RIYADH (Dispatches) – Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, says he sees the Zionist regime as a “potential ally” with shared interests, not an enemy.
“We don’t look at Israel as an enemy,” the crown prince said during an interview with The Atlantic.
“We look to them as a potential ally, with many interests that we can pursue together. But we have to solve some issues before we get to that,” the prince added.
The statement marked a shift from the official Saudi line, which has long held that the Zionist regime and Saudi Arabia could establish relations once it resolves its conflict with the Palestinians, but perhaps not a friendship.
Yet despite the absence of official ties, Saudi Arabia agreed in 2020 to allow Zionist-UAE flights to cross its territory.
Earlier this year, a high-ranking official at the Zionist regime’s ministry of foreign affairs said Tel Aviv is working clandestinely towards normalization of diplomatic relations with Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.
“These are the two countries we want to reach an agreement with, but it is a slow process that takes a lot of time and effort. We hope for the best,” the unnamed official noted at a media briefing in early January.
Riyadh has taken a number of steps recently toward normalizing relations with the occupying regime.
On January 6, an independent nongovernmental organization advocating human rights in Saudi Arabia said the Riyadh regime is making use of arbitrary arrest to silence vociferous opponents of normalization of diplomatic relations between the Saudi and Zionist regimes.
The London-based rights group ALQST said Saudi officials have kept writer and researcher Abdullah al-Yahya behind bars since December 24 last year, after he criticized normalization with the Zionist regime in a series of posts published on Twitter.

‘I Don’t Care If Biden
Misunderstood Me

Bin Salman also said he doesn’t care if U.S. President Joe Biden misunderstood things about him in an interview in The Atlantic published on Thursday.
The de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia also warned the U.S. not to interfere in the country’s internal affairs.
“We don’t have the right to lecture you in America,” he said. “The same goes the other way.”
When asked whether Biden misunderstood things about him, he said “simply, I do not care”.
It is up to Biden “to think about the interests of America”, he added, suggesting that if the American president wanted to alienate the ruling monarchy then he should “go for it”.
The two allies have long enjoyed close ties.
But since becoming president Biden has taken a tougher stance on the crown prince, who the U.S. said is responsible for the murder of dissident Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Biden has suggested in the past that he would only deal with King Salman - and forgo the young prince.
The Atlantic article, which was written after three years of travel to Saudi Arabia and several meetings with MBS and some of his critics and supports, gives a glimpse of the prince’s views on the Khashaoggi murder, the Saudi relationship with the U.S., China, Qatar’s emir, and more.