People familiar with the matter said Saudi Arabia is expected to announce this week that it will allow all commercial flights to and from Israel to use its airspace and allow Israel’s Muslim minority to fly charter flights directly to Saudi Arabia. Arabia to participate in the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Biden will also fly directly to Saudi Arabia from Israel, a moment he called “a small symbol of the budding relationship” between the two countries.
Senior Biden administration officials have said that full Saudi-Israeli normalization remains out of reach, although covert coordination between the two countries has expanded.
“It has changed the security situation in the Middle East,” a senior US official said of the Abraham Accords signed in late 2020. “Our job is to go deeper with the signatory countries and go wider if we can.”
The Biden administration’s focus on expanding normalization agreements between Israel and Arab countries has frustrated Palestinian officials who would prefer the U.S. focus on reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But U.S. officials say their focus on Arab-Israeli normalization is a recognition of the reality in the region: The momentum for growing Arab-Israeli ties combined with the deadlocked political conditions in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Two senior administration officials said the administration would like to see a move toward Israeli-Palestinian peace, but said the White House decided not to pursue the kind of high-level diplomacy pursued by previous administrations because it would likely fail.
“We are very careful about setting targets, particularly in the Middle East. Where administrations have gotten into deep trouble is promising the Moon and not being able to deliver and wasting time and resources and investment,” said a senior government official. “If we had started a peace process, there would be no one at the table.”
“If the parties are ready to talk, we will always be there to help, but we are not going to come out with some top-down plan and create expectations that cannot be met,” the official said.
Attempt to make incremental progress in Israeli-Palestinian relations
US officials have focused on improving living conditions for Palestinians and restoring relations with the Palestinian Authority.
“The Palestinian relationship we entered into had been completely broken. We restored relations with the Palestinians, returned funding to the Palestinians — nearly $500 million — and looked for opportunities to improve the lives of Palestinians where we could,” the senior administration official said.
Biden is expected to visit a Palestinian hospital in East Jerusalem this week and announce $100 million in new funding for the facility, US officials said. The Biden administration is also working with Israel on an aid package to bolster the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinians.
Palestinian officials are still calling on Biden to do more to reverse the Trump administration’s actions, including making good on his promise to reopen the US consulate in Jerusalem to deal with the Palestinians. That promise has gone unfulfilled amid disapproval from Israel.
Palestinian officials are also urging the US to do more to hold Israel accountable for the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May, which the US State Department said last week was “likely” to have been fired from Israeli defense positions forces during an IDF. – Raid on the West Bank.
The State Department avoided its conclusion, however, saying the forensic analysis “could not reach a definitive conclusion as to the origin of the bullet that killed” Abu Aqleh. The statement angered Abu Akleh’s family, who wrote a letter to Biden saying his administration had failed to conduct a thorough investigation into her murder.
The Israeli government was also angered by the statement, according to a senior Israeli official, because it appeared to contradict itself. On the one hand he said the analysis was inconclusive, and on the other he concluded that the bullet probably came from the IDF. “We have a problem with the way it was presented,” the official said.
Even amid this controversy, US officials are working to ensure the trip is not marred by rising tensions between Israel and the Palestinians, encouraging dialogue between the two sides that led to the first-ever call between an Israeli prime minister and its president Palestinian Authority on five years last week, during which Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas congratulated Israel’s new Prime Minister Yair Lapid on his inauguration and the two leaders expressed their wishes for peace.
“We encourage them (the Israelis and Palestinians) to have talks and we encourage them to do things that keep things calm,” a senior US official said.
State Department officials also last month asked Israel to limit all military operations and settlement activity in the West Bank, at least while Biden is in town, a second senior US official said.
The White House is particularly keen to avoid a repeat of Biden’s visit to Israel as vice president in 2010, when Israel’s Interior Ministry approved settlement expansion in east Jerusalem while Biden was in the country trying to build support for new talks with the Palestinians. Biden condemned the announcement, and White House officials were so furious at the time that they urged Biden to fly home, officials told CNN.
Asked if Israel would honor US requests not to engage in settlement announcements surrounding Biden’s trip, the senior Israeli official would only say that Israel is doing “everything possible” to make the visit a success.
“Political Earthquake”
The Biden administration’s focus on the Abraham Accords more broadly, however, also reflects recognition that a fundamental shift in regional dynamics has begun. “In a way, it’s a political earthquake,” said David Makowski, a distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy who worked on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process during the Obama administration. “I think there is a fundamental paradigm shift from which there is no going back.” Ahead of Biden’s trip, Israeli officials have made no secret of their willingness to move toward normalization with Saudi Arabia and their hope that Biden can help them make progress on that front. “Saudi Arabia, as we see it, is that it is a very important country in the Middle East and beyond. In the expansion of Israeli normalization with the Arab world, we would also like to see Saudi Arabia as part of that expansion.” , a senior Israeli official told CNN. To that end, Israel pressed Biden to travel to Saudi Arabia and mend relations with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — whom the U.S. accused in a declassified CIA report of authorizing the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — believing that Abraham’s expansion deals would be more difficult without strengthened US-Saudi relations, despite Biden’s tough domestic political situation surrounding Saudi relations. The crown prince denied involvement in the murder. When Biden travels to Jeddah on Friday, he will attend a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council plus three — Egypt, Iraq and Jordan. He will also have a bilateral meeting with Saudi King Salman and his advisers, including MBS. Some US officials told CNN they hope MBS and Biden will get some one-on-one time as part of the meeting, although the choreography will likely be led by the Saudi hosts. Biden is likely to touch on Khashoggi’s murder, US officials told CNN, and the administration hopes MBS will acknowledge some responsibility for the crime. Although oil production is not expected to be the main topic of the meeting, US officials expect the topic to come up — there is hope that the Kingdom will commit to increasing output in the weeks following the meeting. The conflict in Yemen will also be central to the discussion. US officials hope the Saudis will agree to extend the ceasefire between Yemen’s Saudi-backed government and Iran-backed Houthi rebels for another six months. While U.S. officials don’t expect the Saudis to throw any major curveballs during the events, they acknowledge it’s possible, especially since the Saudis are hosting. When National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met with MBS last year at a beachfront property along the Red Sea coast, MBS was dressed in shorts while Sullivan and other US officials wore suits. It created a strange standoff, adding another layer of pressure to an already tense meeting, officials said. But the Biden administration isn’t overly anxious about the meetings, given the extensive diplomatic groundwork already laid over the past eight months by Biden’s national security advisers. And the US has already played a central role in deepening Israeli-Arab security coordination after a key decision last year to move military coordination with Israel under the US Central Command, putting Israel under the same umbrella as Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. Earlier this year, Israel and Saudi Arabia both participated in joint naval exercises for the first time, with the US and Oman. There could be more. Biden will arrive in the region amid talks to create a regional air defense framework that would include Israel and Arab countries to warn of Iranian attacks. “There is an effort (housed) within CENTCOM to develop regional security cooperation among all actors, and one element is the integrated air defense initiative. It’s a…
