Opinion - Why Israel Wanted America to Start a War With Saudi Arabia

Opinion | Why Israel Wanted America to Start a War With Saudi Arabia Under-the-radar ties with Riyadh are intensifying, but it wasn’t so long ago that Israel categorically refused to explore peace with Saudi Arabia, and even tried to provoke the U.S. into attacking the kingdom Azriel BermantApr. 14, 2022 3:07 PM. https://www.haaretz.com/1.10742127

In August 2020, Israel announced that it had reached historic peace deals with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain that would become known as the Abraham Accords. At the end of March, Israel hosted a summit in the Negev desert featuring the foreign ministers of the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt and Morocco. Over recent years, formal and informal ties between Israelis and Saudis have also intensified, amid the shared perception of an acute threat from Iran.

Coverage of the Abraham Accords has tended to focus on the change in the attitudes of the Gulf states, yet there has been surprisingly little scrutiny of the change in Israel’s perception of Saudi Arabia.

Indeed, 40 years ago, Israel viewed Riyadh as an implacable enemy of the State of Israel, much as Tehran is today. On the surface, this is extraordinary given that back in August 1981, Saudi Crown Prince Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud unveiled a peace initiative that appeared to offer recognition of the Jewish state.

Israel responded by launching an inflammatory campaign against the regime in Riyadh and came close to igniting a war with Saudi Arabia in November that year.

At the time, Saudi Arabia was an ally of the U.S. against Moscow: In order to block Soviet influence in the region, President Reagan sought closer strategic ties with the Saudis. The Americans viewed Saudi Arabia as the most influential of the moderate Arab states and were determined to bring Riyadh into the peace process.

Israel turned its back on this opportunity for potential cooperation with the Saudis.

Recently declassified papers in Israel and the United States reveal that Israel was determined to thwart closer relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Israel’s prime minister Menachem Begin lashed out at the Reagan administration, and tensions between the two countries escalated to a full-blown crisis by November 1981.

How did relations between Israel and its closest ally unravel so dramatically, and why was Israel so categorically opposed to peace with Saudi Arabia?

On 7 August 1981, the Saudi Crown Prince had unexpectedly announced an eight-point program for solving the Arab-Israeli conflict. The seventh point of the Fahd Plan, as it became known, appeared to implicitly recognize the State of Israel, with the clause that "all states in the region should be able to live in peace."

Until the Fahd initiative, Egypt was the only Arab country to recognize Israel. The Saudis believed that the diplomatic gambit would win it new friends in Washington. Reagan declared that "it was the first time they [Saudi Arabia] had recognized Israel as a nation and it is a beginning point for negotiations." Even U.S. Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, consistently supportive of Israel’s policies, believed that the seventh clause of the Fahd Plan was significant.

The Reagan administration had already angered Israel with its sale of AWACS (airborne warning and control systems) to Saudi Arabia in 1981. Israel could not countenance the notion of the United States establishing a close strategic relationship with the Saudis which it saw as a major threat to the U.S.-Israel special relationship.

The State Department was convinced that the Begin government was nurturing a persecution complex: "However repellent the plan is to the Israelis, there is a growing fear in Israel that Saudi Arabia will be Israel’s greatest threat as long as its oil gives it a hold on the U.S. Israelis have become convinced that the Saudis are out to destroy Israel…Even were Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel, however, the belief is widespread that recognition would be merely a ploy to enable the Saudis to achieve their objective - the elimination of Israel in stages."

Yet it was a priority for the United States to fend off an imminent Soviet threat to Gulf stability following the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, both in 1979. Saudi Arabia was viewed as a key player in repelling the Soviet threat in the region because of its geopolitical position, its oil and its strong anticommunism.

The contrast with the accommodating Saudi attitude towards Moscow today, its non-committal stance towards the Western alliance and its muscle-flexing towards Washington in the midst of Putin’s war on Ukraine could not be greater.

Begin wrote to President Reagan on 30 October to tell him that he was "deeply troubled" by the U.S. support of the Saudi initiative. The Israeli leader insisted that the Saudis were seeking "the ultimate liquidation" of the Jewish State.

Israel despatched a bipartisan delegation to the United States to head off the support for Saudi Arabia’s diplomacy. One of the strongest opponents of the Fahd Plan was Labour opposition lawmaker Chaim Herzog, who told Haig: "We are worried by the emphasis you are placing on Saudi Arabia, at Egypt’s expense. We don’t believe in the stability of the Saudi regime. We remember [what happened to] Iran."

