Next Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to host Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) at the White House.
Trump has been talking a lot about brokering a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, the United States’ two most valued allies in the Middle East. But for all Trump’s talk, this is something that is certainly beyond his reach.
In the future, political conditions may change, and the long-sought-after Israel-Saudi normalization agreement may become a reality. But for now, those conditions are pure fantasy.
We should also be clear-eyed about any real concern on MBS’s part for the Palestinian people. He has been prepared to sell them out before and would do so again. Five years ago, angry rebukes of the Palestinian leadership by Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, who had been the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. for over two decades, seemed to indicate that the Saudis were leaning toward the argument that Israel had often made: that Palestinians should not have a “veto” over regional agreements.
Indeed, mere weeks before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the Israeli genocide of Gaza of the past two years, it seemed that the Joe Biden administration was getting very close to closing a deal for Israel-Saudi normalization. This was almost certainly a key factor in Hamas’s decision to launch the attack when it did.
But Palestine is important in the Arab and Muslim world, and that is why MBS is not indifferent to the ongoing killing in Gaza and the escalating Israeli attacks in the West Bank. Trump will find himself unable to square the circle with MBS, and it will remain so as long as Israel, with help from the United States, continues to block every path to Palestinian freedom, or even the hope of it.
What does MBS ultimately want?
Any normalization deal with Israel is a means to an end for Saudi Arabia. Open and expanded trade with Israel is certainly desirable for Riyadh, as it seeks to diversify its economy. But normalization is not at all necessary for those Saudi ambitions.
Over the past seven years, MBS has established a Saudi foreign and regional policy that, while still in full partnership with Washington, is much less dependent on the United States than it has been for most of its history.
Unlike Israel, which relies on American taxpayer largesse for its U.S.-made weapons and other aid, Saudi Arabia buys what it wants and needs only to make the case for what it wants to purchase. Major purchases also require congressional approval, although Trump has used the power of his office to bypass this requirement by declaring a purported “national security emergency” in the past.
Trump concluded a huge arms deal during his trip to Riyadh last spring, but that agreement was essentially a letter of intent for a long list of individual weapons sales, each of which requires approval. The process is a slow one, and it is by no means certain that all of it will go through.
Now, Saudi Arabia is hoping to conclude a major deal for the F-35 jet fighter, an advanced warplane that, to date, has been licensed to only one Middle Eastern country: Israel.
MBS’s main goal on this trip is even bigger than scoring the new toys; he wants a defense pact from Washington that would extend American protection over Saudi Arabia in a manner similar to the one Trump committed to with Qatar in September.
That agreement committed the U.S. to treat an attack on Qatar like an attack on the U.S. itself, an arrangement similar to NATO that even Israel does not officially enjoy, although in practice, the U.S. has routinely come to Israel’s aid when asked.
The Saudis want to go one better than Qatar. The agreement with Doha was an executive order, which means this president or any subsequent president can simply reverse it with another one. Riyadh wants a treaty approved by the Senate, which would be much harder to cancel.
That’s not going to happen any time soon, if at all. Such an arrangement would be deeply unpopular, and it would likely face bipartisan opposition. However, because that is MBS’s opening position, it allows an executive order from Trump to appear like a compromise on his part, and it allows Trump to feel that he is doing a favor to MBS, which he can call in later.
MBS indicated recently that he is not backing off his demand that Israel agree to a new “peace process” as a precondition for normalization talks. And he can afford to take a hard line on this point.
Saudi Arabia already works with Israel, very quietly, on regional security matters and has done so, on and off, for decades. Normalization brings some benefits, but they are balanced against the potential backlash in the Arab and Muslim world for being seen as betraying Palestine. Unlike Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia has a good deal invested in its position as a Muslim leadership state, particularly owing to its custodianship of Islam’s holiest site in Mecca.
Trump’s defense deal with Qatar made it virtually inevitable that he’d have to give at least a similar deal to Saudi Arabia. With that kind of American commitment, the need for overt security cooperation with Israel, while still significant, is greatly diminished.
