Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a remarkable speech on Friday celebrating what could be a historic shift – for Israel in its regional relations and security, for broader Jewish-Islamic relations and also for much of the rest of the international community.
He spoke two days after meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden to discuss the prospects for normalizing Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia – a partnership that until relatively recently seemed at best a distant possibility that the Biden administration but quietly advances it.
And he also spoke following a groundbreaking television interview in which Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman confirmed to his people, ours and the watching world that we are “getting closer every day” to Saudi-Israeli peace The Crown Prince said it was “the biggest historic deal since the end of the Cold War.”
Bin Salman’s interview, in which he promised to work with “whoever rules Israel” in creating this new regional order, meant that Netanyahu, back in the UN General Assembly after a five-year hiatus, echoed Shimon Peres’ grandiose prediction of a ” New Middle East” but to do so in a speech claiming justification.
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While well-meaning supposed experts had failed to expand Israel’s circle of peace for a quarter of a century, he, insisting that the Palestinians should not and must not be an obstacle to further agreements, had signed, first during the Trump presidency and now the Abraham Accords led Israel to the brink of peace with Saudi Arabia alongside Biden.
Given the US president’s self-described “Irish optimism”, Bin Salman’s low-key bombshell interview and the recent announcement at the G20 summit of a proposed economic corridor that would connect India to Europe via Israel and Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu was in favor capable credibly claims that a “historic change” is coming for Israel, the Middle East and beyond – “a monumental change, another turning point in history,” as he put it.
The Israeli delegation (middle row) watches as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the 78th United Nations General Assembly at the UN Headquarters in New York City on September 22, 2023. (UN screenshot)
“I believe we are on the threshold of an even more dramatic breakthrough: a historic peace with Saudi Arabia,” the prime minister said. “Such a peace will go a long way toward ending the Arab-Israeli conflict. It will encourage other Arab states to normalize relations with Israel. It will improve the prospects for peace with the Palestinians. It will promote greater reconciliation between Judaism and Islam, between Jerusalem and Mecca, between the descendants of Isaac and the descendants of Ishmael.”
Of course, some aspects of how the behind-the-scenes interaction could be brought to the public were not discussed at the United Nations. For example, will it be possible to balance Israel’s need to maintain its qualitative military edge with Saudi military demands on the United States in what will remain a highly threatening region even after an Israeli-Saudi peace? And can adequate safeguards be put in place to guard against what the crown prince described as the need for Saudi nuclear weapons should Iran move to the bomb?
A Saudi diplomat listens to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2023. (Prime Minister’s Office)
But Netanyahu has laid out how the Palestinians could, in theory, become beneficiaries of the process rather than its disruptors: Israeli-Palestinian peace requires that Palestinians “stop spreading Jew-hatred and finally reconcile with the Jewish state,” he said . “By this I mean not only the existence of the Jewish state, but also the right of the Jewish people to have their own state in their historic homeland, the Land of Israel.”
Netanyahu has said these words many times. He apparently believes that Saudi Arabia, despite being the architect of the Arab Peace Initiative, which requires a Palestinian state, will not make full, independent Palestinian sovereignty a prerequisite for its agreement with Israel.
And yet, in his Fox TV interview, when asked what it would take to normalize relations with Israel, bin Salman replied: “For us, the Palestinian issue is very important.” We have to solve that part. We have good negotiations [that] continue until now. We’ll have to see where it goes.”
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attends the APEC leader’s informal dialogue with guests during the APEC Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit on November 18, 2022 in Bangkok, Thailand. (Athit Perawongmetha/Pool photo via AP)
Of course, there was apparently no mention in Netanyahu’s speech of how the prime minister believes he can sign an agreement that “solves” the Palestinian issue and yet maintain a governing coalition that is largely hostile to any substantive concessions to the Palestinians.
The short answer is that he couldn’t. The longer answer is that the transformative promise he described from the UN podium has the potential to reshape Israel’s political direction as well as its geostrategic reality.
Also conspicuously, but less self-evidently, left unmentioned in Netanyahu’s address was any reference to the fact that, in his nine months in power, he and his coalition have sparked unprecedented internal division in Israel by attempting to push legislation through parliament that would would castrate the Israeli The justice system would be destroyed, the ruling majority would be given almost unlimited power and the way would be cleared for a series of radical right-wing and ultra-Orthodox policies and laws.
Israeli-led demonstrators demonstrate against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in front of the UN headquarters in New York City, September 22, 2023. (Luke Tress/Times of Israel)
In his brief public comments alongside Biden, Netanyahu managed the boring promise that “Israel’s commitment to democracy” would never change – even as he continued to insist elsewhere that he would legislate to change the way to reshape how Israel chooses its judges.
During Friday’s 25-minute address, as thousands demonstrated outside against the threat he and his coalition pose to Israel’s internal freedoms, the prime minister devoted long passages to the rise of artificial intelligence but found no time for even the vaguest affirmation of Israeli democracy.
In other words, there was certainly no promise that the Israel he sought to lead toward unprecedented regional reconciliation would be the Israel of rights and freedoms, equality and tolerant Judaism as envisioned in the Declaration of Independence – an Israel , that is, being at peace with yourself.