US says ‘very close’ to deal with Saudi Arabia on bilateral aspect of Israel normalisation

May 2, 2024

US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller speaks to reporters during a press briefing at the State Department in Washington DC on United States, March 25, 2024. [Mostafa Bassim – Anadolu Agency]

The US, on Thursday, said it is “very close” to reaching an agreement with Saudi Arabia on bilateral aspects of the wider Israel normalisation deal, Anadolu Agency reports.

“We are very close to reaching an agreement on the bilateral pieces of a normalisation agreement … There are few details that we have to continue to work through, but we think we can reach agreement on those details in very short order,” State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, told reporters.

“There is still more work to be done on a separate piece of that, which is the proposal for a pathway to a Palestinian State,” he added.

Miller reiterated Saudi Arabia’s position regarding normalisation with Israel, with two requirements being calm in Gaza and a path to an independent Palestinian State.

“We have been very clear, Saudi Arabia has been very clear that this is a package deal that would include a bilateral component, and also include a path to two states,” Miller said.

The remarks came after Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, on Wednesday returned from a three-day visit to the Middle East, with stops in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel.

READ: Saudi arresting critics of Israel as normalisation talks continue

Saudi arresting critics of Israel as normalisation talks continue

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May 2, 2024 at 2:56 pm

Social media apps [Aytuğ Can Sencar – Anadolu Agency]

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Saudi Arabian citizens have faced increasing arrests for criticising Israel on social media in recent months as a result of its ongoing military onslaught against Gaza.

According to Bloomberg, one detainee was an executive involved in Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s economic development initiatives including the kingdom’s Vision 2030.

Another reportedly urged Saudi citizens to boycott American  brands operating in the Gulf kingdom as well as a media figure who said Israel should never be forgiven.

A source close to the Saudi government, who asked not to be named, confirmed that the arrests are motivated by concerns over potential threats to the country’s security from pro-Iranian influences.

There are no official records of how many people have been arrested since 7 October 2023 for voicing concerns about Israel’s actions in Gaza.

This crackdown coincides with ongoing efforts by the United States to facilitate the normalisation of ties between Riyadh and Israel.

Read: Biden urged to include safeguards in any nuclear power deal with Saudi Arabia

During a recent visit to the Gulf state, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken remarked that intensive negotiations over the past week have brought the parties “potentially very close to completion.” Meanwhile Saudi Arabia has repeatedly announced that it will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel until an independent Palestinian state is established.

Israel has waged a genocidal offensive against Palestinians in Gaza since 7 October, killing more than 34,500 men, women and children, and wounding over 77,000 others, reported Wafa news agency.

The Israeli offensive has left 85 per cent of Gaza’s population internally displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60 per cent of the enclave’s civilian infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). An interim ruling by the World Court in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza. South Africa, which took the apartheid state to the ICJ, has since warned that Israel is ignoring the court’s ruling. Israel denies all charges against it.

source https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240502-saudi-citizens-increasingly-face-arrests-for-criticising-israel-on-social-media/

Saudis push for ‘plan B’ that excludes Israel from key deal with US

Riyadh seeks more modest agreement with Washington in absence of Gaza ceasefire and Netanyahu resistance to Palestinian state

Julian Borger in WashingtonWed 1 May 2024 12.00 BSTShare

The US and Saudi Arabia have drafted a set of agreements on security and technology-sharing which were intended to be linked to a broader Middle East settlement involving Israel and the Palestinians.

However, in the absence of a ceasefire in Gaza and in the face of adamant resistance from Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government to the creation of a Palestinian state – and its apparent determination to launch an offensive on Rafah – the Saudis are pushing for a more modest plan B, which excludes the Israelis.

Under that option, the US and Saudi Arabia would sign agreements on a bilateral defence pact, US help in the building of a Saudi civil nuclear energy industry, and high-level sharing in the field of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

An offer would be made to Israel of normalisation of diplomatic relations with Riyadh in return for Israeli acceptance of the two-state solution to the 76-year Israeli-Arab conflict. But under Riyadh’s plan B proposal, completion of the US-Saudi deals would not be made dependent on agreement from the Netanyahu government.

“There should be room for a less-for-less model, so the relationship with the US need not be held hostage to the whims of Israeli politics or Benjamin Netanyahu,” said Firas Maksad, senior director for strategic outreach at the Middle East Institute.

The Biden administration would not land the historic regional settlement it has been seeking in the wreckage of the Gaza war, at least not immediately, but it would cement a strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia that would keep encroaching Chinese and Russian influence at bay.

It is far from clear whether the administration – let alone Congress – would accept such a less-for-less outcome.

In remarks in Riyadh on Monday, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, continued to link a US-Saudi deal to Saudi-Israeli normalisation and progress towards a Palestinian state.

