An anonymous Saudi Arabian official told Al-Arabiya on Tuesday that the only possible route for Saudi to establish ties with Israel is through the establishment of Palestinian statehood.
“We don’t have a partner on the other side that is helping us to make this step,” the official said while claiming that normalization with Israel was still possible but more difficult since October 7. “But there must be an irreversible, irrevocable” establishment of a Palestinian state, the official asserted.
Pushing for Palestinian statehood
The United States is engaged in ongoing “planning processes” on how best to advance the establishment of a Palestinian state, US State Department spokesperson Mathew Miller said in January.
“Yes, we are actively pursuing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with real security guarantees for Israel,” Miller told reporters in Washington on Wednesday. "We support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, and we do a lot of work in the government to think about how to bring it about.”
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken also pushed Israel for recognition of a Palestinian state in January, claiming that it would be the best way to marginalize Iran.
“If you build that integration, if you bring Israel in, if you make the necessary commitments to security, and you move down the path to a Palestinian state, that’s the single best way to isolate, to marginalize Iran and the proxies,” Blinken said.
Do Palestinians want a two-state solution?
A poll conducted by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that only 28% of Palestinians support a two-state solution, and 70% oppose it, the Jerusalem Post reported in June 2023.
A November poll conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development found that 74.7% of Palestinians supported the existence of only a singular Palestinian state.
The support for a single Palestinian state was more commonly held by Palestinians living in the West Bank (77.7%) than Palestinians living in Gaza (70.4%.)
A total of 17.2% of respondents said they supported a two-state solution, with Palestinians in Gaza (22.7%) supporting this solution to a greater extent than Palestinians living in the West Bank (13.3%.)
Only 5.4% of respondents supported a “one-state for two peoples” solution.
Tovah Lazaroff and Barak Ravid contributed to this report.