The primary benefit for Saudi Arabia in normalizing with Israel now is what that would do for Riyadh’s ability to win congressional approval for its arms purchases in both Washington and European capitals. And with Israel’s diminished image in the West, even that is not as valuable as it once was.
Thus, the best-case scenario for MBS on this trip will be a new defense pact and a new weapons deal—although, as we shall see, that is also complicated by the U.S. relationship with Israel. Regardless, MBS will be enjoying a warmer atmosphere in Washington than he ever could have dreamed of after the infamous murder of U.S. resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
What will Israel be watching?
While Trump, like Joe Biden before him, would like to broker a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal, it isn’t nearly important enough to really put the screws to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And for Netanyahu, there is little reason to move forward on the deal at this time.
Most Israelis would very much like to see Israel and Saudi Arabia normalize relations. Many would accept it, even if it’s conditioned on reviving a political process toward a Palestinian state. However, it’s hard to say how much of that agreement is based on the cynical belief that it would resemble the Oslo process, which was always a road to nowhere.
That makes it seem like it would be very tempting for Netanyahu, who is facing elections in October 2026. However, Netanyahu is unlikely to see it that way.
Opposition to Saudi normalization comes mostly from the right. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich became the image of that opposition when, in typically racist fashion, he said, “If Saudi Arabia tells us ‘normalization in exchange for a Palestinian state,’ friends — no thank you. Keep riding camels in the desert in Saudi Arabia, and we will continue to develop with the economy, society and state and the great things that we know how to do.”
Smotrich later apologized for the slur, but he still summed up well the view of many on the Israeli right and the Israeli center-right. It’s a minority view, but it’s a key minority for Netanyahu’s prospects for staying in office.
More to the point, reducing regional tensions is not in Netanyahu’s interest. His political fortunes are built on the fears of Israelis. With Trump enforcing a lower level of daily killing in Gaza—and with Palestinian factions being largely unable, for both physical and strategic reasons, to fight back—Netanyahu is trying to rekindle the high-level assault on Lebanon.
Put simply, Netanyahu needs conflict. And he is not going to compromise on the full denial of Palestinian rights.
Normalization is beyond U.S. control
For all of Trump’s talk about normalization, he isn’t going to press Netanyahu on this matter. Netanyahu is likely comfortable with that point.
What Netanyahu is going to be more concerned about is Israel’s “qualitative military edge,” or QME. That condition, which has been codified into U.S. law, demands that the President confirm that Israel is armed sufficiently to fight off an attack from any combination of regional actors. In other words, the U.S. is bound by its own law to ensure that Israel can militarily dominate the Middle East.
How does that square, however, with the sale of F-35 jets to Saudi Arabia on top of the huge arms deals Trump has been making with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and others? That’s where Israel and its lobbyists in the U.S. will be looking. It’s certain to be a key part of the case they make for the expanded American commitment to aid to Israel.
It is a long-standing irony, which has lasted from Trump’s first term, through the Biden years, and up to this day, that the U.S. is the party that has been the most eager for Israel-Saudi normalization. In fact, that’s a key reason it hasn’t happened. Only the U.S. is willing to go out of its way to make it happen.
Trump loves being a salesman, and so he is eager to build on the $142 billion arms sale commitment from last spring. Such sales do nothing to enhance U.S. security or even its economic interests beyond the benefit to the weapons industry.
No doubt, he will press MBS on normalization, but he won’t get any commitment beyond some vague words about the future. Riyadh has made it clear that they don’t see normalization as important enough to invite the sort of controversy in the Muslim world that it would bring to them, and there is nothing Trump can do to change that. Until Israel is ready to at least enter a sham political process like Oslo again, normalization will remain beyond Washington’s grasp. Given how low a price that really is for Israel to pay, it will happen someday, but not while Netanyahu is trying to dodge accountability for his neglect in office and his corruption.