President Joe Biden’s top foreign policy advisers have been shuttling to Saudi Arabia in recent months for a mission impossible: the normalization of diplomatic relations between the state of Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The two countries have never had diplomatic relations. Until recently, most Arab states refused to have a relationship with Israel, objecting to the occupation of Palestinian land.

But the Biden administration is trying to formalize the fact that Israel and Saudi Arabia in recent years have quietly grown closer, in part due to their shared enmity for Iran’s Middle East influence and through less-public collaborations on technology and the military. And several other Arab states normalized relations with Israel under President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords in 2020. Those transactional deals induced Arab states to make peace in return for the goodies they had sought from the US and Israel. The Biden administration initially distanced itself from that Trump policy but has since redoubled efforts, with Saudi Arabia as the prize.

Israel locking in ties with Saudi Arabia, home to the two holiest mosques in Islam and with incredible petro wealth, would be a breakthrough. But it’s also a long shot, and a seemingly bizarre priority for Team Biden to put such intensive political capital into.

Any new agreement would be detached from the current internal politics of both countries. Israel’s radical far-right government has already shown it prioritizes the annexation of Palestinian land, which would run headlong into the even minor concessions to Palestinians that Biden is reportedly seeking as part of the deal. Such a realignment would be unlikely to resonate among Saudis. Israel’s normalization deals with other Arab countries have been very unpopular…Read More!