Now that US President Donald Trump’s second term has begun, officials in his administration optimistically see the recently implemented Gaza ceasefire as paving the way for a normalisation deal between Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The new US national security advisor Mike Waltz said he has high hopes for the “next phase of the Abraham Accords”, with Israeli-Saudi normalisation a “huge priority” for Trump’s administration. A diplomatic accord between Tel Aviv and Riyadh would be a “tremendous historic region-changing agreement,” he added.
One of the main foreign policy legacies of the first Trump administration was the Abraham Accords, which brought four Arab states – the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco – into normalisation deals with Israel.
Although Trump, and later former President Joe Biden, attempted to bring Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, Riyadh has never agreed to such a bold and risky move. Nonetheless, even amid the 15 months of Israel’s war on Gaza, Washington tried bringing Saudi Arabia into the Israeli normalisation camp.
However, the political risks of normalising with Israel amid the gruesome war in Gaza were simply far too high to accept for Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) and the rest of the leadership in Riyadh.
Despite optimism from the pro-normalisation lobby and figures in the new Trump administration, it is reasonable to assume that these risks remain too high for Saudi Arabia’s leadership, even with the tenuous ceasefire in Gaza being implemented on Sunday.
For starters, it is far from guaranteed that the ceasefire will lead to a cessation of hostilities beyond the first phase (if even for that long). Concerns that it could amount to more of a hostage swap agreement than a genuine ceasefire are valid. There are many loopholes in the ceasefire deal and whether the Trump administration will make Israel face any consequences for potential resumption of hostilities toward Gaza is an unknown factor.
“Unfortunately, I expect that similar to the ceasefire in Lebanon, Israel will habitually violate the ceasefire in Gaza. However, because the media narrative will maintain that a ceasefire persists, global attention will move on,” explained Dr Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, in an interview with The New Arab.
“Trump’s influence with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu may indeed bring about a ceasefire in Gaza, at least for the proposed first phase of the deal. From Trump’s perspective, quiet fronts in Lebanon and Gaza are needed to convince the Saudi leadership to join the Abraham Accords. MbS has been reluctant to accept normalisation with Israel as long as the Israeli bombardment of Gaza continued,” Dr Nabeel Khoury, former deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Yemen, told TNA.
“Though a ceasefire is likely to hold for 40 days, a durable peace remains an unrealisable dream for the short and medium terms,” he added.
Ultimately, if Israel’s military operations in Gaza resume, that would make it essentially impossible for Saudi Arabia to agree to normalise diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv.
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But even if it does hold, the impact of the past 15 months of death and destruction in Gaza will not suddenly disappear, making it tough to imagine the Kingdom heading down the normalisation road.
“It’s going to be very difficult to get that [Israeli-Saudi] normalisation deal. [Many] Palestinians, including civilians, were killed in the fighting. The Saudi population is very pro-Palestinian, very against Israel, in particular, for the number of casualties that have been caused. And that’s if the ceasefire holds, it’s going to be difficult,” said Kenneth Katzman, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, in a TNA interview.
“Then if you layer on to that the fact that the ceasefire will probably not hold, it’ll make it even harder for the Saudis, for Mohammed bin Salman, to move forward on normalisation,” he added.
For Riyadh, this precarious ceasefire was “a condition, on top of other conditions” for Israeli normalisation, noted Dr Aziz Alghashian, a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation Middle East (ORF-ME), in a TNA interview.
“Too many people are, I think, putting too much emphasis on the fact that because the ceasefire’s there all the obstacles to [Israeli-Saudi] normalisation are gone, [which] is a wrong kind of perception,” he added.
Saudi public opinion
Like all leaders worldwide, those of Arab countries can’t ignore domestic politics and the attitudes of their own citizens when making important foreign policy decisions. This point is particularly relevant when considering MbS’s Israeli normalisation calculations.
If Saudi Arabia were to enter the Abraham Accords under current conditions, unrest breaking out in the Kingdom would not be unimaginable. This is a scenario that the Crown Prince and those around him seek to avoid at all costs. At this time, Saudi Arabia requires stability as the oil-rich country focuses on making Vision 2030, the Kingdom’s grandiose economic diversification agenda, successful.
