Only Saudi Arabia and Israeli Arabs can save Israel as a Jewish democracy

It’s good to see the president Joe Biden visiting the Middle East.

The United States has long played a pivotal role in advancing the peace process in that country.

But as a person who has been following this region for decades, I can tell you that I am seeing something new, something as ironic as it is surprising:

only Saudi Arabia and Israeli Arabs can save Israel as a Jewish democracy today, not America.

This is because, for different reasons, Israeli and Saudi Arab voters did so more power than ever force Israelis to choose:

they may have a democratic state in Israel and the West Bank, but over time, with high Arab birth rates, it may not be Jewish.

They may have a Jewish state in Israel and the West Bank, but it will not be democratic.

Or they may have a Jewish and democratic state, but they cannot permanently occupy the West Bank.

Those existential options have been with Israel since 1967, when it conquered the West Bank and East Jerusalem in war.

But Israel has increasingly refused to choose, so much so that in the last four Israeli elections in two years, its political parties, both right and left, have largely ignored all “Palestinian question “.

It was alarming.

This need not be true when Israel goes to the polls for the fifth time in less than four years on November 1st.

While the United States has grown weary of the rancorous and frustrating process of convincing Israelis and Palestinians to a two-state solution, Saudi Arabia and Israeli Arabs can now, and hopefully, assume that role.

The future Israel as a Jewish and democratic state may depend on it.

What is the logic?

Start with the most obvious fact.

Israel will not be a viable democracy if it maintains the occupation of some 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank indefinitely.

Such occupation implies the extension of Israeli law to Jews living in the West Bank while governing Palestinians under a separate military code, with significantly reduced rights and opportunities own land, build houses and businesses, communicate, travel and organize politically.

This occupation may not be the same as South African Apartheid, but it is an ugly and morally corrosive cousin of Israel as a Jewish democracy.

It is becoming so alienating to Israel’s liberal friends, including the younger generation of American Jews, that if he continues, Biden could be the last president pro-Israeli Democrat.

To be sure, Israel alone is not responsible for this dead end, and Palestinian progressives and propagandists peddling that idea on college campuses are dishonest.

The second Palestinian uprising, in 2000, did much to destroy the credibility of the Israeli peace camp.

That revolt sparked a wave of suicide bombings against Israeli Jews, soon after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton opened peace proposals to Yasser Arafat to establish a demilitarized Palestinian state in most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Arafat rejected.

Repeated Hamas rocket attacks only from Gaza aggravated Israeli insecurity.

But many of Israel’s supporters in America were left speechless during Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12 years.

Netanyahu did everything possible discredit to the Palestinian Authority as a peace partner:

never gave him credit for his vital efforts to curb Palestinian violence against Israelis and worked to make a two-state reality impossible by installing Jewish settlers deep in the West Bank, beyond the Israeli barrier wall, in the areas needed to any future Palestinian state.

The Palestinians, for their part, shot themselves in two groups:

the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas in Gaza, and by purging the most effective, honest and credible Palestinian Authority Prime Minister of all time, Salam Fayyad in service from 2007 to 2013.

Add it all up and you can see why the last four Israeli elections ignored the existential threat posed to the Jewish state by its continued occupation of the West Bank.

For the most part it was: out of sight, out of mind.

And it is not surprising that the United States has withdrawn from active participation in the area, right up to the president Donald Trump gave his son-in-lawJared Kushnercarte blanche to carry out your plan.

It’s a long story, but the short version is that both Netanyahu and the Palestinians rejected Kushner’s proposal for a two-state solution.

Instead of letting it all collapse, UAE leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayedinspired by his ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, he proposed full peace, trade and tourism with Israel if Israel agreed not to unilaterally annex the West Bank territory assigned to Israel in the Trump plan.

And so they were born Agreements of Abraham 2020, in which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan have entered into diplomatic negotiations with Israel.

The UAE has done a very important thing by catalyzing this agreement.

