This past weekend, normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia was formally sacrificed on the altar of an emerging one-state reality.
On Sunday, the US energy secretary announced the beginning of a US-Saudi nuclear cooperation agreement. It was a small item in American and Israeli media, with a side note that the negotiated understanding will apparently not include Israel. President Donald Trump will travel to Riyadh next month for his first meeting abroad. Israel is not on his trip itinerary.
Once the coveted crown jewel of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s foreign policy efforts, establishing full diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia is now indefinitely on hold.
Saudi leadership clarified at the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War that a path toward Palestinian statehood was a prerequisite for normalization. Israeli leaders just as adamantly insisted that they would put every possible obstacle in the way of a two-state solution.
The historic peace treaty that the Israeli government intended to use as conclusive proof of the irrelevance of the Palestinian issue to regional normalization and stability has been aborted – because of the Palestinian issue.
The new US administration, which now aims to reinstate a version of the Iran deal that Trump brought down in his first term while also juggling significant economic and diplomatic interests in Saudi Arabia, quickly accepted the deadlock and just as quickly shrugged off Israel’s interests and concerns in order to move forward with its own regional goals.
As a result, the two most powerful countries in the MENA region are that much closer to obtaining nuclear weapons. Israel gets left by the wayside, no longer a significant factor in US calculations except as an attack dog card that Trump occasionally waves at the Iranians to encourage their commitment to the diplomatic track.
How did this happen?
In the early days of the war, the Israeli government framed itself as the ultimate obstacle to Palestinian statehood, doubling down on the notion that there is no significant difference between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority while framing a two-state solution as a prize to Hamas.
Despite the ongoing security coordination between the IDF and PA, and Hamas’s long-standing opposition to a two-state solution, the position is popular in Israeli society; the deep-seated trauma from the horrors of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre has only deepened over time, with emerging details about the atrocities, more bereaved families, and barbaric hostage-release parades.
The fear is understandable. The lack of any long-term strategy to deal with the security risks behind the fear is less so.
There are two clear existential threats to Israel in the next decade. One is a nuclear Iran. The other is the trilemma of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between land, democracy, and Jewish statehood: Israel can be a Jewish and democratic state if it compromises on territory, a democratic binational state if it compromises on demography, or a Jewish apartheid state if it compromises on democracy.
At the moment, the Israeli government is hurtling full tilt toward the third option, with the extreme right factions working to establish facts on the ground that will create a one-state reality without national rights for five million Palestinian residents.
Current policies in the West Bank to maximize settler presence and control, weaken the Palestinian Authority, and minimize consequences for Jewish terror against Palestinian civilians are calculated to raise tensions to a point of violence that would then justify IDF operations to make the West Bank as uninhabitable for Palestinians as Gaza.Just like Gaza, however, massive destruction of infrastructure and loss of life will provide no lasting solution to the conflict and no safeguards for Israel’s long-term security.
If countries can be found to serve as third-party refugee dumping grounds for the Trump plan of willing emigration – and so far, none have volunteered – a limited number of Gazans will choose to escape from the Gaza Strip. These are likely to be whatever is left of the elite in Gazan society, a brain-drain similar to what has been taking place in Israel since the start of the war. In this scenario, Israel’s existential trilemma remains (but now with an even poorer and more desperate Palestinian population).
The rational answer to Israel’s growing challenges is to ally itself more closely with regional actors that have demonstrated their trustworthiness: Saudi Arabia, which took part in shooting down Iranian missiles in April 2024; Egypt and Jordan, which have kept their peace agreements with Israel through coups, internal protests, and the current polarizing war; and the Palestinian Authority, which has maintained security coordination with Israel, invaded terror strongholds, and serves as the most significant bulwark against Iranian, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad influence in the West Bank today.
Israeli policies have eroded ties to allies
Current Israeli government policies have weakened ties with these key allies at every turn.
Five years ago, the Trump administration pivoted from the Deal of the Century to the Abraham Accords, once it became clear that the one-sided proposal for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a nonstarter for the Palestinian side.
The process soured ties between the PA and the US government and made the former into a diplomatic cipher for the remainder of the first Trump term, with consequences still shaping the conflict context to this day.
Now the long-awaited Saudi-Israeli normalization deal has been jettisoned for more realistic progress toward nuclear agreements with both Saudi Arabia and Iran. This time, it is Israel that is being sidelined. The potential diplomatic and security damage is immense.
The further Israel sinks into its one-state reality, the more irrelevant we become in key geopolitical considerations and regional diplomacy. Like the US, we are alienating our closest allies in Europe and the Arab world, but from a position of significantly less strength.
Our government sells the public a pipe dream of two million Palestinians happily packing their bags to move to Somalia as a smokescreen for their greatest failure: the lack of any realistic plan for ending the war, bringing our hostages home, and ensuring that October 7 will never happen again.
The writer is deputy director of the Geneva Initiative.