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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Saudi Arabia wants the world to see its future. The Houthis keep reminding it of its neighborhood.
As the kingdom promotes investment, international conferences, tourism, and economic transformation, an Iranian-backed militia out of Yemen has been repeatedly attacking its airports.
Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport was struck four times in five days, with passengers and workers killed and hundreds wounded. The distance between Saudi Arabia’s ambitions and its vulnerabilities has rarely been more painfully visible.
Against that backdrop, the kingdom’s insistence on making relations with Israel contingent on Palestinian statehood looks increasingly self-defeating. In May, a Saudi source reiterated that normalization required a clear, definitive path toward an independent Palestinian state, including credible guarantees of implementation.
Consider the strategic logic: A country under attack by an Iranian-backed movement continues to place a Palestinian precondition on establishing full relations with a country that has spent decades confronting Iranian-backed movements. Riyadh is making a potentially valuable partnership depend on resolving a conflict that neither created nor fully explains its own security problems.
The Houthis’ attacks expose the weakness of a regional worldview in which Israel must first make concessions before cooperation with it becomes publicly acceptable. Saudi Arabia’s security needs exist now. Its economic ambitions exist now. Its interest in a region where armed Iranian clients cannot terrorize civilian infrastructure exists now. Why should pursuing those interests require Israel to promise a Palestinian state?
Israel and Saudi Arabia have substantial reasons to cooperate. Both have an interest in containing Iranian aggression, protecting trade routes, confronting missile and drone threats, and preventing militias from dictating the region’s future. Saudi ambitions in technology, infrastructure, agriculture, and economic diversification also create obvious opportunities for partnership with Israel.
Their interests are not identical, and no serious alliance requires them to be. The relevant question is whether cooperation serves both countries. Demanding that Israel first settle the “Palestinian question” substitutes an ideological entrance examination for that strategic judgment.
There is also something profoundly backward about treating Saudi recognition as a favor for which Israel must pay. Israel’s legitimacy does not originate in Riyadh. Jewish sovereignty is not a temporary arrangement awaiting approval from the next Arab capital. Normalization would benefit Saudi Arabia as well as Israel, and Saudi leaders should be capable of explaining those benefits to their own people.
After October 7th, those terms demand considerably more scrutiny than diplomatic language usually allows. Israelis watched Hamas turn territory under its control into a jihadist base for invasion, mass murder, and hostage-taking. Israelis are entitled to ask what would prevent another territory from becoming another launching ground, who would control its weapons, and what would happen if extremists overthrew whoever signed the agreement.
These are questions about whether their children will survive. Calling a proposed arrangement a “pathway” does not answer them.
An Israeli promise of future Palestinian statehood is therefore neither a necessary prerequisite for Saudi-Israeli peace nor a substitute for establishing that such a state could coexist peacefully with Israel. Insisting on that promise before demonstrating the conditions for its safe implementation is foolish. It asks Israelis to commit to an outcome while leaving the most consequential questions about that outcome unresolved.
Saudi Arabia would never outsource its own survival to reassuring language about the future intentions of armed adversaries. It should stop expecting Israel to do so.
The central burden belongs with Palestinian leadership: What future is it prepared to build, and what is it prepared to abandon to build it?
A national movement cannot indefinitely demand sovereignty while leaving open whether its ultimate ambition is coexistence with its neighbor or that neighbor’s disappearance. Palestinian leaders must demonstrate that governing Palestinians matters more to them than defeating Jewish independence. They must make the institutions, security commitments, and political choices that give that claim substance.
Palestinian civilians deserve a future beyond corrupt leadership, armed factions, and recurring war. But treating them as people with agency means holding their leaders accountable for the choices that shape that future. The perpetual demand that Israel produce the next concession allows Palestinian political failure to become somebody else’s responsibility.
Saudi Arabia could use its influence to insist on a different standard: Build a credible national project that accepts the permanence of the Jewish state, and stop making the rest of the region wait for a Palestinian leadership willing to do so.
