A Saudi-Israel peace deal would be a game-changer

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.