Trump and Netanyahu
Trump and NetanyahuReuters

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s diplomatic plate is overflowing. His visit to Washington, including the summit with President Trump, must delineate Israel’s impending agenda on several different fronts, most importantly: the achievement of victory in Gaza that will defeat Hamas, end its reign of terror on Israel from its Gaza base of operations, and liberate our remaining hostages. Add to that the elimination of Iran’s nuclear capacity and these meetings are quite momentous.

According to reports, President Trump is fixated on advancing on the Saudi front, with the goal of achieving normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. To be sure, that is a worthy objective and will jumpstart the Abraham Accords that the Biden administration left to wither. Nevertheless, Israel should enter these negotiations as equals, not as beggars at the trough desperate for recognition at any price. We should be mindful of our national interests – as well as the advantages and limitations of any agreement with Saudi Arabia.

The theory is that any agreement with the Saudis will effectively end the Arab-Israeli dispute. Saudi Arabia has special status in the Muslim world as the custodian of the Islamic holy places. As such, its rapprochement with Israel would be tantamount to a declaration that all Islam should reconcile with Israel, effectively ending Israel’s ostracism from much of the Muslim world. That is certainly consequential.

Yet, similar claims were made when Israel and Egypt made peace in 1979. Removing the Arab world’s largest army from the battlefield was assumed to make future wars with Israel impossible, and an era of peace and prosperity would dawn.

It hasn’t quite happened like that. It is true that battlefield wars between Israel and our neighbors have ceased since then but they have been replaced by protracted wars fought against non-state actors, or evil terrorists as they should be known, several times in Lebanon and Gaza, continuously in Judea and Samaria, with the specter of a genocidal Iran looming over the region.

Saudi Arabia may be attempting to modernize, but agreements between democracies and autocracies are inherently unstable, as the latter are always subject to coups and abrupt changes in leadership. There have been several attempts to overthrow the Saudi monarchy, and we should recall the temporary rise to power of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2013, which, if not overthrown by current Egyptian President Abdel al-Sisi, could have spelled the end of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty.

Israel then must be cautious about relinquishing vital assets or compromising our security for tentative gains that might be short-lived. These forfeited assets or hazardous compromises could theoretically include an end to the war with Hamas and withdrawal from Gaza, recognition of a Palestinian state, a freeze on construction of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, withdrawal from Lebanon, a return to the status quo of October 6, 2023, a ban on Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, et al.

Not one element of the above is worth normalization with Saudi Arabia, even if President Trump is enamored with the deal.

We are not at war with Saudi Arabia, except in the technical sense. There are no reciprocal claims on each other’s territory. There is no reason there should be any hostility between Israel and Saudi Arabia, there is no casus belli, and no reason peace does not already exist. I have never placed much stock in the notion that these powerful autocracies must heed the “Arab street,” and thus Israel has to make precarious compromises, and Saudi Arabia has to be afforded a fig leaf so as to better sell the deal to its public. Autocracies do not work that way.

Perhaps the value of these agreements can be put into better perspective by analyzing the relationship between Israel and its current peace partners.

The peace with Egypt, as well as with Jordan, has long and accurately been described as a cold peace. Trade exists, but tourism these days is almost non-existent. Israelis must hide their identity when visiting those countries and the welcome is not always hospitable. These countries are not our friends or even allies, and they consistently evince open hostility to Israel in international forums including the United Nations. It would seem that we want it more than they do, which is not inherently unreasonable because Israelis feel better without the sense of isolation imposed on us by much of the world, but which should give us some pause as to the risks implicit in these agreements and the tangible concessions we make to procure them.

In both agreements, we forfeited vital territory won with the blood of our soldiers. With Egypt, we relinquished essential assets (oil) and with Jordan, we were somehow cajoled into providing them with water for, it seems, infinity. In exchange, they agreed to… well, not kill us. Both nations benefited substantially from American aid after signing these agreements.

