I’m informed via reader e-mail that I must discuss the interview Saudi Prince Turki Al-Faisal gave to the Financial Times at the risk of losing my credibility.
The Financial Times itself believes the interview is worthy of editorial comment, so I guess I’d better hop to!
I think Pr. Turki is honestly conveying the feelings of the government and people of Saudi Arabia. His words echo those of his brother, Pr. Saud, the Foreign Minister, that the conflict must end, once and for all.
As much as the government of Saudi Arabia wishes to maintain friendly relations with the US, that relationship is in jeopardy. This repeats the warning that then-Crown Prince Abdullah gave the Bush Administration back in 2002: The US must try to rein in Israel if there is to be peace and stability in the region. In the views of Saudi and Arab publics, the Bush Administration was an unmitigated disaster for the region, for Arabs, and for Muslims at large. Some of this is indeed hyperbole, exaggerations made to score political points as well as misdirection by groups like Al-Qaeda to stir up resentment toward the US. The Iraq incursion started it, Abu Ghraib heightened it, stories coming from Guantanamo pushed it into the stratosphere. Gaza has simply made the situation intolerable.
The issue here is not just a matter of politics that can be reasoned, argued, fixed with a treaty or agreement. Instead, it has grown into an emotional issue—the same emotional issue that Abdullah brought to Bush’s attention in 2002. There has not been any forward action taken on the issue beyond Bush’s enunciation of the ‘two-state solution’. Today, Arabs and Israelis are both questioning whether a two-state solution is even feasible. What has changed the ground enormously is Gaza.
Again, it’s not a matter of politics or even a rational discussion of ‘who started it’ or why. Instead, it has become a visceral issue, fed by endless photographs of dead and dying Palestinian children and women. Hundreds of ghastly photos circulate through the Internet, e-mails, list-servers, and the Arab media. People who see these photos are not prepared to argue the niceties of international law. They are convinced that Israel is a criminal state.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the last 60 years of Middle Eastern politics have served to demonize Israel, justly or not. Nor does it help that too many imams in too many countries preach raw antisemitism and teach it in their schools.
Pr. Turki’s point is that if the US is to maintain cordial relations with Saudi Arabia, the US government must be seen to do something to change the status quo. Saudi Arabia, through King Abdullah’s peace plan, has gone as far as it can go, to the point of getting the members of the Arab League to sign onto the plan. The US, as a supporter of Israel, perhaps the supporter of Israel, must now do its part.
Some might say, ‘Well, if the Saudis don’t want the relationship, let them walk away… good riddance!’ That, while popular with some sectors of US society, is particularly dumb. The Saudis have already said that they will not use oil as a ‘weapon’, i.e., no repetition of the 1973 boycott. That does not mean that they will continue to offer preferential prices to the US for oil. Nor does it mean that Saudi Arabia cannot make life difficult for the US government. Simply by refusing to grant the US military permission to overfly the country, the Kingdom can wreak havoc for US military planners with concerns east of Suez. It could stop being the piggy bank to which the US government goes to find funding for international aid programs for which there is nothing in the US budget. It could stop buying Boeing or Sikorsky or General Electric weapons and weapon systems and instead buy from Europe, Russia, or China. Rather than voting with the US in international fora, it could simply vote ‘present’.
There are many ways in which the US-Saudi relationship can be harmed, all short of war. The question is whether the US government thinks the Saudis are bluffing. I think not. Having offered warning seven years ago, only to see promises made and then frittered away, I think they are serious. I think, as well, that the US government mostly understands this. As a result, pressure will be put on Israel to make changes in its traditional demands, though pressure will be applied to the rejectionist Arab states and groups as well.
It’s not the showdown at the OK Corral just yet, but warning flags are flying.
Saudi Arabia’s patience is running out
Prince Turki Al-FaisalIn my decades as a public servant, I have strongly promoted the Arab-Israeli peace process. During recent months, I argued that the peace plan proposed by Saudi Arabia could be implemented under an Obama administration if the Israelis and Palestinians accepted difficult compromises.
But after Israel launched its bloody attack on Gaza, these pleas for optimism and co-operation now seem a distant memory. Unless the new US administration takes forceful steps to prevent any further suffering and slaughter of Palestinians, the peace process, the US-Saudi relationship and the stability of the region are at risk.
