The 12-day air campaign against Iran that was carried out by Israel last June, and then eventually joined by the United States, changed the strategic equation in the Middle East. But as much as that is an enormous benefit to both Jerusalem and Washington, there was one consequence to this victory that will discourage many observers of the region.
The tacit alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia against a common enemy in Tehran was the basis for the success of the first Trump administration’s ability to make the Abraham Accords a reality in 2020. It also raised the possibility of the entire Arab and Muslim world coming to terms with the permanence of Israel, as well as the possibility that the guardian of Islamic holy places in Mecca and Medina might embrace formal recognition of Israel.
The end of a threat
But after a week of war, the threat of Iran building a nuclear bomb in the near future no longer hangs over the Saudis. The crippling of Tehran’s nuclear facilities—and stripping it of its air defense and much of its missile arsenal—proved an enormous victory for Israel and America. It largely removed the prospect of an existential Iranian nuclear threat that had been hanging over the Jewish state for the last 20 years.
But it has now removed Riyadh’s prime motivation for its tilt toward Jerusalem.
That trend began when the Saudis were largely abandoned by an Obama administration that was committed to appeasement of Iran, rather than confronting or containing it. In response, they turned to the Jewish state to counter what appeared to be a threat to the existence of their government. If that threat is largely removed, then why should they normalize relations with Israel?
As insider reports have increasingly made clear, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the country, has decided to alter his country’s course. Instead of continuing to move closer to Jerusalem and, as so many in the United States and Israel hoped and even expected, joining the Abraham Accords themselves, the Saudis seem to be eyeing a different sort of regional realignment, in which they will now link up with other Islamist countries like Qatar and Turkey. They have even reportedly been advocating for the United States not to attack Iran so as to help the protest movement succeed in overthrowing the Islamist theocrats that have despotically ruled since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. They’ve also refused to let Washington use their territory for potential attacks on Iran.
On top of that, the Saudis are also moving away from their efforts to erase antisemitism from their education system and public discourse, as they had been doing as late as 2024. Instead, the regime’s state-run media has again turned to spewing out anti-Israel venom, in addition to the sort of open hatred of Jews that was routine before Riyadh’s turn to Israel and the West. Among other monitors of the situation, the Anti-Defamation League is sounding the alarm about prominent Saudi voices—closely tied to the royal family and the government—promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and trashing the Abraham Accords.
This is very disappointing for both Washington and Jerusalem. President Donald Trump has invested a lot of effort in trying to undo the damage to U.S.-Saudi relations done by the Obama and Biden administrations, which both sought to downgrade relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia in order to effect a rapprochement with Iran. It’s equally frustrating for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw the expansion of the Abraham Accords to include the Saudis as his prime foreign-policy objective.
A beguiling prospect
To be fair, the idea of an Israeli embassy in Riyadh—and the Saudis following the lead of the United Arab Emirates in becoming an open friend of Israel and a friendly place for Jewish visitors—was a beguiling prospect. It made sense for the Saudis to go down this road from a strategic point of view. And it also dovetailed with MBS’s hopes of modernizing Saudi society, and even more importantly, its finances, to openly engage with the Start-Up Nation, the most economically dynamic in the region.
It’s time to admit that while it would have been nice, it was probably always a fantasy.
Even before the war that began as a result of the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which put a freeze on any efforts to expand the accords, there was good reason for skepticism about the Saudis ever fully embracing normalization. As I wrote in 2022, for a government whose identity has always been bound up with its alliance with the extreme Wahabi sect of Islam, recognition of Israel was always going to be a stretch. For all of his desire to get his nation into the 21st century and shake its reliance on oil income, MBS knew that good relations with the Jewish state are still extremely unpopular inside his country and elsewhere on the Arab street.
Israeli diplomats like to speak of the difference between cold and hostile public comments toward the Jewish state uttered by their Arab and Muslim counterparts and warmer private ones. However, the reason—with the possible exception of the UAE—that contrast still exists is the fact that hatred for Zionism and vicious antisemitism is the rule in the region, regardless of whether a war is going on. The leaders of moderate Arab nations know that letting a Palestinian national movement that cannot move beyond its dreams of Israel’s destruction hold them hostage to those fantasies is a mistake. But while the authoritarian rulers of these states do, as a general rule, ignore public sentiment, even a stable regime such as that in Riyadh knows that such governments are not invulnerable to threats of being toppled.
