Security for Riyadh, uncertainty for Israel

In a few days Washington will try to sell the world a neat package. Saudi Arabia gets a historic security pact and astronomical American weapons. 

The United Nations gets language about a “pathway to a Palestinian state.” Israel is told to smile for the photo. It is sold as peace. It looks a lot more like blackmail.

After October 7, the idea of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan is not just naïve, it is reckless. You do not watch thousands of Hamas terrorists butcher, rape and kidnap Israelis, see crowds celebrate it from Gaza to Western capitals, and then announce that the answer is to give these societies an army, borders and international recognition. That is not peace. That is rewarding terror.

The first lie in this whole construction is about Palestinian public opinion. No one in polite diplomatic circles wants to say it, but the numbers are there for anyone who cares to look. 

In poll after poll, Hamas and similar movements beat Fatah and the Palestinian Authority by huge margins. 

Large segments of the public still see “armed struggle” as legitimate and the October 7 attack as justified or “correct.” At the same time, Palestinians themselves describe the Palestinian Authority as corrupt, useless and illegitimate. Most want Mahmoud Abbas to resign and see his circle as a cartel, not a leadership.

So let us be honest. Washington is not building a peaceful, responsible Palestinian state. 

It is fantasizing about a leadership that does not exist, in a society where the most popular force is either Hamas itself or movements that share its culture of martyrdom and rejection.

Why is this happening anyway?

First, this is about Saudi Arabia, not about Palestinians. Washington wants to lock Riyadh into its security orbit and keep China and Russia out. The price is a treaty, bases, missiles, maybe F-35s and advanced drones. That is the hard part of the deal: real metal, real contracts, real money.

Second, Washington wants a story. 

The story is that all this hardware is wrapped in “peace.” So someone in the State Department sprinkles magic words into resolutions and talking points, “pathway,” “political horizon,” “two states.” The same vocabulary that has failed for thirty years is suddenly recycled after the worst antisemitic massacre since the Shoah.

Third, Saudi Arabia needs cover in the Arab and Muslim world. 

Mohammed bin Salman cannot normalize openly with Israel while Gaza is in ruins without some symbolic gift to “Palestine.” 

The cheapest gift is verbal. Not genuine reform, not an end to incitement, not disarming terror groups, only sentences about a future state.

Israel is not pushing for any of this. The current government would collapse if it signed a real Palestinian state. 

Most Israelis understand that any state created today in Gaza or Judea and Samaria would be either openly controlled by jihadists or quietly infiltrated by them. 

They also know that this entire regional structure is being built around one man in Riyadh. Today Mohammed bin Salman has interests that push him toward cooperation with the United States and a cold pragmatism toward Israel. 

Tomorrow he can be weakened, overthrown or replaced. The Shah of Iran was once armed to the teeth in the name of stability. His regime fell, the weapons stayed and the ideology changed.

There is another illusion at work. Israelis have never had an American president like Donald Trump, surrounded by so many advisers who genuinely feel close to Israel and to the Jewish people. 

It is tempting to believe that with “our” president in the White House, risks can be taken and history can be bent in our favor. 

That is a dangerous dream. The most constant thing in politics is change. Trump will not sit in the Oval Office forever. 

Sooner or later there will be a smaller, weaker president, eager to trade away Israeli security for applause in European salons and likes on social media, while sitting on top of the same weapons architecture and the same fragile “Palestinian state” that was signed in a different era.

There is no American guarantee against that. The horizon that diplomats talk about cannot be trusted, because it changes every four or eight years. 

The real guarantees are elsewhere: in an Israel that refuses suicide by diplomacy, in regional partners who truly want stability and prosperity, and in a Jewish people that says with one voice that October 7 will never be rewarded with a state. 

The hope is not in magical “pathways.” It is in a simple doctrine that must not bend: never again means never again, even when the pressure comes dressed as peace and backed by presidents and princes who will be gone long before the consequences arrive.