Prince Saud Al-Faisal, Saudi foreign minister, told the UN Security Council that if there was no just settlement, “we will turn our backs on you”. King Abdullah spoke for the Arab and Muslim world when he said at the Arab summit in Kuwait that although the Arab peace initiative was on the table, it would not remain there for long.
America is not innocent in this calamity. Not only has the Bush administration left a sickening legacy in the region, but it has also, through an arrogant attitude about the butchery in Gaza, contributed to the slaughter of innocents. If the US wants to continue playing a leadership role in the Middle East and keep its strategic alliances intact – especially its “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia – it will have to revise drastically its policies vis a vis Israel and Palestine.
The US administration will be inheriting a “basket full of snakes” in the region, but there are things that can be done to help calm them. First, President Barack Obama must address the disaster in Gaza and its causes. Inevitably, he will condemn Hamas’s firing of rockets at Israel. When he does that, he should also condemn Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians and support a UN resolution to that effect; condemn the Israeli actions that led to this conflict, from settlement building in the West Bank to the blockade of Gaza and the targeted killings and arbitrary arrests of Palestinians; declare America’s intention to work for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, with a security umbrella for countries that sign up and sanctions for those that do not; call for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from Shab’ah Farms in Lebanon; encourage Israeli-Syrian negotiations for peace; and support a UN resolution guaranteeing Iraq’s territorial integrity.
Mr Obama should strongly promote the Abdullah peace initiative, which calls on Israel to pursue the course laid out in various international resolutions and laws: to withdraw completely from the lands occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem, returning to the lines of June 4 1967; to accept a mutually agreed just solution to the refugee problem according to UN resolution 194; and to recognise the independent state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital. In return, there would be an end to hostilities between Israel and all Arab countries, and Israel would get full diplomatic and normal relations.
Last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad of Iran wrote a letter to King Abdullah, explicitly recognising Saudi Arabia as the leader of the Arab and Muslim worlds and calling on him to take a more confrontational role over “this obvious atrocity and killing of your own children” in Gaza. The communiqué is significant because the de facto recognition of the kingdom’s primacy from one of its most ardent foes reveals the extent that the war has united an entire region, both Shia and Sunni. Further, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s call for Saudi Arabia to lead a jihad against Israel would, if pursued, create unprecedented chaos and bloodshed.
So far, the kingdom has resisted these calls, but every day this restraint becomes more difficult to maintain. As the world laments once again the suffering of the Palestinians, people of conscience from every corner of the world are clamouring for action. Eventually, the kingdom will not be able to prevent its citizens from joining the worldwide revolt against Israel. Today, every Saudi is a Gazan, and we remember well the words of our late King Faisal: “I hope you will forgive my outpouring of emotions, but when I think that our Holy Mosque in Jerusalem is being invaded and desecrated, I ask God that if I am unable to undertake Holy Jihad, then I should not live a moment more.” Let us all pray that Mr Obama possesses the foresight, fairness and resolve to rein in the murderous Israeli regime and open a new chapter in this most intractable of conflicts.
Prince Turki is chairman, King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies, Riyadh. He has been director of Saudi intelligence, ambassador to the UK and Ireland and ambassador to the US
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
January:27:2009 - 06:06
I agree with a lot of what you say, but I would point out that I think to some extend the Saudis are posturing. As much credibility and capital (literally and figuratively) the US has lost as the US goes the world follows, economically speaking. For the same reason that China’s economy depends on the US economy. The foreign minister doesn’t buy penthouse suites in luxury high raises in Shangahi or Mumbai — he goes to New York City. (I think he owns two floors of the Columbus Circle tower, or used to.) We can call that bluff. If the Saudis don’t want to invest, the Kuwaitis will. The US is still the harbor when the global economy trembles, which is why we’ve seen the dollar strengthen since the recession began, right? I think what’s going on in China is going to reach a head, and I’ve never considered India to be on the cusp of being on a “flat world” with the US, considering their population of people living in abject, illiterate squalor is larger than the population of the US. When China needs 7 percent growth just to keep its people from heading toward anger and social resentment, let the Saudis invest there and see how far that goes.
That said, I agree completely that the US needs to be a smart power if it expects to maintain its momentum. And that means making nice with the developing world, especially in the Middle East and Africa. That includes the Palestinian cause. There will actually come a time, I think, when our relationship with other countries in the region will be far more important than the one we have with Israel — or at least the problems we will have with these countries will out-match our concerns for Israel’s insistence on its borders. The Israel relations are based on ideology, shared interests, recent history, but not necessarily geopolitical interest, IMO.
