Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Sunday that “we will one day be able to have railways connect Saudi Arabia and Israel.” This came just hours after a New York Times piece suggested that the kingdom was expecting the Jewish state to make significant concessions to the Palestinians as a precondition for normalization.
While the train to normalization has long left the station, the rails it is traveling on will have to pass through Washington. The Biden administration has been trying for months to have the normalization be linked to a breakthrough with the Palestinians, and that explains why The New York Times ran that piece. Essentially, in order to get Riyadh, Netanyahu will have to please Ramallah, the article said. But Jerusalem officials have been rejecting this idea, and the conventional wisdom is that the royal palace in Saudi Arabia has also rejected it.
We reject The New York Times assessment too. The application of sovereignty over Judea and Samaria must stop being used as a political football. With the increasing revelations of the Biden corruption scandal that are waking people up daily, the best thing for this negotiation is that it drags out or stalls altogether. With that said, the hope is that Biden will be forced to step down or removed from office. We then pray for a true friend of Israel to be installed as the next US president and put a stop to the hostilities towards Israel.