Did Saudi Arabia Just Try To Give the West Bank to Israel?

All share a desire for an agreement by Israel’s Arab neighbors to cede territories in order to enable Israel to gobble up the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Former Netanyahu aide and NSC head Uzi Arad and his successor Giora Eiland—along with other Israelis who served with Netanyahu—have mooted this solution. For their patrons, Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank and Jerusalem is an absolute non-starter.

How then to communicate this Israeli idea to Riyadh at the very moment when Trump and Netanyahu were finalizing understandings related to the Trump declaration on Jerusalem?

Only days before the MBS-Abbas meeting, U.S. envoys Jared Kushner (the president’s son-in-law and majordomo) and Jason Greenblatt (the Trump Organization’s former lawyer and current Mideast peace envoy) traveled to Riyadh for late-night deliberations with the crown prince.

Kushner, as we know, is a longstanding friend of Netanyahu’s—he even led a parents’ foundation to funnel money to the West Bank settlements. He travels in circles where Jerusalem as “the eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish People” and the “Gaza Plus” idea are common currency. Gaining Kushner’s support for the proposals as the basis for a new American strategy that places an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Jerusalem in the deep freeze is like pushing on an open door.

Kushner, who is said to have bonded with his fellow thirty-something royal, is MBS’s best source for all things Israeli. Assuming that Kushner and MBS are on the same page regarding the Gaza scheme, and the MBS-Abbas meetings suggest they are, their agreement adds a new and troubling dimension to Trump’s Jerusalem declaration.

Such a U.S.-Saudi understanding  is consistent with the Saudis’ effective abandonment of their own Arab Peace Initiative. The Saudi leader himself undermined a key element of that proposal when, in April 2016, Saudi Arabia agreed to join the Israel-Egypt strategic partnership established by their peace treaty without Israeli concessions on a Palestinian state, as the price for reestablishing Saudi control over the strategic Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir.

The source noted that MBS himself wrote a formal letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlining the unprecedented Saudi pledge to participate—along with Egypt, Israel, and the United States—in upholding the security terms of the historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

That decision, and the letter, could be understood in Israel as a practical demonstration that Saudi Arabia was indeed prepared to engage with Israel without any quid pro quo requiring a Palestinian state, in Gaza, Jerusalem, or indeed anywhere.

A call by TAC to the Saudi embassy went unreturned on Monday. The White House denied the plan to the New York Times, as did the Saudi government, and an Abbas spokesman called the reported Saudi offer “fake news” that “does not exist.”

Nevertheless, the details of the meeting were confirmed by several people to TAC and the Times, and they provide some badly needed context to the Jerusalem declaration. Confident of Saudi support for the Gaza option and its historic agreement to strategic collaboration with Washington, Egypt, and Israel independent of progress on Palestine, Trump can be forgiven for assuming a Saudi carte blanche in his effort to remake the Middle East, with recognition of Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem at its center.