The United States has been working hard toward a diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But the aggressive plans on expanding the Israeli settlements into the West Bank, as championed by the hardliner and far-right Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich and others, has created an environment that is making the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab world an impossible goal to achieve.
While general perception in the west is that Arab leaders are autocratic and can make decisions as they wish, the reality is that many such decisions would require public support or at least minimum resistance from the population. In this case, it would be political suicide for Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) to go along with the normalization of relations with Israel while the latter continues to encroach into the Palestinian territory. No Arab leader would survive such move, no matter how autocratic his rule. Although the conservative Wahabis movement in Saudi Arabia has been clearly weakened by MBS to allow him to execute on his Vision2030, the movement’s vast network and members remain active and can create major problems for MBS if such rapprochement takes place now.
This is the same thing in Morocco. The sympathies toward the Palestinians that the Moroccan people have are so strong that King Mohammed the 6th must have felt relieved when the US government reportedly called for the postponement of a summit that would have brought Israel and the four Arab countries of the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Egypt together in Morocco to celebrate their newfound friendship. Holding such a summit at this moment in time, characterized by the rise of the far-right movement in Israel, would have been a huge headache for the Moroccan King and his foreign minister, a staunch proponent of the rapprochement with Israel. While the Moroccan monarchy has succeeded so far in considerably weakening the Islamist political party PJD, bringing Israel front-and-center while the fate of the Palestinian people remains compromised, would have given more ammunition to the grassroots of the Islamist movement in Morocco. The optics of such a summit, which by the way also carries the controversial name of the Negev Summit, would have been a big problem for the Moroccan monarchy.
So, the latest news is that the US reportedly called for a further postponement of the Negev summit because apparently Washington is struggling to make sense of the new Israeli settlement plans in the West Bank. Israel wants to build more than 4,500 housing units in the occupied West Bank, which would have the effect of displacing the local Palestinian inhabitants and replacing them with potentially tens of thousands of new settlers. The move is, according to the US government, in contradiction to the commitment Israel made in Aqaba in Jordan and Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt – and its pledge to conduct a dialogue aimed at preventing escalation.
For the US, such decision adds another degree of concern on how it is perceived in the Arab world, where China and Russia continue to make major inroads there, politically, economically and militarily. The apparent distancing of Saudi Arabia from the US is a major concern in Washington who sees the Israel aggressive campaign of territorial expansion as another problem that would further alienate its Arab allies, and give more opportunity for Russia and China to make further inroads. And so the US strong statement against the new settlements may be seen by Washington as a new opportunity to reengage with the Arab world by having a firm stance against the settlements and by postponing the Negev Summit. It is also likely that Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations may have pleaded with the US to intervene before Arab rulers face domestic backlash for attempting a rapprochement with Israel.
Various US and international media outlets, including Axios, suggest that the Moroccans were the ones to ask the US for a postponement, in particular since the summit was initially scheduled to take place on June 25, 2023, around the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. Then the Summit was rescheduled in July 2023, but now it has been indefinitely put on pause.
