Israeli prime minister visits Saudi Arabia, meets with crown prince and Pompeo, say local media
By Steve Hendrix and Shira Rubin,
Reuters
JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly made a secret trip to Saudi Arabia on Sunday, a visit that would mark a significant shift in the historically hostile relations between the Jewish state and the Arab power that is home to Islam’s holiest sites.
The prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the visit, which was first reported by local media outlets in Israel. Education Minister Yoav Gallant, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, appeared to confirm the trip in a radio interview Monday.
“This is something our ancestors dreamed of,” Gallant said. “The main thing is the warm acceptance of Israel by the Sunni world, the lowering of the whole hostile process.”
Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud, the foreign minister, however, denied that the meeting took place, maintaining that “the only officials present were American and Saudi” during the recent visit by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The brief trip would represent the first acknowledged visit by an Israeli official to Saudi Arabia and comes amid a flurry of diplomatic breakthroughs between Israel and its Arab neighbors. It also reportedly occurred as tensions with Iran, considered a common enemy of both countries, are on the rise.
[Saudi media soften tone on normalization, offering clue to kingdom’s thinking on Israel]
According to the Israeli publication Ynet, Netanyahu spent only a few hours late Sunday in the Saudi coastal city of Neom, where he met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pompeo. Netanyahu reportedly traveled with Yossi Cohen, the head of Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, a point person in emerging efforts to broker diplomatic relations with the kingdom.
In August, Israel and the United Arab Emirates reached an agreement to establish formal relations and open up trade, security and tourism ties. Bahrain and Sudan followed suit, marking a collapse of long-standing Arab unity that resisted making such negotiations with Israel as long as the country continued to occupy the West Bank. Palestinian leaders have condemned the Arab deals as a betrayal.
But in recent weeks, speculation has risen in Israel that Riyadh and Jerusalem are close to a similar agreement. Cohen reportedly told associates in October that the Saudis were ready to decide on an arrangement with Israel once the U.S. presidential election was concluded.
Israel has long maintained semi-secret security contacts with Saudi Arabia, as it had with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
The Saudi foreign minister signaled Saturday during the Group of 20 Summit in Riyadh that his country was open to forging official ties with Israel, but not unconditionally.
Saudi Arabia has “supported normalization with Israel for a long time, but one very important thing must happen first: a permanent and full peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians,” Prince Faisal said in an interview with Reuters.
Mohammed is close to President Trump and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and adviser. With Trump’s reelection defeat, anxiety has risen in both Saudi Arabia and Israel that President-elect Joe Biden will reverse Trump’s hard-line policies against Iran and seek to revise Washington’s participation in the Iran nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration and still recognized by European and other allies.
The timing of Netanyahu’s reported trip suggested to some analysts that the two countries wanted to present a united position to Biden’s incoming foreign policy team before his inauguration on Jan. 20.
“I think the main thing is that both sides want to get ready for January and to project and align an Israeli-Arab front that is ready for engagement with Iran,” said Shimrit Meir, a Middle East analyst for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronot.
The Saudi foreign minister said Saturday that Riyadh was ready to cooperate with the incoming administration. But speculation that the Trump administration was preparing for military action against Iran nuclear capacities in its waning days has been rising. Some considered Netanyahu’s apparent visit to the kingdom and the presence of Pompeo as further evidence that a strike was possible.
Palestinian officials made no immediate comment. But an Arab-Israeli member of the Knesset accused all three governments of seeking to foment conflict in the region.
“Netanyahu, Trump and [bin] Salman are trying to set fire to the area and put sticks in the wheels of a return to the nuclear deal,” tweeted Aida Touma-Sliman, a member of the Arab Hadash party. “They could degenerate the entire region into escalation and war.”
Pompeo, on what may be his final official trip through the Middle East as secretary of state, was in Saudi Arabia following a three-day visit to Israel in which he sought to cement Trump’s legacy of tilting U.S. policy toward one favored by Netanyahu’s government — much like Trump’s stance on Iran.
Pompeo became the first secretary of state to visit Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Golan Heights and declared that Washington would view an international boycotts movement targeting Israel as anti-Semitic, among other shifts.
Secrecy surrounded Netanyahu’s movements Sunday. A scheduled meeting of the government’s cabinet-level coronavirus response committee was canceled. Flight tracking sites showed an unusual route of a plane flying directly from Tel Aviv to Neom on Sunday evening and returning early Monday, according to the Associated Press.
Other Israeli officials, including Defense Minister and Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz, were unaware of Netanyahu’s trip in advance, Ynet reported.
Israel’s Foreign Affairs Ministry declined to comment.
The lack of official denials was itself a notable change from the reaction to previous reports of clandestine meetings even in neutral countries. Those reports were kept under wraps or hotly denied to avoid embarrassing the Saudis.
The quiet response this time indicates that the tenor of relations has shifted significantly, even if a formal declaration of normal relations is not imminent.
“I think that this is already happening,” Meir said. “If the Israelis are saying, ‘We met with the Saudi crown prince’ and he’s not denying it, that’s normalization. You can call it whatever you want, but that’s normalization.”
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