as an opportunity to achieve progress towards Palestinian autonomy and to butress the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Although the exact details of an Israeli-Saudi peace deal have not yet been announced, it’s clear that the deal itself is becoming increasingly inevitable, based on the forces which are converging to secure it. It would seem as if the hand of Providence is at work to bring an elusive and deceptive “peace” to the Middle East in advance of the cataclysmic events described by the Hebrew prophets. This may very well be true. But for now, we can only continue to watch and pray.