MBS told Blinken that the Biden administration represented his best chance for realizing his plans: Two-thirds of the Senate needed to ratify any Saudi-U.S. defense pact, and he believed that could happen only in a Democratic administration, which could help deliver progressives’ votes by building a Palestinian state into the deal. He had to move quickly, before the November election risked returning Trump to power.
“What do you need from Israel?” Blinken wanted to know.
Above all, MBS said, he needed calm in Gaza. Blinken asked if the Saudis could tolerate Israel periodically reentering the territory to conduct counterterrorism raids. “They can come back in six months, a year, but not on the back end of my signing something like this,” MBS replied.
He began to talk about the imperative of an Israeli commitment to Palestinian statehood.
“Seventy percent of my population is younger than me,” the 38-year-old ruler explained. “For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful.” (A Saudi official described this account of the conversation as “incorrect.”)
He wanted Blinken to know that he was pursuing this deal at the greatest personal risk. The example of the assassinated former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat weighed on him, an unshakable demonstration that the Muslim Brotherhood would wait patiently to exact murderous revenge on an Arab leader willing to make peace with Israel.
“Half my advisers say that the deal is not worth the risk,” he said. “I could end up getting killed because of this deal.”
