RIYADH (Dispatches) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s top adviser Brett McGurk is in Riyadh to discuss a possible normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and the occupying regime, according to a U.S. news portal.
McGurk’s talks with Saudi officials “will focus on the administration’s efforts to reach a normalization agreement between Israel and the kingdom as well as other issues,” Axios reported.
The U.S. adviser is expected to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during his visit.
There was no comment from the Saudi authorities on the report.
McGurk’s visit comes a few days after U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken visited Saudi Arabia, where he met with several Saudi officials, including bin Salman.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud said at a joint press conference with Blinken that “without finding a pathway to peace for the Palestinian people…any normalization will have limited benefits.”
Saudi Arabia does not have diplomatic relations with the Zionist regime and opposes normalization with Tel Aviv until ending the decades-long occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Six Arab countries have diplomatic ties with the occupying regime starting with Egypt in 1979, Jordan in 1994, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan in 2020.
Saudi Arabia cautiously welcomed the U.S.-brokered normalization deals between the Zionist regime and the Arab states in 2020.
The oil-rich kingdom itself, however, has been expected to jump on the bandwagon since then, as the two sides have seen growing contacts and de-facto rapprochement in recent years, despite claims that it is committed to the 2002 so-called Arab Peace Initiative, which conditions normalizing ties with the regime on the establishment of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
The Riyadh regime in November 2020 granted permission for Zionist regime airlines to use its airspace, hours before the first Israeli flight to the UAE was set to take off.
Palestinian leaders, activists and ordinary people have repeatedly rejected Arab-Zionist normalization deals as “a stab in the back of the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian people.”