“The work that Saudi Arabia, the United States have been doing together in terms of our own agreements, I think, is potentially very close to completion,” Blinken told the World Economic Forum in the Saudi capital. “But then in order to move forward with normalisation, two things will be required: calm in Gaza and a credible pathway to a Palestinian state.”

However, there are signs of wavering in the Biden camp. US officials who were adamant last week that US-Saudi agreements were inextricably linked to Saudi-Israel normalisation and the two-state solution have become non-committal on the subject in recent days.

One of the goals of Blinken’s trip to Riyadh was to finalise the US-Saudi agreements, which administration officials describe as almost complete. However, they made clear there was no final breakthrough.

“We’re close, but they haven’t made the kind of progress that would put us past the finish line, which the Saudis had been hoping for when Blinken was due to come through,” said Maksad, who was in Riyadh last week.

Initially at least, the US-Saudi deal would be agreed independently of developments in Israel and the occupied territories, but a formal offer would be extended to Israel, exchanging Saudi normalisation – a key Israeli foreign policy goal – for “irrevocable” moves towards the creation of a Palestinian state on the territory of Gaza and the West Bank.

The US hope was such an offer would become an issue in Israeli politics, particularly in elections which would follow the collapse of the Netanyahu government.

According to informed sources, the nuclear part of the US-Saudi deal could allow Riyadh a conversion plant for turning refined uranium powder into a gas, but Saudi Arabia would not initially be allowed to enrich uranium gas on its own territory, a key constraint on the capacity to make a nuclear bomb. The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has raised proliferation fears in the past by declaring that Riyadh would pursue nuclear weapons if Iran developed its own.

A separate US-Saudi text would establish a defence pact between the two countries.

“At a minimum, what is required from the Saudi side is something similar to what the US shares with South Korea – short of an article 5 [the Nato mutual defence clause] – but a more stringent, formal commitment to the territorial defence of the kingdom,” Maksad said.

The third part of the deal would involve a loosening of US export controls to Saudi Arabia of computer chips used in AI development tools, a key element in Saudi aspirations to become the hi-tech hub for the region.

All three parts of the draft deal involve the US giving vital strategic assistance to Saudi security. In place of progress towards Israeli-Palestinian peace, the Saudi monarchy is presenting a purely bilateral deal as a US win in its efforts to contain Iranian expansionism and in Washington’s “great-power competition”, particularly with China.

Riyadh has been steadily ramping up the amount of arms it has been buying from China as it has hedged its strategic bets in recent years. The Biden administration was taken by surprise in March last year when Saudi Arabia and Iran announced they had agreed a Chinese-brokered deal to restore relations.

Out of fear of losing its dominant great power role in the Middle East, Biden abandoned his attempt to cold-shoulder Prince Mohammed over abuses like the 2018 murder of the Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was a Washington Post columnist. The US rapprochement culminated in a much-criticised fist bump between Biden and the crown prince during a presidential visit to Jeddah in 2022.

Kirsten Fontenrose, a former senior director for the Gulf in the US national security council, described the nuclear, defence and AI deals as the “deliverables from Biden’s fist-bump trip to the kingdom”.

“The deal was drafted with the assumption that the Saudis would bring normalisation with Israel to the table,” Fontenrose said. “But the Israeli government is currently placing higher value on blocking the formation of a Palestinian state than on normalising with Saudi. So the deal now being discussed is bilateral.”

The White House, however, is reluctant to give so much away in the absence of a normalisation deal that has the power to transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Opposition would be even stronger in Congress, which is more focused on the kingdom’s poor human rights record, including Khashoggi’s murder.

It was revealed on Tuesday that a young Saudi women’s rights activist, Manahel al-Otaibi, had been secretly sentenced to 11 years in prison by an anti-terrorism court after being arrested for “her choice of clothing and support for women’s rights”.

“If the deal does not include commitments from Saudi on China and Iran, for example, in exchange for a security guarantee, Congress will be asking, ‘What’s in it for the US?’” Fontenrose said.

Maksad suggested, however, that the “great-power competition” argument for signing a deal with the Saudis should be enough for the Biden administration.

“If you can bind Saudi Arabia to the United States in a strategic alliance, in a way that marginalises Russia and China in this part of the world, that’s a significant win for this administration,” he said. “That is something that consolidates the Middle East for the foreseeable future as being within the American realm.”

Even if this were enough for the White House, it almost certainly not be enough for the US Senate – and without Senate approval, any US security guarantees and promises of technological help are likely to be short-lived.

“Without Senate approval, this is a non-starter, and without the Israel piece of this, a Senate approval is non-starter,” said Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders now the executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy.

“I remain confounded by how obsessed this administration seems with this deal, given all the obvious downsides and given the fact that we’re not making a deal with Saudi Arabia – we’re making a deal with one guy, a corrupt psychopath.”

source https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/may/01/saudi-us-biden-deal-israel