This September we are commemorating yet again another anniversary since the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Those of us who have been professionally involved in the study of the Middle East were shocked to learn at the time that the vast majority of the terrorists who flew hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon back then did not come from Lebanon, Libya, or Syria, but rather from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which was never associated with international terrorism.
Across the world, many tried to understand the source of the rage that motivated the operation. Looking into this question at the time, I discovered that in Saudi Arabia there were huge multinational charities propagating a movement representing an extreme form of Islam, known in the West by the name of its 18th-century founder, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab. There was al-Haramain, the International Islamic Relief Organization and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. The Wahhabi charities were moving enormous sums of funding to jihadist organizations around the world.
We in Israel had a particular interest in what they were doing, since one of their recipients was Hamas, a Palestinian group that advocated suicide bombings which were hitting our major cities. During 2000, Hamas helped launch the second Intifada which brought about a sharp escalation in these attacks. I wrote a New York Times bestseller, Hatred’s Kingdom, which presented the evidence from captured documents.
Fast forward to 2023. How much Saudi money is now going to Hamas? It appears that Saudi Arabia is not giving a dime to any of the terrorist organizations. Today the main countries funding Hamas are the Islamic Republic of Iran and Qatar.
What about the propagation of extremist ideologies? Back in 2001, the Muslim World League, headquartered in Mecca, was spreading the ideology that supported a new wave of global terror. Its membership included refugees from Arab states who had been part of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yet today the same Muslim World League has issued the Charter of Mecca in 2019 based on inter-religious tolerance rather than jihad. A year later its secretary-general took a delegation to Auschwitz. We are clearly in a different world.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
SINCE MOHAMMED bin Salman (MBS) became Crown Prince in 2017, important reforms have reshaped key elements of Saudi Arabia. In the past, the religious police were harassing Saudi citizens and foreigners.
In 2020, however, MBS curbed their powers. In the meantime, he has launched a new city called “Neom” near the Gulf of Aqaba, requiring international cooperation. He has set the stage for a new Saudi Arabia, which can take a leadership role in the Middle East and beyond.
What is required in the region is a new infrastructure of relations. After the Second World War, the US wanted to withdraw its troops, but the Soviet Union kept its armored forces ready in Germany and Czechoslovakia.
The Western powers created NATO, bringing together former enemies, in order to address the new threat to them all. Today our collective challenge is Iran and its proxies, which seek to reestablish Persian power in the framework of a renewed Safavid Empire.
That would bring the Iranian armed forces into most of Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, and to large parts of Syria. Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have been in Lebanon since 1982 and stand to take over that country today as its economy collapses. Tehran is claiming much of the Arabian Gulf, as its sovereign territory, that is beyond the case of Bahrain with its Shi’ite majority.
Iran is also active across Africa. It uses Hezbollah to train Arabic-speaking militias. It employed its embassy in Algiers to reach out to the Polisario in the Western Sahara, and arm them to fight Morocco.
Iran has a clearly expansionist agenda. The West’s attitude to Iran has been disturbing.
The last time it made a nuclear deal with Tehran in 2015 (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA), it removed sanctions, leading to massive funds flowing to the Iranian treasury and then to its militia forces around the Middle East. This must not happen a second time.
The way forward is for like-minded Saudis and Israelis to draw together. Governments will follow.
We need to create a consensus for the security of our nations. Saudi diplomatic rhetoric is changing. The Saudi Foreign Minister just stated that “normalization is in the interest of the region”
The Saudi ambassador in Washington has introduced new terminology stating that Saudi Arabia wants integration with Israel. These expressions cannot be ignored.
THE TIME for action is now. It cannot be delayed while we wait for political developments that might take years to reach fruition. Even private citizens can bring about the needed changes if they can reach out to visionary leaders on both sides.
This is not about geopolitics alone. Historically, Jews and Muslims have been cousins who surmounted their differences and reached a common language that brought us together. In the Middle Ages, Jewish religious scholars like Maimonides wrote in Judeo-Arabic.
Our religions are rooted in common concepts, especially the One-ness of God, which is called Tawhid in Arabic. Our concept has been enshrined in the Biblical verse: “Hear O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”
We have both protected our peoples from the Byzantines, the Crusaders, and others who sought to obliterate both our civilizations. We overcame what separated us and we survived.
While we have security challenges that bring us together today, we should leave future generations with a new basis of cooperation and hope that keeps our peoples as one in an alliance of civilizations.
Our region gave birth to our religions and to the nations that today live with us. We must embrace that history again and in doing so set the stage for a very different Middle East.
Let us remember that if any diplomatic process goes forward, it is likely that the whole question of what happened to Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 will likely be raised in the US.
Since that time, the US has led a coalition of states against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Europe has faced an acute shortage of gas which it previously imported from Russia.
These geostrategic realities have forced the US to moderate its attitude to the Khashoggi question and to the possible role of MBS in ordering his removal. (It was notable that in 2022, the Biden administration provided a legal opinion that MBS had immunity in the whole Khashoggi incident.)
Since that time another factor has arisen, namely the reproachment between Saudi Arabia and Iran. It is doubtful that Riyadh is prepared to replace its decades-old alliance with the US with an alternative connection with Iran.
To best understand the underlying motivation for this move it is critical to recall the escalating Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, including its oil infrastructure in 2019. The US did not respond at the time to these actions in which Iran was complicit.
Saudi Arabia sought to diversify its alliances in response, but it could not depend on Tehran to provide an umbrella against Houthi initiatives that ultimately were directly backed by Iran in the first place.
Right now one of the complications which Saudi Arabia faces could come from the internal struggle inside of Israel. It is imperative that Israel finds a way to gain control of the chaos that has plagued the West Bank whether it came from the Palestinian organizations or from Jewish groups at this time.
There is a historical opportunity emerging which must not be missed and it is determining the direction Saudi Arabia is taking. Israel needs to show that it understands where Saudi Arabia is heading and how both countries can become partners in creating a different Middle East.
The writer, a former senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations and director-general of the Foreign Ministry.