I think of piracy off the coast of Somalia is a symptom of diplomatic neglect and as the world gets smaller, unrest in the extremely poor places is gonna grow and become far more important to the US than Israel.
We probably ought to be identifying poverty and squalor hot spots (especially issues with stateless people) and simply turn them into the core mission of our foreign policy. The Palestinians situation can rank high on this list without it being overtly an issue of “appeasing the Arabs.” We ought to be interested in the Palestinians because they live in really horrible conditions, and because those conditions as they arise destabilize regions. We should not be nice to the Palestinians simply because being nice to them will please the Saudis. We should be helping people like this because elevating the middle class in these hot spots is the key to our own survival and prosperity in the long run.
January:27:2009 - 10:29
[...] sobering. Also worth checking out this analysis from a retired US foreign service officer who was twice posted to Sauid [...]
January:27:2009 - 22:11
I think Israel had to defend itself against the rocket attacks by Hamas. I do not think Israel should have attacked UN facilities or universities. However, Israel protects it’s citizens against rocket attacks by evacuating areas under attack, siren warnings, and setting up bomb shelters. It seems like Hamas sets the Gaza citizens up to be martyrs. Israel should open the borders especially to humanitarian aid, but Hamas should stop smuggling weapons into the area.
I think a the idea by Terry Hirchberg as Israel/Palestine two states in one country with Jerusalem as a shared capital instead of split could be a solution to the problem.
January:27:2009 - 23:15
I agree absolutely that Israel has a right to protect itself. The end of the British protectorate is over 60 years ago. That, no matter what the circumstance was before, has changed the facts on the ground, literally. Hamas, with its mantra of driving Israel into the sea, cannot win support from the world. Israel, on the other hand, can and does lose support through careless attacks.
I can see Jerusalem as a unified city governing two states. I can also see a divided Jerusalem. My preference would be for it to become an international city, administered alternatively by Jews, Muslims, and Christians on a rotating basis. All three groups have a deeply rooted and legitimate interest in the city and its well-being.
January:28:2009 - 09:57
[...] see this analysis from a retired US Foreign Service officer who was twice posted to Saudi [...]
January:28:2009 - 12:36
Israel, on the other hand, can and does lose support through careless attacks.
The attacks don’t have to be “careless”, or even real. What bloggers call “Pallywood” is the fakery of Israeli deeds by the Palestinian propaganda machine. As far as Hamas is concerned, this includes complicity by non-Palestinian Muslims, for when I linked to this article describing them on a Pakistani website, I was denounced by the moderator for posting “propaganda against Islam”.
Lots of women and children died in the bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, and London, yet I don’t think that either Germany nor Britain engaged in the kind of child war pornography that Arabs revel in today to fan the flames of hatred. Hate like that had become a kind of drug, and its addicts simply can’t do without it – it must be manufactured, if the real thing can’t be found. One of its purposes here is just what John stated, to obscure “the niceties of international law” that demonstrate that in this campaign, at least, Israel was in the right and Hamas was in the wrong.
How is any kind of peace plan supposed to be taken seriously by Israelis when the atmosphere of the Arab public has been poisoned this way? They probably think, with good reason and repeated experience, that this is just another Arab plot aimed at destroying Israel – something to be portrayed to the Arab masses as another step towards destroying the Zionists.
January:28:2009 - 13:24
Yep… it’s a hard question. The problem doesn’t rest on ‘Pallywood’ or ‘Fauxtography’, though. There are enough real images of real, but dead, Palestinian children to poison the atmosphere for another generation. It really doesn’t matter whether a particular attack was justified or accidental or careless or precise. Pictures of dead children short-circuit the mental circuits that govern rational thought. Emotions kick in and Israel–and the US–are seen as perpetrators of war crimes. No, the actions do not amount to any reasonable definition of actual war crimes, but it doesn’t matter.
It’s not fair; it’s not justified by the facts. It simply is. Finding a way to deal with it is the real problem.
January:28:2009 - 14:00
“There are enough real images of real, but dead, Palestinian children to poison the atmosphere for another generation. ”
That doesn’t have to happen, any more than the Germans of 1945 were “poisoned” by their dead; the Germans made and kept peace. Must the Gazans suffer the loss of not just 0.1% of their population but, like the Germans, a hundred times that number for them to learn? Can’t wise leadership and education make a difference?