The more the Middle East resembles the European Union, the less theto the Syrian civil warit’s a very good thing.

But the UAE and its Abraham Accord colleagues have been largely reluctant to get involved in Israeli-Palestinian affairs.

They don’t have a high regard for the Palestinian leadership and don’t want to get involved in this whole mess; they want to enter into trade and investment deals with Israel’s high-tech economy to strengthen themselves.

When they convinced Israel to agree not to annex the West Bank, they thought they had hit the mark.

Which brings me to the Saudis.

For Israel, the peace with Saudi Arabia it’s the grand prix.

It opens the door to peace with the entire Sunni Muslim world and access to a huge pool of investment capital.

But senior Saudi officials have told me their support won’t come cheap.

The ailing Saudi monarch, King Salman, has always had a deep emotional attachment to the Palestinian cause.

And his son and the de facto ruler, the crown prince Muhammad bin Salman (also known as MBS), knows that if Saudi Arabia forges a cheap peace with Israel, Saudi Arabia’s archenemy Iran will use it to launch a propaganda jihad against Saudi Arabia throughout the Muslim world.

It would be bad.

Despite these potential dangers, Israel and Saudi Arabia have secretly discussed terms for normalize relationships.

I suspect the Saudis will want that revolutionary moment to take place in two phases.

Dennis Ross, a former US envoy to the Middle East, told me the Saudis could offer open a sales office in Tel Aviv, which would serve Saudi economic interests and “would be a great psychological move towards Israel”.

In return, the Saudis could ask for something big:

that Israel halt all settlement construction east of the Israeli security fence in the West Bank and accept the Saudi Arabian peace plan for a two-state solution as the basis for negotiations with the Palestinians.

Such an Israeli settlement commitment would mean that Israelis no longer build “in 92% of the West Bank, preserving two states as an option,” Ross said, noting that around today 80% of Israeli settlers They live west of the barrier.

Phase 2 would come with the end of the Israeli occupation and a peace agreement with the Palestinians:

the Saudis could promise to open an embassy for Israel in Tel Aviv and an embassy for Palestinians in Ramallah in the West Bank, or an embassy for Israel in West Jerusalem and an embassy for Palestinians in Arab East Jerusalem.

It would be Israel’s choice, but they should be embassies for both.

Israel should also commit to preserving the status quo in Jerusalem Temple Mount, which is sacred to all Muslims.

(To help Biden show something during his visit to Saudi Arabia, which begins today, and to signal to Israel that the Saudis are serious, Riyadh should announce unlimited privileges for Israeli airlines to fly over Saudi territory and direct charter flights. from Israel for Muslims participating in the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

(Reuters reported Thursday on the planned new flight privileges.)

I don’t expect Israel to jump on any of these proposals, especially its current interim government.

But I can 100% guarantee that if the Saudis made them public, they would ring a central role in the Israeli elections on November 1 and help spark the kind of debate and creativity needed to preserve Israel as a democratic state.

This is where the Israeli Arabs come in:

one could see such a shock from Saudi Arabia reinforced for them in the elections.

Here are some simple Israeli election calculations:

neither the Israeli center-left coalition nor the Israeli right-wing religious nationalist coalition have sufficient votes to create a stable majority in government.

This is why Israel continues to have elections.

As a result, Israeli Arabs, who make up 21% of the Israeli population and typically win around 12 seats in the Knesset, have replaced Israel’s Orthodox Jewish religious parties as a swinging voting bloc.

The last prime minister of Israel, Naftali Bennetthe could form a close coalition only by recruiting the Israeli Arab religious party Raam.

If all the Israeli Arab parties declared that they would only join a Jewish-led government that agreed to negotiate with the Palestinians on the basis of the Saudi proposals, I assure you once again that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank – the biggest existential problem that Israel faces – it would be at the forefront of the fall elections.

And this is how, and why, I argue that only Saudi Arabia and Israeli Arabs can save Israel as a Jewish democracy.

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