The Saudis are in play, casting about for partners.In a clear vote of no-confidence in US President Barack Obama’s leadership, Saudi King Salman led several Arab leaders in blowing off Obama’s Camp David summit this week. The summit was meant to compensate the Sunni Arabs for Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
Salman’s decision is further proof that US-Saudi
relations have jumped the tracks. For 70 years the Saudis subcontracted their
national security to the US military. Deals were closed with a wink and a nod.
That’s all over now.
Obama has destroyed Washington’s credibility. Salman
views its gentleman’s agreements as worthless. All he wants now is military
hardware. And for that, he can send a stand-in.
The Saudis never put all their eggs in America’s basket.
For 70 years the Saudis played a double game, maintaining strategic alliances
both with the liberal West and the most reactionary forces in the Islamic
world. The Saudis pocketed petrodollars from America and Europe and transferred
them to terrorists and jihadist preachers in mosques in the US, Europe and
worldwide.
Iran isn’t the Saudis’ only concern. Although for
outsiders the worldview of the theocracy governing Saudi Arabia seems all but
identical to the worldview of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudis consider the
Brotherhood a mortal foe. The Saudis claim that their tribal, top-down regime
is the genuine expression of Islam. The Brotherhood’s populist, grassroots
organization rejects their legitimacy.
And so, since the Arab revolutionary wave began in late
2010, the Saudis opposed the empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Saudis
are the primary bankrollers of Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s regime.
During Operation Protective Edge last summer, the Saudis
sided with Sisi and Israel against Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim
Brotherhood, and its Turkish and Qatari state sponsors. Although Saudi Arabia
had previously been a major funder of Hamas, that backing ended in 2005 when,
following Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas forged strategic ties with Iran.
For the past five years, the Saudis worked against
both the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. But in recent months they began
reconsidering their two-war approach.
With the Iranian-backed Houthis’ takeover of Yemen and
the US’s conclusion of its framework nuclear deal with Iran, the Saudis
apparently determined that weakening Iran takes precedence over fighting the
Brotherhood. With its Houthi proxies in Yemen deployed along the Saudi border
abutting Shi’ite-majority border provinces, and fighting for control over the
Bab el Mandab, Iran now poses an immediate and existential threat to Saudi
Arabia.
Moreover, as the Saudis see it, the threat posed by the
Brotherhood has severely diminished since Sisi began his campaign to destroy
its infrastructure in Egypt. So long as Sisi continues weakening the
Brotherhood in Egypt and Libya, the Saudis feel safe working with the
Brotherhood and its state sponsors Turkey and Qatar in Syria and Yemen. To this
end, much to Washington’s dismay, the Saudis are willing to back a consortium
of rebel groups in Syria that include the al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra.
The Muslim Brotherhood and its terrorist offshoots are
not the only strange bedfellows the Saudis are willing to work with in their
bid to neutralize Iran.
They have also signaled a willingness to work with
Israel.
While Israel should be willing to reciprocate Saudi
overtures, there are institutional impediments to constructive cooperation.
For more than 20 years, Israel’s policy-making community
has been intellectually ensnared by the notion of peace. As a consequence, the
concept of joint action based on shared interests has become almost
incomprehensible.
Many senior officials believe that the only way for
Israel to collaborate with its Arab neighbors is by first signing a peace
treaty with the Palestinians. So long as such a peace treaty eludes us, no real
cooperation is possible.
This is the why Labor head “Buji” Herzog and Yesh Atid
leader Yair Lapid responded to the stunning support Israel received from Egypt,
Saudi Arabia and the UAE during Operation Protective Edge, not with a simple
nod and smile, but with the idea that what we all need to do to follow up with
a regional peace conference where the Egyptians, Saudis and the UAE could join
the West in condemning Israel for failing to cough up Jerusalem.
The problem is that the security establishment is
committed to the notion that Israel’s international position is a function of
the state of our relations with the Palestinians. If we appease the Palestinians,
then people will develop ties with us. If not, they will blackball us.
This week, Dr. Mark Heller, a principal research
associate at the Institute for National Security Studies, gave expression to
this popular assessment in an article he published on the institute’s website.
Heller claimed that while it is true that Israel and regional actors, including
Saudi Arabia, share interests, and it is possible that due to those joint
interests “potential may exist for expanded ties,” nothing significant can come
from those ties so long as Israel refuses to appease the Palestinians.
In his words, “Those [who reject making such concessions
to the Palestinians] should at least refrain from indulging in the fantasy that
Israeli involvement in a regional response to Israel’s challenges – the Iranian
threat, Islamist radicalism, American fecklessness, or anything else – is a
substitute for movement on the Palestinian issue rather than a consequence of
it.”