January:28:2009 - 17:45
“Wise leadership” is the sticking point.
January:28:2009 - 21:47
Perhaps. I’m not sure there would have been a successful post-WWII Germany without Konrad Adenauer. It is not a mark of great leadership to pride oneself on restraining the populace from carrying out mob violence – Turki’s letter implies that Saudi Arabia’s current leadership considers that its role is “to prevent its citizens from joining the worldwide revolt against Israel” – as much as it is to persuade them to choose a different course as more beneficial to their own and their community’s interests. Adenauer did not pride himself on restraining a defeated Nazi Germany, but on transforming his country into the peace-loving democracy of the most productive people on the planet.
For the collective energies of a people are like the waters of a river: they flow from many sources into a powerful stream. Damming the flow may work temporarily, yet ultimately either the dam will burst into a destructive flood, or its waters will be diverted for constructive purposes. By choosing the former instead of the latter, hasn’t Prince Turki chosen the course of ultimate failure?
January:28:2009 - 23:04
I think the Gaza situation works to hinder efforts to divert the stream. It’s hard for any Arab government to get cozy with Israel, on any level, when all the common people see are dead children. Even those states that had taken half-way steps, like Mauritania and Qatar, have had to take a step backwards. Right now, any Arab leader who tried to say, “Listen, the Israelis have a point here,” should know where the exits are.
January:29:2009 - 15:34
Any Arab leader who tried to say, “Listen, the Israelis have a point here,” should know where the exits are.
Indeed. I note that the Turkish PM just walked out of a Davos meeting rather than give a substantive response to Shimon Peres’ point that he would have done the same to Gaza if rockets had been falling on Istanbul. For once the moderator, Washington Post journalist David Ignatius, cut off Erdgan’s digression, what could Mr. Erdogan say? If he had said “no” he would be inviting Turkey’s enemies (i.e., separatist Kurds) to attack, and if he had said “yes” he would be accused of awarding moral authority to Israel – something that is treated by many as a crime in and of itself.
Truly, most peoples in the Middle East are currently poorly prepared to abandon their damaging bigotries. Such moral preparation comes from education, and who, exactly, is responsible for that? The media? The government? Israel? The U.S.? Rabbis? Imams? The U.N.?
All organized education is a process of deliberate instruction, and teaching requires both funding and discretion. I would guess that this is the area government leaders can reform most easily without worrying about “where the exits are.”
May:15:2010 - 11:14
[...] Prince Turki Al-Faisal on US-Saudi Relations 15 05 2010 Prince Turki Al-Faisal on US-Saudi Relations [...]
May:15:2010 - 21:05
This gives me so much more respect for the Arab world, Muslims and hope for the Palestinians and others being persecuted by Israel and US. But, what took you so long? I just always thought you didn’t care!
Thank You, now I think we will soon see things turn around.
May:15:2010 - 21:21
I thought this was new, news, because I had not heard it before. Then I noticed the dates on the comments, Jan. 2009! Nothing has happened yet, the massacres are still going on as before. My hope was just dashed. Just a lot of royal talk I guess. Maybe you could get that going again cause it really sounded great!
October:08:2010 - 23:16
Why is Israel-Palestine American problem? Why cant America unilaterally support Israel? If Saudi Arabia is loosing pateince, let it loose. What does Saudi Arabia control? Nothing! As far as the oil goes, suppliers and consumers have equal buying power. America needs oil and so is Saudi Arabia that needs dollars. So America is in no way dependent on Saudi. American economy is much broader and deeper. Asia with 4 billion people will be the economic centre and America just has to do align its commercial interests towards Asia especially India and China.
October:09:2010 - 12:04
The supporters of Israel seem to be missing something very important. . . . integrity and morality! All you can think of is money and material things. Israel is governed by a bunch of thugs and they are not Jewish, they are atheist, pretending to be Jewish. It is all about taking what doesn’t belong to them and not valuing life except their own. I think people all over the world are becoming aware of the ugly truth about Israel.
Soon, the so-called Israelis will be driven out of Palestine! I will cheer along with the rest of the world.
Soon we will see the war criminals at the Hague as justice prevails, along with all those who supported this dark Cabal.