Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has been enjoying a successful visit to Washington this week, much of it at Israel’s expense. He’s getting the F-35 stealth fighters he wants, assorted hi-tech weapons, a mutual defense agreement, AI technology, a promise to help develop a civilian nuclear program – and the Trump administration’s support for a path to Palestinian statehood.
Until now, US President Donald Trump had been coy about statehood, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been ratcheting up his opposition in hopes of discouraging the president. Extremist Jewish settlers have increased their violence against West Bank Palestinians, not just to block statehood but also to force them to flee abroad. I’ll get back to that in a moment.
The defense pact is an executive agreement that can be waived by a future president, unlike a treaty, which has the force and effect of law and must be ratified by 67 senators. In this case, ratification could prove rather difficult, however.
Questions to avoid
Senators would raise questions the White House and House of Saud would prefer to avoid, such as questions about the kingdom’s security partnership with China, or its abysmal human rights record. Like the CIA’s “certainty” that the prince ordered the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi during Trump’s first term – which Trump shrugged off.
For bin Salman, it was Thanksgiving with all the fixings. Israel didn’t even get some leftovers. It started with an unusually elaborate White House welcome complete with an F-35 flyover symbolizing the dealer-in-chief’s enthusiasm for this visit.
Netanyahu had urged Trump to link the F-35 sale, the defense pact, weapons, and nuclear project to Saudi normalization with Israel and membership in the Abraham Accords. That had been former US president Joe Biden’s and, Netanyahu thought, Trump’s intent.
Many of Israel’s American friends as well as its own defense and intelligence establishment, warn that the sale of the world’s most advanced stealth fighters would erode America’s longstanding moral and legal commitment to assuring Israel’s qualitative military edge and threaten its regional air superiority.
Gold-plated Trump
This most transactional American president is a gold-plated winner.
His family is getting some very lucrative business deals worth billions in which the crown prince is a key player, The New York Times and others have reported. There will be a Trump Tower Jeddah, two projects in Riyadh, and a luxury hotel in Diriyah.
It reeks of corruption, but no one in the executive branch or the Republican-led Congress seems willing to raise ethical questions, much less try to stop the self-dealing and violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.
The “F35-Plus” deal wasn’t the only setback to Israel’s fading fortunes.
The UN Security Council approved Trump’s Gaza peace plan, which calls for an international stabilization force to be deployed in the Gaza Strip, a role for the Palestinian Authority in reconstruction, and a path to an eventual Palestinian state.
This could provide an excuse for more anti-Palestinian violence in the West Bank by Jewish terrorists.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told a gathering of his followers that if the UN decides to “accelerate” recognition of statehood, “orders must be given for targeted killings of senior Palestinian Authority officials – who are terrorists in every respect – as well as order the arrest of [PA head Mahmoud] Abbas. There is a solitary confinement cell ready for him in Ketziot Prison.”
Ben-Gvir, who called Palestinians an “invented people,” has a history of terrorism. He has a long record of anti-Arab actions and at least eight criminal convictions, including incitement to racism.
He is also a driving force behind legislation currently moving through the Knesset to establish the death penalty for terrorism, but only for Arab terrorists. Israel has a very narrowly defined death penalty law that has been invoked twice, once for an innocent man (wrongly accused of treason) in 1948 and for Adolf Eichmann in 1962.
The bill exempts Jews by applying it only to terrorists convicted of murder “with the intention to harm the State of Israel and the restoration of the Jewish people in its land.” By that standard, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, would be exempt.
Former prime minister Ehud Olmert called violent, young, religious Jewish settlers “murderous terrorist militias” who are Israel’s “most dangerous enemy.”
Settler clashes
Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich are their high-ranking protectors, he added. Another is Defense Minister Israel Katz, who canceled detention without trial for Jews arrested in West Bank violence but not for Arabs.
Sometimes, the settler vigilantes clash with police and the army, as happened this week when the members of the Nachala Movement, the radical settler organization, tried to block the demolition of an illegal outpost near the settlement of Metzad, calling the security forces “anti-Zionist.”
At other times, witnesses have reported, security forces would just stand by or even take part in the attacks. The Jewish terrorists have enough political clout to buy immunity from prosecution. Netanyahu insists they are just a small minority and don’t represent the settler movement.
These are not just a few bad apples, but barrels full of rotten fruit often encouraged and protected by top government ministers, the army, and the police.
Making life so terrible
In the three years since the current Netanyahu government took office and Ben-Gvir has been security minister, nearly every criminal investigation for incitement undertaken by Israeli police has targeted Palestinians, according to media reports.
The goal of these terrorists is to make life for the Palestinians so terrible that they will leave the country.
“There is Palestinian terror in the West Bank, and this can’t be ignored,” Olmert noted, and it is “a real and immediate danger [which] requires firm and effective measures to thwart it,” but it cannot be used as an excuse to justify Jewish terror.
Jewish terrorism does great damage to Israel far beyond its borders.
In Washington, it hardens those in both parties – the MAGA isolationists, Christian nationalist Groypers, budget hawks, antisemites, human rights activists, progressives – who see sympathy for the Palestinian cause growing at Israel’s expense and who want to downgrade the US-Israel alliance.
Netanyahu, in a rare move, condemned the latest violence and promised a crackdown on anti-Palestinian violence. Seeing is believing.
The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and former legislative director at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.