On 21 December 2023, the pro-Israel think tank Washington Institute for Near East Policy released their findings on Saudi public opinion toward Israeli normalisation based on polling data obtained between 14 November and 6 December of that year. This polling revealed that 96 percent of Saudis believed, at least at that time, that all Arab states should sever ties with Israel in response to the aggression against Gaza.
“Obviously, there’s a great sympathy for the Palestinian people and citizens of Gaza. I think to normalise after all that bloodshed is going to be very, very tough for the Saudi leadership to sell internally,” Katzman told TNA.
“Although MbS had previously expressed openness to normalising with Israel, he is unlikely to try to force it on his people; he has admitted that doing so could put him at risk of assassination, as was the fate of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat after he signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979,” observed Dr Sheline.
Dr Alghashian believes that many who speculate about Israel and Saudi Arabia normalising at some point in the upcoming period have failed to fully appreciate the extent to which public opinion in the Kingdom is an important factor, and how much it has changed since the war on Gaza began.
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Saudi public opinion has “not only become…fiercer towards Israel or…friendlier towards the Palestinians, but the Saudi population has developed their understanding of the iniquities of this occupation and how the conflict is managed by Netanyahu, and basically how Hamas was propped up by Netanyahu,” explained Dr Alghashian.
“They’ve developed their understanding, so…public opinion now has become a bigger obstacle because of these reasons,” he added.
“Moreover, the strong stances that Saudi Arabia made towards the Palestinians and the strong statements…kind of boosted Saudi nationalism and the Saudi ruling elite, and kind of gave a sense of pride to Saudis regarding MbS. So, to negate that because Donald Trump is coming is going to take a lot of work. It’s going to take not only wording, [but] it’s [also] going to take a lot of really tangible stuff.”
Palestinian statehood
Saudi Arabia has long maintained its official stance that the Kingdom’s normalisation with Israel can only happen after the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state based on the 1949-67 borders. This has been Riyadh’s position since then-Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud proposed the Arab Peace Initiative (API) at the 2002 Arab League summit in Beirut.
As much as Saudi Arabia’s leadership would welcome the successful implementation of a ceasefire and a long break from fighting, which would help restore some regional stability and ease tensions, this development alone would not address the root causes of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – chiefly the harsh and illegal occupation and constant violations of the Palestinians’ most fundamental rights.
Without steps being taken towards the formation of a Palestinian state in line with the API, it is difficult to imagine Riyadh normalising with Tel Aviv.
“[The Saudi government’s] formal conditions are a roadmap to a Palestinian state and so the Kingdom can always fall back on that argument that – even though there is a ceasefire, and even if it holds – there’s still no movement toward a Palestinian state, and so the Kingdom’s leadership can…say we can’t move forward on normalisation right now,” explained Katzman.
Furthermore, there is speculation that the Trump team’s concession to the Israeli government in exchange for Netanyahu’s commitment to the deal with Hamas is support for the official annexation of the occupied West Bank. Such an arrangement would even further dim the prospects for Saudi Arabia, or any other Arab state, entering the Abraham Accords in the foreseeable future.
“It is not yet clear what Trump has promised Netanyahu in order to achieve even a temporary ceasefire. For example, Trump likely agreed to support Netanyahu’s ambitions to annex the West Bank, which would be as much of a nonstarter for MbS as an ongoing genocide in Gaza,” Dr Sheline told TNA.
Mindful of where the Israeli government stands on the topic of Palestinian statehood, it is extremely unrealistic to imagine Israel making the concessions to the Palestinians that would be necessary to bring Riyadh on board with normalisation. But it’s not just Israel’s government that has this position. Today it is Israeli society too.
In the pre-7 October 2023 period, Netanyahu’s Likud Party had generally been openly against Palestinian statehood while the Israeli population was somewhat mixed on the issue. But as a result of the Hamas-led Operation al-Aqsa Flood, support for a Palestinian state from within Israeli society has dramatically fallen.
