Israel and Saudi Arabia have “hammered out … a basic framework” for a landmark agreement to establish diplomatic relations, President Joe Biden’s team acknowledged amid reports that the accord will hinge on U.S. security guarantees.
“We very much continue active discussions with Israel and Saudi Arabia,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “And all sides have hammered out, I think, a basic framework for what we might be able to drive at.”
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Israeli relations with most of its Muslim-majority neighbors have been fraught, at best, throughout the history of the modern Jewish state, which declared independence in 1948 and faced an invasion by five Arab states the next day. The unresolved Israeli-Palestinian dispute has functioned as an enduring justification for continued tensions between Israel and other Middle Eastern powers, but security pressures are reorganizing diplomatic relations.
“There’s a lot of common denominators that are driving us forward in this process,” Kirby said Friday. “One of them is, of course, Iran, and the continued concerns that Israel has about Iran, Saudi Arabia has about Iran, and certainly we have about Iran.”
The progress was on display in Riyadh this week, where Saudi officials hosted a United Nations World Tourism Organization conference attended by an Israeli official — the first public high-level visit by an Israeli official to Saudi Arabia.
“We made a crack in the wall,” Israeli Tourism Minister Haim Katz said Friday.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has warned recently that his country will have to obtain nuclear weapons if Iran acquires them. And though Biden dubbed him a “pariah” during the 2020 presidential election campaign on account of the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, the young prince is keen to fortify his country against a conflict with Iran.
“At the heart of the potential deal lie Saudi asks of the United States: Chiefly, formalized U.S. security guarantees and U.S. support and cooperation for the development of a Saudi civilian nuclear program,” as a United States Institute of Peace memo noted this week. “In parallel, Saudi Arabia and the United States are expected to require Israeli concessions that minimally provide benefits to the Palestinians and that maximally reinforce the shared Saudi and U.S. position of preserving the possibility of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared at the United Nations General Assembly last week that the Palestinians “should not have a veto over the process.” The Saudi royal told Fox News last week that his priority is to find an agreement that “will ease the life of the Palestinians,” a remark widely interpreted as a sign that he will not prioritize Palestinian political priorities over the security guarantees that Biden could provide.
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“It would be a mutual defense understanding, less than a full treaty,” an unnamed U.S. official told Reuters.
Kirby, the White House spokesman, avoided commenting on any details. “Everybody’s going to have to do something, and everybody’s gonna have to compromise on something,” he said. “There’s a lot of intense diplomacy going on. There are some agreed principles, but there isn’t a final deal struck. And so, you know, until you negotiate everything, you haven’t really negotiated anything in a final format. So again, we’ll just keep working.”
