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Rabat – Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, stated yesterday at the Davos World Economic Forum that normalization with Israel “cannot happen” until a peaceful resolution regarding the Palestinian case is reached.
As he reiterated his country’s support for the Palestinian cause, the top Saudi diplomat also commented on the murder by Israeli forces of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera and veteran Palestinian journalist who was killed on May 11. Faisal called on the international community to get Israel to respect Palestinians’ rights in order to prevent such tragic incidents in the future.
The Saudi minister’s strongly-worded defense of Palestinians’ struggle for a state comes amid reports that his country is considering diplomatic rapprochement with Israel.
The Wall Street Journal reported on May 8 that Saudi Arabia has indirectly agreed to fund two Israeli startups through a private equity fund set up by Jared Kushner. A senior advisor to former US president Donald Trump, Kushner is known, among other things, for being one of the chief architects of the Trump administration’s much-decried “deal of the century.”
Read also: Saudi Arabia to Invest in Israeli Startups Through American Fund
Faisal’s Davos comments suggest that despite reports of an imminent normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, the Gulf kingdom is still far from joining the cohort of Arab countries that have signed the US-brokered Abraham Accords.
Critics might still maintain, however, that such comments from senior political officials should be taken with a pinch of salt, especially as relations with the US — Israel’s main supporter on the global stage — remain a core marker of Saudi diplomacy despite perceptible tensions in the past few months.
The American news website Axios reported on Tuesday that US President Joe Biden is planning to hold talks aimed at finalizing a 2017 maritime agreement that involves Egypt giving Tiran and Sanafir islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia.
Through this move, Axios argued, Biden seeks to mediate between Egypt and Saudi Arabia in an effort to begin normalizing relations between the two Arab countries and Israel.
In 2017, the Egyptian parliament voted in favor of this maritime agreement, saying that the two islands are Saudi although they have been under Egyptian protection since 1950.
As Biden’s mediation attempt is similar to the series of pre-normalization moves the Trump administration made before the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco eventually agreed to the Abraham Accords in late 2020, many have suggested it is only a matter of time before Saudi Arabia joins the normalization circle.