The Likud government’s suspicions of Saudi intentions were not unreasonable. Concerns over the stability of the Saudi regime would have been reinforced by the Mecca mosque siege just two years earlier which posed a direct threat to the Saudi monarchy. In August 1980, Fahd had called for a "jihad" against Israel, following the Knesset law’s reaffirmation of a united Jerusalem as its "eternal capital." The Saudi government was notorious for its promotion of antisemitism in the Arab world and beyond, even funding Arabic translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Yet it was hawkish Israeli lawmaker Moshe Arens who conceded during the U.S. tour that the Fahd Plan was "a step ahead."

Arens later claimed that he was quoted out of context, yet he would also criticize Israel’s hostile public diplomacy shortly afterwards when he appeared before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee:

"A hasbara campaign that ignores the facts is not a hasbara campaign…It is true that the Saudis have changed their tactics. You cannot claim that [the Fahd plan] is synonymous with jihad."

Britain’s ambassador to Israel, Patrick Moberly, painted a grim picture of the deteriorating U.S.-Israel relationship: "Haig’s admission of a crisis in U.S./Israeli relations is revealing and suggests even greater strains than have been apparent on the surface. The real Israeli nightmare is that the United States is now determined to make Saudi Arabia an active partner in the formulation of American Middle East policy."

By November 1981, Britain’s ambassador to Washington, Neville Henderson, had cabled London to report that Haig had spoken of "paranoia" in Israel and "evidently believes the Israelis may be about to go over the edge and wants to do everything possible to stop them."

On 9 November, six Israeli aircraft overflew Saudi airspace. The Saudis placed their missile systems on a high state of alert. One U.S. official told Henderson that the Israeli incursions were an attempt to undermine U.S.-Saudi relations.

The U.S. ambassador in Saudi Arabia, Richard Murphy believed that "the Israelis simply wanted to give a fright to Arabs who went around touting peace plans." Haig wrote to Reagan that the United States would have to tell the Israelis that it could not "condone any such violations of Saudi airspace."

The Fahd Plan was submitted for approval in November to the Arab summit in Fez, Morocco, but fierce Arab divisions over its terms led to the summit’s collapse. The rejection of the Fahd Plan by the Fez summit was a get-out clause for the Israelis and helped to prevent a damaging break in the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Looking back, the Fahd Plan was too vague on Saudi commitments but called for far-reaching demands that no Israeli government at that time could have accepted. Once the Begin government had agreed to hand over the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt as part of the Camp David peace agreement, it could not stomach any more concessions. The establishment of an independent Palestinian State, one of the conditions of the Saudi plan, was unthinkable for Israel’s government and much of its opposition.

The opportunity squandered lay in Israel’s failure to build on the peace treaty with Egypt of 1979 and to at least follow up the intriguing opening offered by the Saudis. The Saudis had a strong interest in defusing and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fearing the threats of the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the radical Arab states.

But they hit a stone wall. It was convenient for the Likud government to interpret Saudi intentions in their most negative light. The very possibility that the Saudis could be ready to recognize Israel under certain conditions damaged the longstanding narrative that the Jewish State was encircled by enemies that were ready to

annihilate it. As Elie Podeh has suggested in a Haaretz interview, it was convenient for Israel to cynically exploit an Israeli sense of isolation to win public support and legitimacy.

Twenty years later, King Fahd’s brother, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud followed in his footsteps with a new peace initiative in February 2002 offering full normalization with Arab states in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. The initiative, which was later modified by the Arab League, again went without a response from successive Israeli governments.

Nevertheless, Israeli attitudes towards Saudi Arabia have undergone a transformation. Israel now perceives Riyadh as a potential partner in countering the rising threat from Iran. The fresh but warm normalization with two other Gulf states and one other Arab League member, has lowered the barriers for informal ties on both sides.

Amid the very public cooperation between Israel and the Gulf States, it’s becoming harder to recall the extent to which Saudi Arabia was once Israel's unequivocal bogeyman. Israel’s enmity with Saudi Arabia, and vice versa, was not, in fact, set in stone. This is something to bear in mind amid today’s heightened tensions between Israel and Palestinians and the dangers of an escalation with Iran.

Azriel Bermant is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of International Relations, Prague. Twitter: @azrielb This article is adapted from a paper written for the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies