Israel has a fateful choice: Rafah or Riyadh

Already a subscriber?US diplomacy to end the war in the Gaza Strip and forge a new relationship with Saudi Arabia has been converging in recent weeks into a single giant choice for Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: what do you want more – Rafah or Riyadh?

I appreciate how traumatised Israelis are by the vicious Hamas murders, rapes and kidnappings of October 7. It is not surprising to me that many people there just want revenge, and their hearts have hardened to a degree that they can’t see or care about all the civilians, including thousands of children, who have been killed in Gaza as Israel has ploughed through to try to eliminate Hamas. All of this has been further hardened by Hamas’ refusal so far to release the remaining hostages.

That is the other road that Israel could take right now – the one that no major Israeli opposition leader is arguing for as the top priority, but the one that the Biden administration and the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Bahrainis, Moroccans and Emiratis are rooting for. Its success is by no means a sure thing, but neither is the “total victory” that Netanyahu is promising.

US officials are convinced that if Israel now smashes up all of Rafah, after having done the same to big parts of Khan Younis and Gaza City, and has no credible Palestinian partner to relieve it of the security burden of governing a broken Gaza, it will be making the kind of mistake the United States made in Iraq and end up dealing with a permanent insurgency on top of a permanent humanitarian crisis.

It has several components, but the three key US-Saudi ones are: 1) A mutual defence pact between the United States and Saudi Arabia that would take any ambiguity out of what America would do if Iran attacked Saudi Arabia. The United States would come to Riyadh’s defence, and vice versa. 2) Streamlining Saudi access to the most advanced US weapons.

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