Saudi Arabia Deploys Soft Power to Win Favor In Washington

A report on the charm offensive of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), meant to show how tolerant the Kingdom has become, and especially underlining its openness to Jewish visitors, and its solicitude for Jewish concerns, is here.

Geopolitics is written all over Saudi Arabia’s religious soft power efforts. Nowhere is this true more than when it comes to Israel and Jews, because of the growing importance of security cooperation with the Jewish state and the support for Israel in the United States, the kingdom’s most important yet problematic security partner.

The Saudis now know that their most useful partner in confronting their mortal enemy, Iran, is the Jewish state. It is the Mossad that has for more than a decade been running rings around the Iranians, with a campaign of cyber warfare (Stuxnet), of targeted assassinations (eight nuclear scientists killed, including the “father” of the nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh), of sabotage (centrifuge plants destroyed at Natanz, nuclear facilities destroyed at Karaj). Israel has done more than any other country to slow down Iran’s nuclear program, and means what it says: it will not allow Iran to produce nuclear weapons, “whatever it takes” – and “whatever it takes’” includes war.

In the latest move, Saudi Arabia ensured that it would be the first stop on the first overseas trip by Deborah Lipstadt as the US special envoy to combat antisemitism.

Lipstadt intends to build on the profoundly important Abraham Accords to advance religious tolerance, improve relations in the region, and counter misunderstanding and distrust,” the State Department said in a statement.

By making sure that Riyadh would be the first stop on the first trip abroad by Deborah Lipstadt, the US special envoy to combat antisemitism, MBS was underscoring his country’s eagerness to support her mission; not so long ago, she would have been barred from the Kingdom, and her undertaking dismissed by the Saudi government as designed to win sympathy for “the Zionists.” There’s been a sea change in Saudi policy, in the lessening of public enmity toward Jews and Israel. That change started, in a small way, even before MBS’s rise to power, but has greatly accelerated now that he is the de facto ruler of the country. After all, behind the scenes Saudi Arabia has been collaborating on security matters with the Jewish state for years, both on the direct threat from Iran, and the menace from its proxy, the Houthis in Yemen, who have been attacking Saudi oil installations and airbases.

Lipstadt said that Saudi religious soft power diplomacy had created an atmosphere in which she could discuss with government officials and civil society leaders, “normalising the vision of the Jews and understanding of Jewish history for their population, particularly their younger population.”

The Saudi officials who now take their cue from MBS seem open to learning about, and allowing to be discussed in their controlled media, the history of the Jewish people, including not just the centuries of persecution in Europe and the Holocaust, but also the history of the Jews in the Middle East. This represents a tremendous volte-face in Saudi policy. But in Saudi schools they will still not be teaching about the 3,000-year connection of Jews to the Land of Israel. That will not happen, if it happens at all, until MBS becomes King.

Saudi Arabia has had a particularly troubled attitude towards Jews in the past. Moreover, in the days when Israelis were barred from traveling to most Arab countries, Saudi Arabia also tailored its visa requirements to bar Jews.

That began to change long before the rise of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who has accelerated a policy change. Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia announced that Israeli business people would be granted entry into the kingdom.

The joke used to be that “any Jew can visit Saudi Arabia, as long as he is called Henry Kissinger.” Not just Israelis, but all Jews – tourists, academics, business people – were prevented from entering the Kingdom. In a reversal, the Kingdom has been welcoming Jewish businesspeople, encouraging Jewish tourists, and allowing Jews to live and work in the Kingdom.

Now the Saudis have seen the enormous number of business deals that their closest Arab ally, the Emirates, has made with Israelis – one billion dollars worth in the first two years of the Abraham Accords, and have heard the Emirati prediction that they will be doing ten billion dollars in trade with Israel within five years. Naturally they want something of the sort, and they are moving slowly toward normalization of ties with the Jewish state; the Saudis will join the Abraham Accords as soon as King Salman, who is 87 and in poor health, passes on, and Mohammed bin Salman becomes king. Unlike his father, MBS has little sympathy for the Palestinians, who have exasperated him with their demands; in 2018 MBS told a complaining Mahmoud Abbas to “take whatever deal the Americans offer you.”

Saudi Arabia has also allowed Jacob Yisrael Herzog, a US-born rabbi resident in Israel, to visit the kingdom several times in an attempt to build Jewish life publicly. Some Jewish critics have charged that his bombastic approach could backfire.

Moreover, in a slow two-decade-long, tedious process, Saudi Arabia has made significant progress in scrubbing its school textbooks of antisemitic and other discriminatory and supremacist content.

The PA, despite Israeli protests, keeps antisemitic passages in its schoolbooks. UNRWA keeps even more virulent antisemitic passages in its schoolbooks, despite its many promises, made to donors, to revise those texts. But Saudi Arabia, that was once a world center of Muslim anti-Jewish propaganda, has been cleaning up its own school textbooks, methodically removing antisemitic content over the past 20 years. Where there’s a will, the Saudis have shown there’s a way.

To project Saudi Arabia as a moderate forward-looking nation, and improve the kingdom’s tarnished image, MBS has met with American Jewish leaders. Many of those leaders are willing to give Saudi Arabia a pass on its abuse of human rights and still weak track record on religious tolerance, in order to advance the cause of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

These Jewish leaders are not giving Saudi Arabia “a pass on its abuse of human rights”; they are merely, and sensibly, choosing not to publicly address the matter. What sense would there be in Jewish leaders angering the Saudis just when Riyadh is moving ever closer to Israel in security cooperation? The most important thing is for those leaders to nudge the Saudis toward joining the Abraham Accords, after years of secretive security cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia. When most of the world’s countries, including members of the EU, have largely kept quiet about that Saudi human rights record, why should American Jews be made to feel they have a special duty to upbraid the Saudis? Are they the moral conscience of the world? Enough of this tikkun-olam repairing-the-world stuff; Israel’s exigstence is imperiled by Iran’s nuclear program; those Jewish leaders are right to concentrate their efforts on the survival of the Jewish state. Right now, closer relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia are critical to countering the Iranian threat.

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