President Trump has advertised the Abraham agreements of 2020 which established formal links between Israel and four Arab countries as one of the major foreign policy results of his first term.
Now he is pursuing his longtime goal to convince Saudi Arabia to join the agreements, but a serious setback may have just been distributed. Mr. Trump’s proposal to transfer all and two million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and therefore reconstruct the enclave while the “Riviera del Middle East” has antagonized some of the same people he needs to seal the agreement.
Gaza’s idea was quickly rejected by the Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia. The Golfo power plant released a statement before dawn immediately after Trump float the proposal on Tuesday evening together with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by Israel in Washington.
The Kingdom clarified that it is awaiting its request that a Palestinian state is established before normalizing relations with Israel. The preliminary, on which the Saudis insisted on the past year, is “not negotiable and not subject to compromises,” said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a note Wednesday.
The declaration directly contradicted Mr. Trump, who had just told journalists to Washington that Saudi Arabia had dropped the assumption. A Saudi Saudi Royal said that what the American leader was proposing would be equivalent to Gaza’s “ethnic cleaning”.
By proposing to “clean up” Gaza, Trump gained little but suspicious and anger in the Arab countries. The efforts of the American administration to soften the position, with the secretary of state Marco Rubio who suggests that Gazas would be transferred only temporarily, have done little to harass them.
The question of the Palestinian state is at the center of the dispute on the proposal of Gaza by Mr. Trump. For many Arabs, moving the Palestinians is an anathema because it would destroy their hopes in an independent state.
Egypt and Jordan, the countries that Trump has suggested could be persuaded to take Gazens, remained publicly unhend that would never have accepted a mass outlet of the Palestinians. Officials, journalists and analysts of both countries said that history spoke on its own: when the Palestinians were forced by their homes, they were not authorized.
From the war to Gaza, both countries have taken Palestinians who need medical care. Egypt has accepted at least 100,000 medical evacuated and others who fled from the nearby Encyclist. Jordan, most of whose population is of Palestinian origin, is dealing with dozens of wounded by Gaza.
But participating in any forced or permanent displacement of Palestinians of Gaza would be “morally and legally horrible”, said Abdel Monem Sied Aly, a political analyst Egyptian and a pro-government publishing.
Given the broad support of the Saudi population for the Palestinians, it would be difficult for the government to accept any agreement that does not face their aspirations for the state. The indignation of the public in the kingdom for the war, and now on the proposal of Mr. Trump to empty Gaza, has complicated the prospects of an agreement with Israel who would have already been difficult to achieve.
Before Mr. Trump came into office for his second term, there was a cause for a modest optimism that the Saudi-Israeli normalization could go on. A ceased the fire between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas was reached on the eve of the inauguration of Mr. Trump. And for years the new American president has favored a good employment relationship with the hereditary prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto sovereign of Saudi Arabia.
But now, some strains seem to emerge in that relationship.
Prince Turki Al-Faisal, a former head of the Saudi Arabia spy and former ambassador to the United States, told the CNN on Wednesday that Mr. Trump “will get an ear from the leadership here” not only on the lack of wisdom in what he is proposing but Even the injustice of “ethnic cleaning”.
As to underline his point, he wore a Palestinian black and white kaffiyeh instead of his traditional white headdress.
The four Arab governments that signed the Abraham agreements – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrein, Morocco and Sudan – did it despite the criticisms that were renouncing what had been for decades the Arab prerequisite for any link with Israel , the establishment of a Palestinian state.
When the Bahrein and the Emirates became the first two nations to sign the agreements, the president of the Palestinian authority, Mahmoud Abbas, called him “a stabbing in the back of the Palestinian people”. Mr. Abbas governs parts of the Israeli employed West Bank.
After 15 months of war in Gaza, it is unlikely that the public audiences outraged by accepting any similar compromises and the Israeli government led by Mr. Netanyahu firmly opposes the Palestinian state.
“If normalization with Saudi Arabia depends on the progress towards a Palestinian state even of a millimeter, it will not happen. Period “, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was mentioned on the basis of the radio of the Israeli army last month.
The Saudis eliminated the historical signature of the Abraham agreements, but when the agreement has expanded to include Morocco and Sudan, the Saudi hereditary prince called Israel a “potential allied” in an interview of 2022 with the Atlantic .
In September 2023, the hereditary prince became the first leader of the kingdom to openly discuss the possibility of establishing relations with Israel in exchange for a defense pact with the United States and helping to develop a civil nuclear program. He did not mention the Palestinian state as a condition.
In an interview with Fox News at that time, the hereditary prince said that such an agreement would require “a good life for the Palestinians”. The indications then indicated the possibility that even Saudi Arabia could be willing to reduce its insistence on a Palestinian state before forging links with Israel.
Then came the attack led by Hamas to Israel on October 7, 2023, who killed about 1,200 people. The 15 -month Israeli military campaign he followed killed over 46,000 people in Gaza, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and fighters. The war devastated the territory densely populated and depleted.
From the war, the Saudi government has moved its tone, saying that the region must be on an irreversible path towards the state road for the Palestinians.
“We have some red lines,” said Prince Khalid Bin Bandar, the Saudi ambassador in the United Kingdom, at the end of last month. “And for us end the last 75 years of pain and suffering caused by a problem must include a Palestinian state.”
It is possible that both Mr. Trump and the Saudi leadership are throwing the maximum positions as starting points in a negotiation and will move at a certain point to reach a compromise.
Many people in the four countries who have normalized the ties to Israel have been horrified by the war in Gaza and have publicly protested the agreement. While the freedom of association and assembly remain strongly limited in Bahrain, the government has allowed protests.
Although Egypt and Jordan have had peace treaties with the Israelis for decades, their audiences never warmed up in Israel and ties were seriously tied by the war.
Egyptian officials reported foreign diplomats in Cairo this week that their refusal of Gaza’s displacement was unwavering. In public, they reiterated that Egypt had focused on putting the agreement of the fire and the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians there in force.
Egypt “says his complete refusal of any proposal or concept aimed at eliminating the Palestinian cause through the uprooting or displacement of their historical homeland and its kidnapping, both on a temporary and permanent basis”, said the Egyptian Foreign Ministry in a declaration on Thursday.
Political analysts close to governments in Egypt and Jordan suggested that the leaders of the two countries would try to convince Mr. Trump to accept an alternative plan for the healing of Gaza involving aid and assistance from their countries like Gaza.
“Egypt and Jordan have been historically engaged in the Palestinian cause and must be an integral part of any solution,” said Khaled Okasha, director of the Egyptian center for thoughts and strategic studies, a Think Tank aligned with the government. “But not what Trump is suggesting.”
Fatima Abdulkarianim Reports contributed by Ramallah, in West Bank.