Perhaps even more instructive is the linchpin of the Abraham Accords, the agreement with the United Arab Emirates. We enjoy trade and tourism. I have visited the UAE several times and always felt comfortable there. Yet, there was a noticeable difference on my most recent visit six weeks ago:

Public Jewish prayer has ended, even if previously it was informally tolerated. There are no longer minyanim, even if an ornate synagogue was opened in the Abrahamic Village in Abu Dhabi. Jews who used to walk around with kippot no longer do so. There is a plethora of kosher restaurants in the UAE but – aside from the ones with “kosher” in their names – the others cannot be identified from the outside as kosher. There is no insignia, no indication that they are kosher restaurants, and patrons must ask for the kashrut certificate to verify that the establishment is, indeed, kosher. This state of affairs preceded the murder of the Chabad Shaliach, Rabbi Zvi Kogan, Hy”d, in the UAE this past November, so it is not just security related.

The sense of “inclusion” that one felt in the early years of the Abraham Accords has subtly changed to a sense of “toleration.” Granted, any peace treaty is better than any war, but the question remains: at what price? Absence of war is a value for all sides, even without a treaty. What must we renounce or surrender for the privilege of being liked or tolerated? All we ask of former adversaries is they commit to not hating us, nothing more tangible. In exchange for that, in the Abraham Accords we postponed indefinitely the annexation of our biblical heartland, Judea and Samaria, and in the Egyptian and Jordanian treaties, surrendered quantifiable resources.

Normalization with Saudi Arabia is not worth it if the price is our acquiescence to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the center of our homeland. We should beware of the diplomat’s rhetorical games, of finding equivocal language that might mean this to us and something else to them but ultimately leave us weakened.

ne of Menachem Begin’s greatest mistakes at Camp David in 1978 was consenting to what was called “the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,” then a newly created nuisance on the world scene. Begin resisted mightily, until he didn’t, assuaging his conscience by telling himself that “legitimate” and “rights” are undefined, and so they can mean whatever we want them to mean.

It was a good lawyer’s argument – but has been seized upon by our enemies to mean what they assumed it meant: that Palestinian Arabs have “legitimate rights,” not Jews, and whatever they are, the Jews are depriving them of those rights. Add to that the effective declaration in the disastrous Oslo Accords that the land of Israel is not just the homeland of the Jewish people, and we should not wonder why even the horrific massacre of innocent Jews – babies, women, men, the elderly – gained us very little sympathy from the world. Why sympathize with a nation that deprives others of “legitimate rights” on land that they do not consider their own?

We should not beg, grovel, or plead for recognition by other nations. There is something amiss about an ancient and eternal people fawning for acceptance by a nation – Saudi Arabia – that literally came into existence in 1932. We must come as a proud nation, equals. The Saudis want a defense pact with the US? That is fine – but we need not pay the price for it. Arguably, they need normalization with us more than we do with them. The Saudis need our assistance with their sworn enemy Iran – and if Iran is successfully neutralized, how valuable does this treaty then remain for them? The answer is, not much, so why should we concede anything substantive in order to achieve it?

That being said, I welcome a normalization deal of equals. Here is a suggestion: Mutual recognition between Israel and Saudi Arabia including full diplomatic relations, joint military efforts to defang the Iranian menace, trade and tourism (although we should be wary of wealthy Arab countries buying substantial real estate in our cities), Israel’s concurrence to a mutual defense treaty between Saudi Arabia and the United States (including lobbying Congress for approval, a such a treaty is not a done deal) and Saudi assent to the land of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.

And about the Palestinian Arabs?

Well, if Saudi Arabia assigns less than 1% of its territory – in the area of the desert that is adjacent to Iraq and Jordan – President Trump can realize his creative plan to resettle Gazans in a place where they can thrive.

Just 1% of Saudi Arabia – whose borders are not sacrosanct, were artificially drawn a century ago, and are still not finalized today – can fit almost 60 Gaza areas (1% can even contain almost four “West Banks”). Or the Saudis can draw that 1% from their southwestern coast, so Gazans can live near the beach and next to their friends, the Houthis of Yemen. Build them an oasis in the desert. Let them live.

But let us not repudiate our past, or endanger our future, on the shifting sands of Arabia. No good has ever come from renouncing our homeland. Only good can come from asserting our divine rights – call them “legitimate rights” – in the land of our forefathers to build a holy and godly society.

Rabbi Steven Pruzansky was a rabbi and attorney in the United States, now resides in Israel where he teaches Torah in Modiin, serves as Senior Research Associate at the Jerusalem Center for Applied Policy (JCAP.ngo), and is author of the two volume Chumash commentary “The Jewish Ethic of Personal Responsibility” (Gefen Publishing).