A covert relationship claimed by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Saudi Arabia, one that was years in the making, has been unravelling in a matter of days.

Netanyahu talked about it explicitly in an interview with Channel 14 during his visit to Washington last week.

“We had covert relations for nearly three years. On our side, apart from me, three people knew about it. On their side there were also a very small number of people who were involved in this, as was the case on the American side,” Netanyahu boasted.

If true, and not another of Netanyahu’s fabrications, you can either reveal this relationship with the other side’s consent, or when it is over. The third possibility is that this statement is the act of a bully, like many others in the past week.

But the relationship between the kingdom and Israel has been as much based on personal as state ambitions. 

As an unknown prince facing stiff opposition from powerful members of the royal family, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) realised that his path to power at home lay via Tel Aviv and Washington.

Once installed as crown prince, Bin Salman continued to court Israel, making a covert visit in 2017. He flattered American Jewish opinion expressing headline-making disdain for the Palestinian cause. 

A year later, he castigated the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, saying Palestinians should negotiate with Israel or “shut up”. 

Before the Hamas-led attack on Israel, MBS inched ever closer to putting his signature on the Abraham Accords. 

Even after the Hamas attacks, Saudi Arabia maintained business as usual.  

No room for manoeuvre 

For 15 long months, no pro Palestinian protests were tolerated and the festivals continued while Gaza wept. Even raising a Palestinian flag or praying for Gaza by pilgrims at Mecca was banned. 

Neither the death toll in Gaza, nor the invasion of Lebanon, nor the military operation in the Occupied West Bank changed the Saudi line. 

The crown prince was even prepared to tolerate a degree of humiliation at the hands of US President Donald Trump. Asked which country he would visit first, Trump said Saudi Arabia would have to pay $500bn in US contracts for the privilege of his presence. 

After a warm phonecall from MBS, the kingdom promised $600bn. Trump then upped the demand, saying the figure should be more like $1 trillion.

“I think they’ll do that because we’ve been very good to them,” Trump said to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

When Trump revealed his plan to own Gaza after the mass transfer of the Palestinians, he said that the bill for the clean up operation would go to the Gulf states, by which he meant Saudi Arabia. This particularly irked Riyadh. 

Trump also bragged that Saudi Arabia would normalise with Israel without a Palestinian state. “So, Saudi Arabia is going to be very helpful. And they have been very helpful. They want peace in the Middle East. It’s very simple,” Trump said.

It took Riyadh just 45 minutes to reply in what has become known as the dawn statement.

It left little room for manoeuvre.

“His Royal Highness emphasised that Saudi Arabia will continue its relentless efforts to establish an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and will not establish relations with Israel without that.”

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia also reaffirms its unequivocal rejection of any infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, whether through Israeli settlement policies, land annexation or attempts to displace the Palestinian people from their land….The kingdom of Saudi Arabia emphasises that this unwavering position is non-negotiable and not subject to compromises.”

The war of words has hotted up since.

In his interview with Channel 14, Netanyahu performed a victory roll. He said if the Saudis were so keen on creating a Palestinian state, they could do it on their territory. “The Saudis can create a Palestinian state in Saudi Arabia; they have a lot of land over there.”

This provoked a further chorus of condemnation from the Arab world including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as well as Iraq, Qatar and Kuwait. 

In its second statement of the week, on Sunday, Riyadh said it categorically rejected statements that “aim to divert attention from the continuous crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian brothers in Gaza, including the ethnic cleansing they are subjected to”.

The statement again left little to the imagination: “This extremist, occupying mentality does not understand what the Palestinian land means to the brotherly people of Palestine and their emotional, historical and legal connection to this land,” it said.

Palestinians have a right to their land and “are not intruders or immigrants to it who can be expelled whenever the brutal Israeli occupation wishes”. 

A bygone era

In just a few days, Trump and Netanyahu have undone all their own work. They were the ones who arm-twisted the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco to sign the Abraham Accords.

In his interview with Fox News, Netanyahu made no bones about the purpose of doing this. He said it was done to sideline the Palestinians. Netanyahu poured scorn on Saudi sensibilities.

Netanyahu is now saying he would impose peace on the Arab world by force, that the Arab world will come crawling to him when Israel has conquered all

“When we complete the changeover in the Middle East, when we cut the Iranian axis down even further, when we make sure that Iran does not have nuclear weapons, when we destroy Hamas, that will set the stage for an additional agreement with the Saudis and with others.

“By the way, I also believe in the Muslim world. Because it’s peace through strength. When we are very strong and we stand together, the objections that are raised now that it’s insurmountable are going to change,” he said.

Until today, Netanyahu had been telling MBS and Mohammed Bin Zayed, UAE president, that he would deal with them as allies.

