RIYADH (Dispatches) – Saudi Arabia has effectively obstructed a plan to allow Zionist foreign minister Eli Cohen to attend a UN conference in the kingdom, after Riyadh would not “seriously discuss” Cohen’s security detail, according to an Axios report on Monday citing three Zionist regime officials.
Cohen was set to attend a UN World Tourism Organization conference in the kingdom this week, a trip that would have marked the first public visit by a Zionist regime minister to Saudi Arabia.
The Israeli officials told Axios that Saudi Arabia had told the UN agency that Cohen could attend the conference. But when it was time to arrange his security detail, the newspaper reported that it “became clear that the Saudis weren’t going to have a serious discussion”, and Cohen took the trip off his agenda.
The report underlines the uphill battle the occupying regime faces as it pushes Saudi Arabia to normalize ties.
Middle East Eye reached out to the Saudi embassy in Washington and the UN World Tourism Organization for comment on this report but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
The occupying regime has used cultural events as a first step to deepen ties with its Arab neighbors in the past. The occupying regime’s “culture minister” visited Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in 2018 and the regime’s men’s basketball team competed in Abu Dhabi a year before the UAE established official relations with the regime.
The UN event is taking place in the Saudi village of al-Ula, which Riyadh is working to promote as a tourism hub.
Kfar Kama, a Circassian village in the Israeli-occupied territories, was among those chosen by the UN as a top tourism village in 2022. Members of Muslim Circassian community from the occupied territories were also slated to attend the event, but Saudi Arabia didn’t respond in time to their visa requests, according to the Israeli public broadcaster, Kan.
In 2020, the occupying regime signed U.S.-brokered normalization deals with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, in what became known as the Abraham Accords.
The Zionist regime and Saudi Arabia do not have official diplomatic relations, but Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met secretly with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the kingdom in 2020, according to several Israeli media reports at the time.
Netanyahu, who oversaw the 2020 Abraham Accords, has made expanding the agreements to Saudi Arabia a top foreign policy goal.