Read Part 1 here.
In the aftermath of the Lebanon War (2006), the intelligence services of Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel began working more closely together. From this point on, Israel intensified its contacts with Arab states that had previously maintained no diplomatic relations with it—most notably Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. On the Saudi side, the Iranian threat led to a gradual decoupling of potential cooperation with Israel from the resolution of the Palestinian question, even though, in public statements, Palestinian self-determination is still cited as a precondition for recognizing the Jewish state.
On the Israeli side, there were also public acknowledgments of cooperation with Saudi Arabia, particularly to exert pressure on the Palestinian Authority. Ehud Olmert publicly praised the peace initiative launched in 2002 by then-Saudi King Abdullah. In 2008, as President of Israel, Shimon Peres was open to an informal conference in Jerusalem, explicitly seeking Arab involvement. Under Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli-Arab cooperation against Iran and its proxies intensified. Not only the Iranian threat, but also weak responses from Europe and the United States under Barack Obama accelerated the development of Israeli–Arab collaboration during Netanyahu’s government. For example, in 2010, during a meeting between Israeli intelligence chief Meir Dagan and Saudi officials in Saudi Arabia, permission was granted for Israel to use Saudi airspace, and assurances were made that the kingdom would provide military support to Israel in the event of a first strike against Iran.
With the conclusion of the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the European states as well as the United States, both Israel and Saudi Arabia increasingly felt not only that the Iranian threat was growing, but that they could no longer count on allies in the West on this issue. Both states feared that, under the agreement, Iran would not only continue its military nuclear program but, with financial support from the West through the lifting of sanctions, would also further destabilize the region. As a result, neither country held back from openly criticizing the United States and the European states involved.
With the nuclear agreement between Iran and the EU as well as the United States, both Israel and Saudi Arabia increasingly felt not only that the Iranian threat was growing, but that they could no longer count on allies in the West on this issue.
It was therefore hardly surprising that Netanyahu, in the same year, sharply condemned the nuclear agreement in a speech before the U.S. Congress—a stance that was greeted favorably by a commentator on the Saudi-funded channel Al-Arabiya:
“It is extremely rare for any reasonable person to ever agree with anything Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says or does. However, one must admit, Bibi [!] did get it right, at least when it came to dealing with Iran … What is absurd, however, is that despite this being perhaps the only thing that brings together Arabs and Israelis (as it threatens them all), the only stakeholder that seems not to realize the danger of the situation is President Obama”.
The Role of Salafi Scholars
It may come as a surprise, but Saudi Arabia’s rapprochement with Israel has been repeatedly endorsed by religious legal opinions issued by the Wahhabi clergy. The “Council of Senior Religious Scholars”, the kingdom’s most important Islamic institution and authority, accompanied the political decisions of the Saudi state regarding the pacification of the Middle East conflict with numerous fatwas. Abd al-Aziz Ibn Baz, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, who headed the Council until 1999, issued a fatwa during the Oslo peace talks legitimizing a peace treaty with Israel.
In it, he referenced the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, which Muhammad had concluded in AD 628 with the polytheists (Mushrikun) of his own tribe—previously his enemies—prior to the conquest of Mecca. This established the basis for an Islamic legitimization of a potential peace treaty with Israel. Furthermore, Ibn Baz permitted the performance of prayers in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, even under Israeli control.
Outside the Saudi state clergy, fatwas were also issued addressing the situation of the Palestinians. Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani, a Salafi hadith scholar active in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, formulated a legal opinion even before the outbreak of the First Intifada (1987), urging Muslim Palestinians to leave their land.
He justified this by arguing that, due to the non-Muslim, Israeli “occupation,” the Palestinians were no longer living in a territory governed by Islam (Dar al-Islam) but in one of unbelief (Dar al-Kufr). According to his reasoning, the ability to perform Islamic religious duties in this territory could no longer be guaranteed. For this reason, he concluded, it would be advisable for them to emigrate to a country dominated by Muslims.
These legal opinions were not issued out of any positive attitude toward Israel or Judaism. On the contrary: in keeping with Salafi tradition, the same muftis advised pious Muslims to avoid all contact with Christians, Jews, or other Muslim sects. The fatwas regarding arrangements with Israel are instead derived from a quietist conviction within Wahhabism, which rejects political intervention, national independence movements, uprisings, and revolutions as forms of Western interference in the Islamic sphere.
In keeping with Salafi tradition, the same muftis advised pious Muslims to avoid all contact with Christians, Jews, or other Muslim sects. The fatwas regarding arrangements with Israel are instead derived from a quietist conviction within Wahhabism, which rejects political intervention, national independence movements, uprisings, and revolutions as forms of Western interference in the Islamic sphere.
Accordingly, such movements are seen as sowing nothing but chaos within the Islamic world and as having no foundation in the Qur’an or the prophetic traditions. In this context, the words of the 13th-century Salafi thinker Ibn Taymiyya are often cited: “The sultan is God’s shadow on earth. Better sixty years under a tyrant than a single night without a sultan”.
Accordingly, the stance toward the Jewish state within Saudi Salafism is relatively indifferent. This politically quietist positioning of Saudi Salafism stands in marked contrast to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadist Salafis, who have repeatedly criticized the quietists’ loyalty to the state and political indifference. But according to the scholars established in Saudi Arabia, it is essential for Muslims to orient themselves primarily on the Meccan period of the Prophet Muhammad’s life. This applies to times of oppression and war, as well as periods of peace. From their perspective, the Meccan era is distinguished above all by the fact that Muhammad confronted the polytheists of his tribe with patience, prayer, and secret missionary work, rather than with violence and war.