Most Israelis believe that the establishment of a Palestinian state would constitute a reward for 7 October 2023. Without the US pressuring Israel to change its stance on Palestinian statehood, there is no way to imagine Netanyahu, or any Israeli leader, agreeing to the API, and the second Trump administration applying such pressure on Tel Aviv is hard to imagine.
“I don’t think you have a recipe for Israeli support for a Palestinian state, no matter how hard Mr. Trump pushes it, and I don’t think he’s going to push it. He never really reiterated any commitment to the US policy to have the two-state solution. He’s never really pushed for it. He’s never committed to that consistent US policy position. So, I don’t think you have the ingredients for [a two-state solution],” Katzman told TNA.
When asked about possible concessions that Israel might make to the Palestinians to move Saudi Arabia closer to joining the Abraham Accords, Charles Dunne, a former US diplomat who served in Cairo and Jerusalem, does not think it would be realistic to expect too much.
“It’s hard to imagine, given the state of Israeli politics and the nature of the Netanyahu coalition, that the current government would be willing to offer more than the vaguest outlines of a future settlement, or more likely a process to deliver the vaguest outlines, with no deadlines and plenty of off-ramps,” the former American diplomat told TNA.
“And even those would be subject to bitter arguments within the Israeli government.”
What Trump often did in his first term was broker relatively artificial deals and sell them as huge diplomatic accomplishments that brought about a type of “peace” that no previous US administration achieved.
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This was the case when it came to Israel-UAE normalisation, which was not a “peace” deal in the true sense of the term given that Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi were never hostile toward the other. The first Trump administration somewhat deceptively framed certain initiatives and agreements, which were economic in nature – such as the so-called “Deal of the Century” in 2019, the Serbia-Kosovo normalisation deal in 2020, etc. – as major political breakthroughs.
“I think there will be some [Israeli] concessions to the Palestinians framed in a particular way, but he will make something out of nothing. He’s going to try to sell it to all – not just Netanyahu but to the Arab world [and to many others],” explained Dr Alghashian, who noted that we can anticipate “a great deal of acrobatics” considering Trump’s record of skilfully “manufacturing political situations out of nothing to serve his political purposes”.
Regional dynamics
Although Saudi Arabia never normalised diplomatic relations with Israel in the past, from a strategic standpoint there was arguably a greater case for doing so in previous years when Riyadh perceived a far graver Iranian threat. Today, in light of Iran and the Tehran-led ‘Axis of Resistance’ suffering humiliating setbacks in 2024, Saudi policymakers see Iran and its regional allies and partners posing less of a threat to the Kingdom’s national security.
Katzman believes that this is another factor which further decreases the odds of Saudi Arabia agreeing to enter the Abraham Accords. “The strategic imperative for the normalisation…with Israel is a little bit lower now [for the Kingdom]. Iran’s regional strategy has collapsed. Iran is not the threat that maybe the Kingdom felt it was a year ago. Iran is viewed as very much weakened. So, the strategic rationale is not as strong right now for normalisation with Israel,” he explained in a TNA interview.
Dunne has a similar assessment. He told TNA, “Ironically, Israel’s own success in stifling Iran in the recent round of hostilities may make the security rationale for closer ties with Israel less urgent”.
Back to the defence treaty
It seems misguided to dive deep into discussions about Israeli-Saudi normalisation if there is no progress on the Saudi-US defence treaty front.
“None of these things [are] actually worth discussing much if there isn’t really movement on the Saudi-American treaty. It’s all about the Saudi-American treaty. Once we have the Saudi-American treaty – or there are discussions there, or there’s tangibility there – then we could debate on what the Saudis can accept and what Netanyahu can be acrobatic about [and so on],” noted Dr Alghashian.
“Without the Saudi-US treaty, that’s a whole different ballgame. The Saudis don’t want to normalise for the sake of normalisation with Israel. That’s nonsense. So, our eyes have to be on the Saudi-American treaty,” he told TNA.
In addition, can Trump and his team convince at least 67 US Senators to vote in favour of such a treaty? That seems unlikely.
Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO of Gulf State Analytics
Follow him on Twitter: @GiorgioCafiero