The historical warning here is substantial. Regimes that elevate confrontation with Israel into a governing mission repeatedly sacrifice their own populations to that mission. “Palestine” becomes a justification for militarization, repression, foreign adventures, and the postponement of every domestic promise. The cause is always sacred; the citizens paying for it are always expendable.
Iran since 1979 offers the clearest example. After the Islamic Revolution, the new authorities handed the former Israeli diplomatic mission in Tehran to the Palestine Liberation Organization. The symbolism announced a profound change in national priorities: Relations with Israel would give way to revolutionary confrontation. A country with enormous resources and human talent adopted hostility toward the Jewish state as a central feature of its political identity.
More than four decades later, the question is not whether that posture has generated speeches, militias, and missiles. It is what it has delivered to ordinary Iranians.
The financial choices are revealing. In November 2025, Iran had funneled approximately $1 billion to Hezbollah that year despite sanctions battering its economy. Maintaining such commitments amid domestic hardship illustrates the regime’s priorities. Money committed to sustaining a foreign armed movement cannot simultaneously modernize an Iranian hospital or repair Iranian infrastructure. Tehran has repeatedly asked its people to finance a regional mission whose promised triumph never arrives.
Other examples reveal the same moral bankruptcy. Saddam Hussein paid families of Palestinian suicide bombers while ruling Iraq through terror and pursuing disastrous wars. Assad’s Syria claimed the mantle of resistance while Assad-aligned forces besieged the Palestinian community of Yarmouk.
These regimes did not collapse simply because they opposed Israel. The point is that their supposed devotion to “Palestine” never produced successful states.
Saudi Arabia has an opportunity to choose a fundamentally different direction. Indeed, its ambitions depend on doing so. An economy that seeks international investors, visitors, advanced industries, and enduring commercial partnerships requires predictability and security.
Those objectives fit poorly with a regional political culture that continually elevates confrontation with Israel above practical cooperation. The kingdom cannot afford to modernize its economic aspirations while preserving every diplomatic reflex of the old Middle East.
The United Arab Emirates provides a useful example precisely because it has maintained support for Palestinian statehood while establishing relations with Israel. Bilateral trade in goods reached approximately $3.2 billion in 2025. Normalization has not required agreement with every Israeli decision. It has allowed a relationship to develop despite disagreements. Saudi Arabia’s insistence on withholding that relationship until the “Palestinian question” meets its conditions is a policy choice, not an unavoidable obligation of Arab identity.
Riyadh’s predicament is that it wants room in two different versions of the Middle East. In one, national legitimacy still depends partly on keeping Israel at arm’s length and treating Palestinian demands as the organizing principle of regional diplomacy.
In the other, countries cooperate openly because technology, trade, security, and a common interest in resisting Iranian coercion make cooperation worthwhile. Trying to extract the benefits of the second while preserving the prohibitions of the first may feel like sophisticated balancing. In practice, it places an unnecessary ceiling on what Saudi Arabia can achieve.
That ceiling also gives opponents of normalization a destructive opportunity. If regional cooperation must wait for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to become politically manageable, those who perpetuate the conflict gain influence over everybody else’s future. Every escalation becomes another argument for postponement. Every postponement demonstrates that violence can obstruct integration. Saudi Arabia should be asking whether its conditions weaken the forces that oppose peace, or preserve their ability to prevent it.
This requires Saudi leaders to distinguish helping Palestinians build a future from allowing the Palestinian conflict to govern Saudi Arabia’s future. They can support reconstruction, responsible institutions, economic opportunity, and leadership committed to coexistence while establishing full relations with Israel. There is no strategic necessity to make the latter hostage to the former.
The Saudis deserve airports where passengers can board planes without fearing missiles. Israelis deserve homes where families can sleep without fearing another October 7th.
Those interests belong in the same regional conversation.
A clear and cogent analysis that reveals facts, realities, choices and their consequences. These are typically obscured by all the familiar, rote ideological posturing. This analysis provides genuine insight. Thank you.
Well written as usual. This column should be sent to the highest officials of Saudi Arabia. It is mind boggling that Saudi Arabia stands idly by ( in large part) while the capital’s airport is repeatedly attacked.