The latest inkling of change came from the most famous Saudi ambassador to the United States in a series of heavily promoted television interviews and on his new, specially dedicated website. Formalizing Saudi-Israeli relations would help each country achieve a number of strategic and military goals.
But if and when Saudi Arabia and Israel do establish official relations, the results will not necessarily be as transformative as any party proclaims. In fact, the transformations may not work in their favor. Here are six touted goals that proponents of the deal claim it would achieve—in reality, the odds that such lofty goals would be reached seem quite long. First, normalization would not produce peace. Over the past decade, the majority of Arab countries including Saudi Arabia have witnessed protests against oppressive and corrupt governance.
The same has been true in Israel and Palestine. Many of these protests have been followed by state violence, and in some cases civil wars and foreign interventions, but the deep-seated inequities that have driven the protests have never been addressed, with the relative exception of Tunisia.
Arab regimes need U. Despite the veneer of peace offered by the recent normalization treaties, Saudi Arabia is expecting both the United States and Israel to upgrade their defense and security cooperation and for Washington to pay less attention to the end use of U. However, both Israel and Saudi Arabia have highly problematic records regarding the treatment of civilians in this kind of warfare.
Both have an interest in keeping the United States an active regional military hegemon, and as a result, they want to avoid, or at least hedge against, a U. Saudi Arabia and Israel want to see the United States use its military might to defeat, not just contain, the threat from Iran. They both actively push for an all-encompassing and hard-to-get U. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States all want Washington to remain actively invested in the fight against terrorism in the Middle East.
This expansion of the war on terrorism complicates the U. Meanwhile, both Israel and Saudi Arabia are expanding their relations with U. So far, this cooperation is limited and overwhelmingly economic. However, such collaboration is not always transparent and has the potential to spill over into larger intelligence and military cooperation.
By encouraging regional partners to normalize relations, Washington hopes to redistribute its defense burden among a more integrated defense network of regional allies. But neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia, even with support from the United Arab Emirates, can lead the kind of regional security framework that the United States has in mind. In addition to deeply rooted intraregional mistrust and competition, most countries disagree with the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel on how to deal with Iran.
Third, there is no credible proof that Saudi citizens are on board. A new Saudi narrative portrays normalization with Israel as part of a new, moderate Saudi Arabia that is taking shape. Speaking of history , the Jews should bear in mind that Cyrus the Great liberated the "Captives in Babylon," which is also recorded in the Bible. In a long period of more than 2, years, there were no major conflict between the Persian and Jewish peoples.
In that case, why does Israel hate Iran so much? Because Iran has never recognized the legitimacy of the state of Israel. It can be said that the hostility of Iran to Israel has caused Israel's hatred of Iran. The leading thought of the Islamic Revolution in Iran comes from Islam. Since it was an "Islamic" revolution, the Iranian revolutionaries needed to respond to the major concerns of the Islamic world in the Middle East at that time.
In this way, Palestine became the focus of Iran's Islamic revolutionary leaders. The new Iranian regime, like many Arab countries, refused to recognize Israel as an independent and legal country. Obviously, Iran hates Israel because of Palestine.
But Palestine today is different from Palestine 40 years ago. Is this really appropriate? Iran should seriously consider the following policy toward Israel. But it was the latter camp that had the upper hand during the rule of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who consolidated his power after a , U. Relations were far-ranging, but to a large extent given a low profile.
Iran sold Israel oil when none of the other oil-rich states in the region would do so. It also became a major importer of Israeli goods and services. Beginning of the end. Just as the relationship flowered in response to larger political conditions, it also came to an end because of larger geopolitical changes. The death of Nasser in and the ascension of Anwar Sadat led to a warming of relations between Egypt and Iran.
Furthermore, the signing of an accord between Iran and Iraq in — in which Iran agreed to stop arming Kurdish-Iraqi separatists — led to a temporary lessening of hostility between those implacable enemies.
All the while, Islamic clerics in Iran kept up a stream of negative indoctrination against Israel. For example, in an article for Iranica Online, the Israeli scholar Prof. When the shah was overthrown in a popular uprising in , and his authoritarian secular regime was replaced by a no-less-oppressive Islamic one, the relationship with Israel was one of the first things to go.
Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in France on February 1, , and less than three weeks later — on February 18 — he severed relations with Israel. For Israel, reluctant to acknowledge that Iran no longer loved it, the opportunity to arm the Islamic state against Iraq was irresistible. Although it was under Netanyahu that the presumed Iranian plan to develop nuclear weapons emerged as a prime military concern, it was predecessors Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres who really began to drum into the Israeli public, and also internationally, the danger that Iran supposedly constituted — not just to Israel, but also to the new international order that was to follow the fall of the USSR.
The mutual hostility, however, extends far beyond rhetoric.
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