Now he was saying he would impose peace on them by force, that this is not a relation of equals and the Arab world will come crawling to him when Israel has conquered all. 

All of this has now forced Saudi foreign policy to revert back five decades to the Arab nationalist days of King Faisal. 

And for the first time in 15 months, there is now a real prospect of a frontline of Arab states emerging, formed from the countries which have been so quiescent to Israel.

Wearing, significantly, a keffiyeh, the former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal warned of “collective action” not only by the Arab and Muslim world but Europe as well.

Late on Sunday, Egypt announced that it would host an emergency Arab summit on 27 February to discuss “new and dangerous developments” after Trump proposed to resettle Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

A bridge too far

What triggered this change was the adoption of mass population transfer as the official policy of Israel and the United States.

For decades, it had lingered untouched on the dusty shelves of political debate in the extremist wings of religious Zionism. Now it’s mainstream policy in Israel and America.

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Far from just challenging Israel’s immediate neighbours, Egypt and Jordan, a forcible transfer of two million Palestinians would affect every Arab state, particularly the Saudi kingdom.

As Trump doubled down on mass transfer, and with Netanyahu calling it the “purest, freshest idea in years”, the threat perceived in Arab capitals has only grown. 

For the religious Zionist movement claims territory far beyond the current borders with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Daniella Weiss, the leader of the settler movement, is not shy about expressing the territorial reach of the land promised to Jews by God.

“This is the promise of God to the Patriarchs of the Jewish Nation. It’s three thousand kilometres. It’s almost as big as the Sahara Desert. It’s Iraq and Syria, and part of Saudi Arabia.”

Even without Itamar Ben Gvir, the former extremist national security minister, in charge, Israel is occupying more Syrian land than the Gaza Strip, not counting the Occupied Golan Heights. It refuses to leave Lebanon. It makes no secret of its plan to divide Syria up into cantons and is employing increasingly hostile rhetoric to Turkey. 

It’s only a matter of time before Israel’s territorial expansion destabilises the whole region with dire consequences for the Saudi kingdom.

Quite apart from which, the factors that brought the quiescence of the Gulf states to the Palestinian conflict no longer exist with quite the clarity they did in 2017.

Israel and the first Trump administration sold the Abraham Accords as part of an anti-Iranian pact.

But now that Iran’s axis of resistance has been weakened by the loss of Syria and the battering that Hezbollah took in the war, the Saudis calculate rightly that it is not in their interests to push Iran further into a corner. 

Particularly as the first oil installations to feel a retaliatory Iranian drone strike would be theirs. Relations between Riyadh and the new Iranian president are warm, and MBS wants to keep them that way.

MBS is also in a different position. He is in firm control of his kingdom and is seen as a popular, modernising leader – by those younger than him. The repression he used to climb up the greasy pole of power is, for the moment, behind him.

Shedding Israel and distancing himself from Trump now gives him and the kingdom the opportunity to return to the moral as well as economic epicentre of the Arab and Islamic world. 

Shedding Israel and distancing himself from Trump now gives him the opportunity to return to the moral and economic epicentre of the Arab and Islamic world

The kingdom is no longer isolated from the Muslim world in the way it was when MBS came to power. It enjoys warm relations with Turkey. There is a $6bn deal in the offing, with Riyadh in the market to buy warships, tanks and missiles from Ankara.

MBS also now knows how popular the Palestinian cause has become at home. According to the Atlantic’s account of his conversation with former US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, he said that while he personally does not care about the Palestinian issue, 70 percent of his people who are younger than him do.

“For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful,” MBS is reported to have said. 

What would MBS get from shaking Netanyahu’s blood-soaked hands in public? 

Today there is only a long list of negatives for him in such a photo-op.

Too late

On Tuesday, King Abdullah of Jordan arrives in Washington with a message from the Arab world to which Trump would do well to listen. It’s not bluster. It’s not spoken out of weakness. It’s the truth.

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The consequences of allowing Israel to flatten Gaza, expel over two million people, force Jordan and Egypt to accept them, and the rich Arab states to reconstruct it, would indeed change the Middle East beyond all recognition. Netanyahu is right about that.

It would embroil the US in a religious conflict that would boil away long after Trump’s or Netanyahu’s body had been lowered into the ground. 

The pragmatist in Trump should wake up.

The only lesson of the futile wars America has waged this century under Republican and Democrat presidents is that they start in certainty and end in chaos, and go on much longer than America wants them to.

It is Trump’s task to end war. It is Netanyahu’s openly proclaimed task to keep this one going, and to expand it to tame the whole region. 

That is why it is in the best interests of an isolationist, nationalist, inward turning America to dump Netanyahu and his dreams of greater Israel today. 

Because tomorrow might be too late. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.