They were never serious
Moreover, for all of the optimism about the inevitability of their transforming their under-the-table good relations with Israel into one of open recognition, it’s not clear that it was ever a possibility. Even when it was being formally discussed after the Biden administration belatedly began pushing for their joining the Abraham Accords (though Biden’s team hated using the name because it was Trump’s signature foreign-policy achievement), the terms the Saudis asked for demonstrated that they weren’t really serious about it. The price they demanded in exchange for normalization included a formal defense pact with the United States and Washington gifting them a nuclear program—two things that were never going to happen under any circumstances.
The Saudis knew this, and by asking for the moon in this manner, they were sending a signal to much of the world, including many Americans and Israelis who ought to have known better.
Nor would it have been worth it for Israel to acquiesce to the principal demand made of them: the creation of a Palestinian state.
That has been a key element of the price tag the Saudis put on their joining the accords. That sounded right to an American foreign-policy establishment that continued to believe that a two-state solution was the only way to end the conflict. Of course, as Palestinians have made clear, over and over again, they have no interest in the idea if it means they’ll have to commit themselves to living in peace with a Jewish state, no matter where its borders are drawn.
After the Second Intifada (2000-2005), and then Oct. 7, the once broad Israeli support for the concept has evaporated. Even most left-wing Israelis know that the Palestinians aren’t interested in peace. Acquiescing to demands for Palestinian statehood would have meant repeating the same catastrophic blunder made by the late Ariel Sharon when he withdrew from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, thus setting in motion the events that allowed Hamas to seize control of the coastal enclave and eventually to be able to commit the atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Doing so in the far larger and more strategic areas of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) would have endangered the very existence of the state.
It’s equally true that the Saudis have no real desire to help create another failed Arab state that would, in all likelihood, be a perfect target to be taken over by Islamists—in this case, Hamas. Yet even before the Palestinians won general Arab and Muslim sympathy by launching a war on Oct. 7 with an orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction, the Saudis were only using the statehood issue to help deflect pressure to join the Abraham Accords.
That should serve as a reminder to Israelis and Americans not to be too disappointed by the Saudis’ decision to attempt to reclaim their status as the leader of Islamist rejectionist forces in the region, a stance that, in recent years, they surrendered to Qatar.
Would it ever have been worthwhile for Israel to have made such a grave sacrifice of its security concerns in exchange for Saudi recognition?
For Israelis, having the Saudis embrace them fully and openly as partners would have signaled the end of the Muslim world’s refusal to accept the Jewish state’s permanent place in the region. But setting up a situation where the Palestinian Authority would likely have been toppled by Hamas would have been suicidal. The scenario in which Hamas assumes control of the territories is a guarantee of nothing but another and even more bloody round of war.
As much as it’s nice to dream of a world where the region could truly be transformed into a “new Middle East,” such as the one that the late Shimon Peres dreamed of when he agreed to the 1993 Oslo Accords, 33 years later, Israelis still don’t live in such a world.
That’s why it is far better to keep such fantasies out of efforts to ensure that the Saudis remain outside of coalitions bent on Israel’s destruction. The Riyadh regime may still hope to develop its economy and needs to modernize its society to achieve that; however, it is never going to be entirely divorced from the Wahabi extremism that put their family in control of the Arabian Peninsula in the first place.
Riyadh can’t change
And so, Americans and Israelis should stop chasing after the vain hope of getting the desert kingdom to behave as if it is anything other than the Islamist regime that it has always been and likely always will be. The Saudis will always act in their own best interests, and if that lines up with a more Israel-friendly policy, then they’ll do that. And being realists and still desirous of friendly relations with the United States, there will be limits on how far they will go in terms of open hostility to Israel. But they can neither be persuaded nor bribed to give up their basic character.
It’s long past time for Washington and Jerusalem to acknowledge this fact and stop trying to pretend that Saudi Arabia is anything other than what it is. It may not be at war with Israel and may even prefer for it to, along with the United States, continue to act to deter Islamist forces that are hostile to Riyadh, even if they are no longer worried about Iran. But it’s never going to be a real friend or ally of a Jewish state.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
