RIYADH (Dispatches) – Saudi Arabia is reportedly seeking a number of conditions to be met by the United States in return for its normalization of relations with the Zionist regime, a report has claimed.
According to the New York Times, Saudi Arabia has said that it could potentially normalize ties with the occupying regime if the U.S. provides it with security guarantees, assistance in its civilian nuclear program, and the lifting of restrictions on arms sales to the kingdom.
Those intentions and conditions were reportedly communicated to Washington by senior Saudi officials last year, when they talked to policy experts in the U.S. such as members of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy – a pro-Zionist think tank – who visited Riyadh in October.
Robert Satloff, the institute’s executive director and a member of the visiting delegation, then wrote in a report that senior Saudi leaders at the time had “bitterly noted what they believe was U.S. indifference to Saudi security concerns.”
The NYT cited two anonymous sources familiar with the matter, who said that the American negotiations are being led by the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, Brett McGurk, as well as President Joe Biden’s top aide for global energy issues, Amos Hochstein.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had reportedly initially played a direct role in the negotiations, but more lately they were taken over by the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Princess Reema bint Bandar Al Saud.
Neither the U.S. nor Saudi Arabia have yet commented on the revelation, but analysts have noted that if Biden and his administration are willing to meet those demands, U.S. Congress would likely be a major stumbling block due to the fact that many members – especially Democrats – have expressed opposition to special ties with the kingdom and have pushed to downgrade those relations.
Senator Christopher S. Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, was quoted as saying that “Our relationship with Saudi Arabia has to be a direct bilateral relationship. It should not run through Israel”. Insisting that the Saudis “have been consistently behaving badly, over and over”, he asserted that “If we’re going to enter into a relationship with the Saudis where we’re doing more significant arms sales, it should be in exchange for better behavior toward the United States, not just better behavior toward Israel”.
Another prominent obstacle to such a deal is the increasing violence by Zionist settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Al-Quds, which has led to clashes between the settlers – protected by Zionist troops – and Palestinians. Along with that, the regime’s troops have been stepping up their raids in cities and camps in the West Bank, killing dozens of Palestinians on a more frequent basis.