Not only is this thinking wrong, given the chaos in
so much of the Arab world today, it is dangerous. With all the Arab regimes
teetering on the edge or seriously threatened by rising jihadist forces, talk
of peace treaties, overt ties and normalized relations between Israel and its
neighbors is not merely irrelevant, it is dangerous. Going public with ties to
Israel could endanger regimes maintaining them.
Israel’s reason for wanting to work with the Saudis
and their neighbors is the same as their reason for wanting to work with us.
Together we can weaken Iran more effectively than we can separately.
If the Saudis oppose open ties with Israel because
they are threatened by jihadists, Israel should oppose ties because they are
collaborating with jihadists.
The greater the expanse of our joint efforts, the greater
the threat of blowback. On the other hand, if limited joint operations are
successful, then the bilateral impetus for future cooperation will grow.
As to the Palestinians, suffice it to note that the
agenda for Obama’s summit with the representatives of the Gulf Cooperation
Council made no mention of the Palestinians.
If the Palestinians did arise as an issue at Obama’s
summit this week, it was because the Americans raised it. The Arabs, for
their part, undoubtedly then responded by cluckingtheir tongues and denouncing
Israel in unison for a bit. Then they cleared their throats and moved on
to a subject that interests them.
And this brings us back to the Israeli
diplomatic-security brass and their antiquated notions about what makes our
Arab neighbors tick.
Israel today is confronted by two strategic threats that
have little to nothing to do with each other. On the one hand we have Iran. On
the other hand we have the international campaign to delegitimize Israel’s
right to exist.
Iran is a regional threat.
The threat of delegitimization emanates mainly from
Western countries acting hand in glove with the PLO. What we learn from
arguments like Heller’s is that many in the top echelons of our
diplomatic-security community view them as interconnected.
This is a problem, because treating them as such only
makes things worse.
Iran is principally a physical threat. The center of
gravity of any strategy for contending with Iran involves physically blocking
Iran’s territorial advance in the region and its acquisition of nuclear bombs.
Cooperation between Israel and the Gulf states
would consequently take place on the ground, far away from television cameras.
The public dimension of a strategy of blocking Iran’s regional and nuclear
advances – continuously sounding the alarm regarding the threat Iran poses to
international security – is not an end unto itself. The purpose of these
warnings is develop the political maneuver room to enable actions on the
ground.
In contrast, a coherent strategy for combating the delegitimization
threat requires Israel to act almost entirely above ground. To defeat the
manifold forces seeking to cast Israel out of the community of nations, Israel
must expose and discredit the goals of the campaign, the political forces
leading it and their sources of finance.
The problem is that in order to adopt a competent
strategy for countering the delegitimization campaign, Israel’s senior
officials first need to understand what is happening. And here the Palestinians
are relevant to the discussion.
Ever since the UN’s diplomatic pogrom at Durban, South
Africa, in August 2001, just a year after the peace process blew up at Camp
David, the Palestinian conflict with Israel became part and parcel of a
broad-based campaign to deny Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist.
For 14 years Israel has failed to forge coherent and
successful policies for contending with this state of affairs because our
senior officials refused to acknowledge what had happened and have instead
insistently argued that the campaign against us is somehow related to a future
peace with the PLO.
We saw just how absurd this view has become earlier this
week when one of the principal PLO negotiators, the terrorist- turned-security
boss-turned international soccer aficionado Jibril Rajoub, the current head of
the Palestinian soccer federation, made real progress in his longstanding bid
to get Israel expelled from FIFA.
Rajoub understands that any success he garners in his
operation will have a cascade effect on the overall campaign to expel Israel
from the community of nations. Rather than open a counteroffensive, based among
other things on exposing Rajoub’s true nature – he is a man whose hands are
anything but clean – and making him persona non grata in polite company, Israel
chose instead to pretend he isn’t our enemy and to deal with this quietly.
The same officialdom that wrongly viewed Rajoub as a
peace partner in the 1990s, cannot accept that he is our enemy, hell bent on
using political warfare as a means of destroying Israel. The officialdom that
still believes Israel’s legitimacy is tied to its ability to appease the PLO
cannot understand that the PLO has no reason to exist outside the campaign to
destroy Israel’s legitimacy.
The Iranian threat does share two features with the
delegitimization campaign. Both threaten Israel’s existence, albeit in
different ways. And both require strategic operations that contradict the
central guidepost of Israeli strategic thinking for the past 20 years.
We don’t need open relations with the Arabs. We get more
behind the scenes that we will ever receive in front of them.
And the Palestinians aren’t the key to good relations
with the West. They are the justification for anti-Semitism.
We have the means to handle both threats. But doing so
requires that we first put our long-held delusions behind us.
**Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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