Mick Hartley

An interesting piece from Jake Wallis Simons in the Spectator, on the possibility of a Saudi-Israeli peace deal:

It emerged this week that the head of the Mossad, David Barnea, slipped quietly over to Washington in July to hold secret talks about the prospect of an Israel-Saudi peace deal.

This was part of a drip-drip of stories suggesting that an agreement may be back on the cards after an Iran-Saudi deal brokered by China complicated things in March.

In another significant development, the respected Saudi newspaper Arab News published an editorial this week selling a possible deal to its readers. This followed a study finding that Saudi Arabia has scrubbed ‘practically all’ antisemitism and Israelophobia from its school textbooks. Apparently, children of the desert kingdom are no longer being taught about the ‘descendants of monkeys and pigs’ in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

To an international media tinged with Israelophobia – which seems to be relishing the Jewish state’s current domestic political trauma a bit too much – this was a reminder that Israel is far from finished as a beacon of hope in the Middle East, and that western interests are bound up with its fortunes. There may yet be a future in which a people with 3,000-year-old roots in the region are fully accepted, and this would be excellent news for democracies around the world.

A significant factor behind such a deal, of course, is that both the Saudis and Israel have a common enemy in Iran.

One major benefit would be the bolstering of a united front against the scourge of Iran. One British official who holds a security brief recently told me that the theocracy’s operations on our shores was the threat that kept him up at night above all others; if you knew what I knew, it would keep you up at night as well, the official told me. In a certain light, beleaguered by internal unrest and battered by sanctions, Iran is increasingly looking like a wounded animal. But it is closer than ever before to becoming a nuclear state; its meddling throughout the Middle East continues unabated; its Revolutionary Guards pose a serious danger to Britain and democratic countries worldwide; and it never rests in its softer cultural and diplomatic efforts to gain regional dominance, which cloak its deeply malign intentions.

The Iranians are the major funders of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. If the theocrats in Iran go, then the future of the Middle East in general, and Israel in particular, would suddenly look immeasurably brighter. Surely it can only be a matter of time….