There’s much talk now, in the wake of other Gulf Arab breakthroughs, that Saudi Arabia is being heavily courted to join the normalization/peace movement regarding Israel.
While shalom/salaam is good, it’s important to realize that, as with another alleged soon-to-be Arab or Arabized nation–the Sudan–Saudi Arabia comes into this with its own severe baggage https://ekurd.net/what-arab-nation-next-israel-2020-09-29. And yes–it would be nice for Israel to be able to cut travel time and save fuel by being able to fly over Saudi air space…etc..
For starters, however, let’s just say that the much-touted, decades old Saudi peace (of the grave) plan must be dropped like a nuked potato.
As a reminder, back when he was still a senator, a Times Of London story on November 16th, 2008, reported that President-elect Obama stated that Israel would be crazy (exact words) not to accept the resurrected, alleged Saudi “Peace Plan.”
A bit earlier, a stop along President George W. Bush’s Middle East trip–after further pressuring Jews to accept his State Department’s vision of Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas’s latter day terrorist Arafatians as being the good cops as opposed to simply more honest Hamas bad cops–took President Bush to the sands of the Saudis and other Arabian Peninsula nations.
A photo was published worldwide of the President wielding a sword along with Bahraini hosts, and Dubya brought along a New Year’s present — tens of billions of dollars in military aid…
Hey, if we don’t sell it to them, the Brits, Germans, French, and so forth certainly will. So goes the argument…And with Bahrain now opening doors to Israel, perhaps it wasn’t a bad decision after all.