Herein lies the difference between Ibn Baz and al-Albani on one side, and Bin Laden and Sinwar on the other. The latter justified the use of violence with reference to the Medinan period of Muhammad’s prophethood, during which he conducted military campaigns against the Meccans.
Quietist Salafis apply strict standards both to questions of the exemplary nature of the Prophet’s life and to issues of modern life, drawing directly on precedents within Muhammad’s own biography. In this respect, they are naturally at odds with an enlightened, modern understanding of the individual. This stance explains why, until only a few years ago, Saudi Arabia’s restrictions on personal freedom, gender inequality, and ascetic disdain for pleasure remained below even the level of medieval Europe. At the same time, it clarifies why the kingdom never produced a particularly leftist or revolutionary anti-Zionism on the scale of the pan-Arabists, Muslim Brotherhood, and jihadists—movements that were deeply influenced by the experiences and traditions of modern Enlightenment thought.
The kingdom never produced a particularly leftist or revolutionary anti-Zionism on the scale of the pan-Arabists, Muslim Brotherhood, and jihadists—movements that were deeply influenced by the experiences and traditions of modern Enlightenment thought.
The hostility toward Jews among Saudi Salafis generally focuses on the Qur’anic accounts of rebellious Jews who disregarded both the commandments of Moses and the prophethood of Jesus. In addition, the prophetic experiences with the Jews of Medina are also cited, who, according to the canonical hadith collections, refused Muhammad’s authority and allied themselves with the polytheists of Mecca. Even though Muhammad ordered the killing of some Jews, this was not treated by the Saudi Salafis as a precedent to justify the killing of Jews in British Mandate Palestine or in present-day Israel. Patterns of justification of this sort are more common among the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadist Salafis.
Nevertheless, this Qur’an- and prophetic tradition–based hostility toward Jews did have political consequences. Until the 1990s, it was forbidden for Jews—whether Israeli or not—to enter the kingdom or work there. Western companies were therefore instructed not to send Jewish employees to Saudi Arabia. Over time, despite the radical literalism of Saudi Salafis, elements of modern anti-Semitism and conspiracy thinking gradually merged with Islamic anti-Judaism, which, in particular due to the Islamic prohibition on interest, aligned easily with resentment against allegedly secretive “money- and usury-Jews”.
Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud also harbored negative views toward Jews, attributing them not only to the Jews’ rejection of the prophethood of Jesus but also to supposed greed. King Faisal distributed anti-Semitic pamphlets to guests and journalists at press conferences and even praised Hitler’s policies of extermination against the Jews. Today’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, however, thinks he can cast Hitler in a “good light” for a very different reason: “I believe the Iranian supreme leader makes Hitler look good”.
Morality or Interest
Statements like these make it clear that opposition to Iranian expansionism is a decisive criterion in Saudi foreign policy. At the same time, it is evident that cooperation with Israel is not motivated by a historically or morally “correct” judgment on the necessity of Jewish statehood. Nominally, support for the Palestinian cause remains the kingdom’s official position. However, it would be a mistake to evaluate Saudi policy toward Israel solely on the basis of public statements or according to standards that might apply to European states.
Like most Arab states, the Saudi kingdom—despite its authoritarian power apparatus—cannot ignore the anti-Israel sentiment of its own population, nor, in its role as custodian of Islam’s two holy sites, the broader animosity toward Israel within the umma—hence the need to publicly affirm the Palestinians’ right to statehood. However statements made on the diplomatic stage provide only a limited guide to the Gulf state’s actual political agenda. This has been true over the past hundred years and remains the case today.
Opposition to Iranian expansionism is the decisive criterion in Saudi foreign policy.
In fact, the vision of an economically and politically cooperative Middle East is far more attractive to Saudi Arabia than supporting an endless war against Israel, a conflict in which Arab parties and states have often torn each other apart during lulls in the fighting. This is all the more the case as the kingdom’s exclusive reliance on its oil reserves no longer guarantees economic growth or political influence. Instead Saudi Arabia is aiming to develop itself into an internationally significant hub for business and technology. Not least to increase the female labor-force participation required for this, the kingdom has permitted a degree of cultural modernization. Even solely in terms of these domestic transformation plans, “normalization” of relations with economically advanced Israel would clearly be in the royal house’s interest.
Moral obligation to support the Jewish state has played no role here—just as it did not in the informal development of relations between the two countries. For the Saudi kingdom, it is irrelevant that Israel was founded in the wake of millennia of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. This may sound disconcerting—particularly to European ears—but the Gulf state’s ignorance of the suffering of the Jewish diaspora before 1948 is precisely why there has been no moralized stance toward the Jewish state, making Saudi foreign policy toward Israel predictably pragmatic: as long as the two countries shared the same enemies, common interests prevailed, and the kingdom’s political actions toward Israel remained indifferent, if not quietly favorable.
It was not abstract, universal “lessons from history” that led Saudi Arabia, after October 7, to do more for Israel’s defense than most European states; rather, it was the plain, self-interested alignment of shared interests with the Jewish state. One can only hope that Saudi Arabia does not catch European moralism along the way.
