Saudi Arabia yesterday sent an official delegation to the occupied West Bank, for the first time in more than 30 years, to assure the Palestinians that it will continue to defend their cause, even in the event of the planned normalization between Riyadh and Jerusalem. The Government of Mohamed bin Salman, represented in Ramallah by Ambassador Nayef al Sudairi, took this step at the same time that Israel announced that its Tourism Minister, Haim Katz, had just begun a two-day trip to Saudi Arabia, in which It marks the first public visit by an Israeli minister to that country.
Katz's expedition is the latest sign of the rapprochement between Israel and Riyadh, which in recent days has been promoted by both the Prime Minister of the Jewish State, Beniamin Netanyahu, and Bin Salman: the Saudi head of government and crown prince stated in an interview with Fox that the two countries are “closer every day” to an agreement for the normalization of relations; a statement that Netanyahu seconded with that both are “on the cusp of a spectacular breakthrough.”
A little over a year before the elections in the United States, President Joe Biden seeks to score a great diplomatic goal with the normalization of relations between his two key allies in the Middle East. The milestone would culminate the stabilization objectives that Washington has been seeking for decades, objectives that three years ago were put on track under the leadership of Donald Trump with the Abraham Accords, through which Israel established diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and to which Then Oman and Morocco joined.
The Palestinian Authority described this process as a “stab in the back” that ended the Arab League's façade of unity on the Palestinian issue.
The arrival of Saudi ambassador Nayef al Sudairi in Ramallah yesterday is unprecedented since the Palestinian-Israeli peace agreements in Oslo, which date back to September 1993 and allowed the establishment of the Palestinian Authority.
After a meeting with the Palestinian Foreign Minister, Riad al Maliki, Al Sudairi assured: “The Palestinian issue is a fundamental pillar” of Saudi foreign policy. “It is certain that the Arab peace initiative presented by the kingdom in 2002 is the cornerstone of any future agreement,” he added to the press in reference to a plan that, adopted by the Arab League, advocated an Israeli withdrawal from all territories occupied since 1967 in exchange for normalization between the Arab countries and Israel.
