It was barely three weeks ago, but the news of the last few days has suddenly disrupted our perception of time.
Gathered in New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Joe Biden and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, did not hide their optimism in the face of “a historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia”, an agreement to at hand and which, they believed, would lead to lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
For Washington, which has been working for several months to advance this rapprochement, this normalization of diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tel Aviv was only a matter of time. The American presidency had its sights set on the end of the year, with a confident smile: “If you and I, 10 years ago, had talked about normalization with Saudi Arabia, I think we would have looked at each other saying: “Who drank what”? » Joe Biden then dropped in a playful tone to his Israeli counterpart.
But the lightness has now become unbearable, and the ratafia, this drink that was once released to seal peace, still far from being drunk, since last Saturday and the unspeakable attack by Hamas launched against Israel. The gesture and its response brought the two parties into a new, bloody war, and above all sent the delicate process of progress towards regional peace onto a completely different timetable.
“The current conflict will perhaps not cause the failure of existing agreements,” summarized in an interview with Duty Osamah Khalil, historian specializing in the Near and Middle East at Syracuse University, but it will certainly delay negotiations with Saudi Arabia by several months, perhaps years.
The current conflict may not derail existing agreements, but it will certainly delay negotiations with Saudi Arabia
Hamas must also rejoice, it which, with the massacres it planned, then perpetrated last weekend on Israeli territory, “ultimately sought to disrupt the normalization talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia.” Saudi Arabia,” continues Mr. Khalil. “He wanted to remind Arab states that the Palestinian question is still not resolved by placing it at the heart of the conflict with Israel. Because until now, these agreements have mainly contributed, according to this group, to consolidating the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, while legitimizing Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and its isolation from Gaza. »
In the wake of the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, any rapprochement between Riyadh and Tel Aviv is therefore viewed with a very negative eye by the Hamas. For the terrorist group, which has vowed to destroy Israel, this would symbolically evacuate the religious dimension of tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, by sealing a historic union between this sworn enemy and the most powerful Sunni Muslim country in the region. , land of two holy mosques, the Grand Mosque of Mecca and the Prophet’s Mosque of Medina.
Isolated in Gaza, an enclave described by Human Rights Watch as “the largest open-air prison in the world”, Hamas did not want to be any more isolated in regional geopolitics. By striking hard and with surprise, he sought to bring the Palestinian question to the forefront. He probably got there.
Whose fault is it ?
The start of the “Sukkot war”, named after the religious festival which ended at the time of the first missile attacks against Israel, was welcomed by Saudi diplomacy with a press release certainly condemning the Hamas attack, but while blaming Israel. For Riyadh, Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government failed to listen to the warnings repeatedly formulated by Saudi Arabia “against the dangers of an explosion of the situation as a result of the continued occupation and deprivations imposed on the Palestinian people.
Tel Aviv’s intransigence towards the Palestinians, as well as the recent, systematic and calculated multiplication of Jewish colonies on Palestinian lands in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, also maintain this same reading of the context elsewhere in the region. They have also contributed for months to eroding the support of Arab countries for any agreement to normalize relations with Israel. Last July, the Saudi political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdulla also recalled that in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, public support for the Abraham Accords had fallen by half since 2020, now standing between 27 and 20%. In Saudi Arabia, support for the normalization of relations with Tel Aviv follows the same curve, a curve now subject to the development of the current conflict.
Will the Saudis continue discussions? This will depend on “two fundamental variables”, summarized in the pages of New York Times Dennis Ross who served as advisor to several American presidents on Middle East policy; “the number of victims”, but also the attitude of Israel which “could give the impression of having decimated Hamas” by the strikes which could further intensify on Gaza. If the enclave were to be reduced to ruins, it could only push Riyadh and Tel Aviv away from a treaty.
“The idea of normalization cannot, however, be completely swept under the rug of war,” said Uriel Abulof, professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, in an interview, “because Hamas does not represent the dominant thought among the Palestinians and that by behaving like the armed group Islamic State, the group cannot on its own compromise the rapprochement towards peace.
A rapprochement always desirable for Saudi Arabia which also sees in the perspective of long-term diplomatic normalization with Israel, 75 years after the complex and controversial creation of this State, a way of countering together, more effectively than alone, a common threat in the region: Iran, the main support of Hamas, financially and militarily.
On Tuesday, Washington also assured that it had not found a link between Iran and the Hamas attack against Israel even if, since Saturday, several experts believe that the invisible hand of Tehran should not be very far away.