Israeli Prime Minister and Author Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Sunday that “we will one day be able to have railways connect Saudi Arabia and Israel,” 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 since left the station, the tracks pass through Washington. The Biden administration has been trying for months to have normalization linked to a breakthrough with the Palestinians, and that explains why the New York Times—the preferred outlet for the president—ran that piece.” Essentially, in order to get Riyadh, Netanyahu will have to please Ramallah,” said the article. But Jerusalem officials have been rejecting this idea, and the conventional wisdom is that the royal palace in Saudi Arabia has also rejected it.
