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The tiny kingdom of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf lost much of its autonomy nearly a decade ago, when its rulers headed to neighboring Saudi Arabia to save them from an Arab Spring uprising that threatened their power.
So Bahrain’s announcement on Friday that it would become the fourth Arab state to normalize relations with Israel was arguably the most significant clue so far that Saudi Arabia, the heavyweight of Gulf politics, could be moving in the same direction, albeit on its own slower timescale. .
Bahrain, scholars said, could never have taken this step if Riyadh objected.
“It’s a vector,” said Bernard Haykel, a Saudi Arabian academic at Princeton University who met with the kingdom’s factor ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “There are signs that Saudi Arabia is moving in the same direction.”
Saudi Arabia is without a doubt the ultimate prize in decades of pursuit of Israel’s recognition by the Arab states that surround it. With vast oil reserves and revered Islamic pilgrimage sites, the kingdom is the most influential state in the Arab world.
His warm ties to Israel are also an exceptionally serious blow to the Palestinians in their fight with Israel.
For the past 75 years, Saudi Arabia has been the foremost advocate among Arab states for the Palestinians, said Khaled Elgindy, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and a former adviser to Palestinian leaders.
That support dates back to the start of the Saudi-American alliance during World War II, and in recent years the Saudis have repeatedly sponsored calls for Arab states to retain diplomatic relations with Israel unless it accepts a Palestinian state as well. across historical borders: a prospect that has seemed increasingly unlikely.
“If the Saudis go to normalization with nothing meaningful to the Palestinians, then we can safely assume that there will be no incentive for Israel to move towards statehood or end its occupation,” Elgindy said. “There will be no more leverage. All the others will be normalized. “
But Saudi Arabia’s consent to the Bahrain announcement is one thing; their taking the same step is another, and still unlikely any time soon.
Speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomacy, Trump administration officials involved in pressuring the Saudis to recognize Israel say the possibility remains remote at best for now, reflecting in part the stark differences in the political context.
Polls show that sympathy for the Palestinian cause remains widespread in public opinion across the Arab world. But since the crackdown on the Bahrain Arab Spring uprising, Bahrain’s ruling royal family has virtually eliminated any national dissent or opposition, with rights groups documenting cases of summary execution and torture.
In the wake of the uprising, sectarianism has dominated the internal dynamics of Bahrain. The country’s Sunni Muslim rulers may rely on the almost unconditional support of a privileged Sunni minority united out of fear of the country’s Shiite majority. And the voices of the opposition in the Shiite majority have been largely silenced.
Since the uprising, Bahrain’s rulers have relied on the threat of Saudi Arabian military force to keep the country’s Shiite majority at bay, and Bahrain is seen in the region as a dependent client of the Saudi royal court.
The United Arab Emirates, another small Gulf state with authoritarian control over public dissent, last month became the third Arab state to say it would open full diplomatic relations with Israel, the first to do so since Jordan in 1994 and Egypt in 1979.
But the rulers of Bahrain, which is home to a major US naval base, had in fact been quietly signaling for more than 25 years that they were considering closer Israeli relations.
The signs began when Bahrain received a visit from an Israeli cabinet official in 1994; then in 2017, the country sent a delegation to Israel. More signals came last year when Bahrain hosted a conference, despite Palestinian objections, to help build Arab support for a White House-Israel-backed plan for the economic development of the Palestinian territories.
“Bahrainis were quite ahead on the track compared to other Gulf countries,” said Michael Stephens, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
Crown Prince Mohammed, the 35-year-old de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, has noted that he may also be open to recognizing Israel.
“Israelis have a right to their own land,” the prince said two years ago in an interview with The Atlantic. He said the Palestinians did too, but he also sounded remarkably opportunistic about the potential for economic and political cooperation between the Gulf states and Israel if peace were to be established.
However, while Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, it is also a much larger country with more complicated internal power structures than its neighbors, and scholars say Prince Mohammed should care more than other Gulf rulers about public opinion and the opinions of his own family.
Perhaps most importantly, you should also consider the views of your elderly father, 84-year-old King Salman. The monarch has delegated most of the governing authority to his son, and it is difficult to determine how much power the king continues to wield. But in his rare public statements he has repeatedly expressed the kind of support for the Palestinian struggle that defined Arab relations with Israel for his generation.
After the publication of Prince Mohammed’s comments on the Israeli right to land, for example, the Saudi news agency appeared to issue a royal corrective. He reported that in a phone call to President Trump, the king had reiterated “the firm position of the kingdom towards the Palestinian issue and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital.”
F. Gregory Gause, a Saudi Arabian scholar at Texas A&M University, suggested that Bahrain’s announcements about Israel may not have reached “kingly level”; Bahrain is just a client state, not the kingdom itself, he noted. “I think that for someone from the king’s generation, the idea of normalization with Israel is simply unimaginable.”
Still, Saudi social media has recently begun to vibrate with religious scholars calling for equal treatment of Jews or others preparing to improve relations with Israel – messages that could not be spread without the consent of Prince Mohammed. Some scholars say that the messages can even be improved at the urging of Prince Mohammed.
“Everything is top-down,” said Professor Gause. “The person who runs the day-to-day operations of Saudi Arabia is preparing the public for different kinds of relations with Israel, but he is preparing the public, he is not about to.”
