The United States and Saudi Arabia are pushing Israel to revive an old peace plan that would see Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil states recognize Israel in return for concrete moves toward the creation of a Palestinian state.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other high-ranking American diplomats have in recent weeks visited Israel and Arab capitals to push the dormant initiative. Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US, Princess Reema bint Bandar, even pitched the proposal to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, held last week.
The diplomatic offensive highlights the urgency of US President Joe Biden and Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, to end the Gaza war. Efforts to date, however, have failed by any and all measures.
Biden must make careful domestic political as well as geopolitical calculations. He is eager for obvious reasons to prevent the Gaza war from morphing into a regional conflagration. In that possible direction, Israel and Lebanon continue to exchange regular missile and drone attacks across their border.
In a novel entry, the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen has fired missiles and armed drones at international commercial ships in the Red Sea, the gateway to the Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean Sea. The attacks represent a challenge to America’s status as a world power, including its self-declared role as protector of global trade routes.
It’s all factoring into Biden’s campaign for reelection this November, likely running against Donald Trump. If Biden keeps the Red Sea open and can also forge peace between Israel, the Saudis and other Arabs, he would portray as a decisive leader who gets things done, a contrast to his oversight of US involvement in the grinding and longer-than-expected war in Ukraine.
For bin Salman, a peace deal would open the way to fulfill two key foreign policy goals: One, to get US security guarantees against possible military threats from Iran; and two, to insulate himself from American criticism of his autocratic rule. Biden, in the wake of the 2018 killing of a Saudi dissident journalist in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, had called Riyadh’s leaders “pariahs.”
If history is any guide, the peace plan faces an uphill journey despite the presumed benefits for its powerful sponsors. The plan recalls a similar Saudi-led proposal broached in 2002 and repeated in 2007 and 2017.
In each, the Saudis offered peace between Arab states and Israel in exchange for the return of Israel-occupied land. Each effort fell prey to Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, especially involving Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic faction that ignited the current war.
This conflict is more brutal than any previous Israeli-Palestinian wars. Hamas sparked it with the October 7, 2023, attack on civilians inside Israel that took about 1,200 lives. The assault included rapes and the deaths of children, according to credible reports.
Israel has retaliated with massive bombing of Gaza towns and a ground offensive. Palestinian Health officials have put the related death toll at over 23,000.
The main obstacle to US-led peace efforts is the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made a political career out of opposing the so-called “two-state” solution that aims to create a Palestinian state. Far-right members of his right-wing ruling coalition oppose it and have threatened to bring down Netanyahu if he flip-flops in favor.
Members of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, which excludes his government’s most virulent opponents of Palestinian statehood, are also cool to the two-state idea. War cabinet minister Benny Gantz, in his most recent public remarks on the issue, made last year, spoke only of the creation of some sort of a “Palestinian entity.” But on Wednesday (January 24), he also criticized Netanyahu for blaming the press and not his own failings for the current crisis.
“The responsibility is solely ours,” he said. Gantz is among the Israeli officials whom US officials have spoken with about possible negotiations on the creation of a Palestinian state.
Hamas has been silent on US-Saudi diplomacy. The Palestinian National Authority, a rival of Hamas that governs part of the West Bank, supports the two-state option but has not remarked directly about its communication with Biden or the Saudis.
Expert observers are skeptical. “I must say, I sometimes ask myself what the administration is smoking,” said Chuck Frielich, a former Israeli deputy security advisor and current researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies. “Not just that we need a two-state solution, but that it is a viable option. Everything I know says it isn’t.”
Hussein Ibish, a researcher at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, added, “Most Arab leaders are extremely skeptical about US plans. There are real doubts about the US ability to restrain Israel.”
So, what are key parties doing to push their positions?
Reports from Washington say that Biden is “looking past” Netanyahu in hopes a future cabinet would replace him and accede to US efforts to begin talks on a Palestinian state. Blinken met with Netanyahu a week ago and told him that Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Arab countries would all help reconstruct Gaza if Netanyahu agreed to future talks on the issue.
Time may not be on Biden’s side, however. He faces reelection in November and for now is the underdog versus Trump. The ex-president may not have warm feelings toward Netanyahu but throughout his 2016-2020 term completely ignored the Palestinian issue.
In any event, Netanyahu refused Blinken’s offer, according to the officials. Instead, Netanyahu insists talks on the future of Gaza, and by extension, the West Bank, must await the war’s end. To Netanyahu’s mind, neither the Palestinian National Authority nor Hamas can be involved in post-war Palestinian governance, which in any event does not include statehood.
Netanyahu’s main tool for resisting US pressure is the ongoing war, which he says won’t be over until years-end at the earliest. That would take talks, if any, beyond the US elections.
Meanwhile, his ministers have pledged to hunt down Hamas officials outside of Gaza. It is probably an open-ended threat; it took two decades to find and kill Palestinian militants in Europe and the Middle East involved in the deaths of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic games. They were killed in Europe as well as the Middle East.
Could talks credibly proceed while Israeli assassination squads are on the hunt for presumed Hamas killers?
Bin Salman is working off a different set of calculations. As much as he would welcome an American security umbrella to deter an increasingly bellicose Iran, he is resisting entering into an accord with Israel unless there is a “path,” as his ambassador to Washington put it, toward a Palestinian state.
The region’s history is littered with unsuccessful pan-Middle East peace proposals. And this is not the first time that a Saudi-led peace offering was undone before it got off the ground due to targeted Hamas violence. In 2002, the first time Saudi Arabia and other Arab states jointly offered Israel a comprehensive peace accord, Hamas aimed bloodshed at Israeli civilians.
On March 27, 2002, Arab countries met in Beirut and for the first time offered to, “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict over, sign a peace agreement with Israel, and achieve peace for all states in the region.”
Then, they demanded the return of territory abutting Israel that was occupied since 1967, i.e. the Gaza Strip and West Bank to the Palestinians and the Golan Heights, land north of the Sea of Galilee, to Syria. Arrangements for Palestinian refugees displaced by post-World War II Arab-Israeli conflict would be negotiated.
The same day this offer was announced, a Hamas killer traveled to the coastal town of Netanya, entered a hotel and detonated a bomb. The explosion killed 30 Israelis who were sitting down to communal dinner during Passover.
Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas founder who lived in Gaza at the time, said the suicide attack sent “a message to the Arab summit to confirm that the Palestinian people continue to struggle for the land and to defend themselves no matter what measures the enemy takes.”
For last October’s attack, Hamas originally planned a rifle assault for Passover in April. But, organizers suddenly feared Israeli intelligence officials knew of the plot. Instead, the group scheduled it for the holiday called Simchat Torah, an Israeli television news program reported.
Unlike its boast after the 2002 killings, this time Hamas tried to excuse the carnage: “If there was any case of targeting civilians, it happened accidentally and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation forces,” Hamas said in a statement.