Advertisement
Supported by
Thomas L. Friedman
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia and Israel are America’s two most important Middle East allies, and the Biden administration is deeply involved with both today, trying to forge a mutual defense treaty with Saudi Arabia and help Israel in its conflicts with Hamas and Iran. But the Biden team has run into an unprecedented situation with these two longtime partners that is creating a huge opportunity and a huge danger for America. It derives from the contrast in their internal politics.
To put it bluntly, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has put his country’s worst religious extremists in jail, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has put his country’s worst religious extremists in his cabinet.
And therein lies a tale.
M.B.S., with his laser focus on economic growth after several decades that he has described Saudi Arabia as having been “sleeping,” has unleashed the most important social revolution ever in the desert kingdom — and one that is sending shock waves around the Arab world. It has reached a point where the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are now putting the finishing touches on a formal alliance that could isolate Iran, curb China’s influence in the Middle East and peacefully inspire more positive change in this region than the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan ever did militarily.
M.B.S.’s government did something appalling when it killed Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a liberal critic living in the United States, in Istanbul in 2018. M.B.S. has also done something none of his predecessors dared: break the stranglehold that the most conservative Islamists held over Saudi social and religious policy since 1979. This shift has proved so popular among so many Saudi women and young people that women’s participation in the work force jumped to 35 percent from 20 percent between 2018 and 2022, according to a report by the Atlantic Council, and is even higher today.
That is one of the most rapid social changes anywhere in the world. In Riyadh, you see its impact on the city’s streets, in its coffeehouses and in government and business offices. Saudi women aren’t just driving cars; they are driving change, in the diplomatic corps, in the biggest banks and in the recent Saudi women’s premier soccer league. M.B.S.’s radical new vision for his country is nowhere more manifest than in his publicly stated willingness to normalize diplomatic and economic relations with the Jewish state as part of a new mutual defense pact with the United States.
The crown prince wants as peaceful a region as possible, and a Saudi Arabia as secure from Iran as possible, so he can focus on making Saudi Arabia a diversified economic powerhouse.
That used to be Israel too. Alas, the tragedy of Israel under Netanyahu is that because he has been so desperate to gain and hold power to avoid possible jail time on corruption charges, he has created a governing coalition that has given unprecedented power to two far-right Jewish supremacists with authority........