Exactly three years ago, two weeks before the October 7 massacre, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the UN General Assembly and delivered a hopeful speech about the transformation ushered in by the Abraham Accords.
“They brought Arabs and Jews closer together. We see it in Jewish weddings in Dubai, in the dedication of a Torah scroll in a synagogue in Bahrain, in visitors flocking to the Museum of Moroccan Judaism in Casablanca. We see it in lessons about the Holocaust taught to Arab students in the United Arab Emirates,” Netanyahu said.
But for Netanyahu, the Abraham Accords were merely the appetizer before the main course: Saudi Arabia. “I believe that we are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough – a historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia.”
Such an agreement, Netanyahu said, would advance the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, encourage additional Arab states to normalize relations with Israel, and improve the prospects for peace with the Palestinians.
Indeed, normalization with Saudi Arabia appeared to be within reach. Two days before Netanyahu’s appearance at the UN, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in an interview with Fox News, referring to normalization with Israel: “Every day we get closer.”
A 2024 investigation by The Atlantic described how, in the fall of 2023, the Biden administration was moving closer to a broad agreement that would include Israeli-Saudi normalization, a US-Saudi defense pact, and American assistance for a Saudi civilian nuclear program.
The shift in the Saudi position on normalization had been developing for years, but it had gathered momentum since at least 2018, when MBS was quoted as telling Jewish leaders in the US that “in the last several decades the Palestinian leadership has missed one opportunity after another and rejected all the peace proposals it was given... It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining.”
MBS added that the Palestinian issue was not at the top of the Saudi government’s priorities.
Meeting between MBS, Netanyahu
Moreover, in 2020, Netanyahu met MBS on Saudi soil. It was the first time that a meeting at such a senior level had taken place in Saudi Arabia. In March 2022, MBS told The Atlantic: “We don’t look at Israel as an enemy; we look to them as a potential ally.”
This background is important because it helps illustrate just how close normalization with Saudi Arabia appeared to be before October 7. An agreement with a country of such immense political, economic, and religious importance in the Arab and Islamic worlds would have overshadowed even the Abraham Accords.
When warnings arrived from Egypt and the UAE about Hamas’s preparations – as well as the message of an “earthquake” conveyed by Yahya Sinwar through Palestinian politician Sufian Abu Zaida – they reached a prime minister who not only suffered from excessive confidence in Israel’s ability to deal with the Hamas threat but was also dazzled by the prospect of an achievement that seemed increasingly within reach.
The very fact that Egypt and the UAE maintained such close intelligence ties with Israel also diverted attention from the warnings toward the hubris generated by Israel’s cooperation with a number of key Arab states.
For Hamas, Israeli normalization with Saudi Arabia represented nothing less than a strategic threat. In the minutes of a Hamas leadership meeting held on September 26-27, 2023, less than two weeks before the attack – and shortly after the statements by MBS and Netanyahu – Sinwar spoke of the need for an “extraordinary action” to bring about a strategic shift.
Sinwar believed that, given Saudi Arabia’s importance, Saudi normalization could lead additional Arab and Muslim states to follow suit and produce a new regional order with Israel at its center.
Moreover, it could push the Palestinian issue off the agenda and undermine the “resistance project.” Sinwar argued that Hamas could not acquiesce in this process and that confrontation had to be intensified, particularly over Jerusalem and al-Aqsa.
Thus, even if planning for Operation al-Aqsa Flood – October 7 – began much earlier and was driven by other considerations as well, the normalization issue played a major role in determining the timing of the operation.
Just as Hamas sought to disrupt the Arab Peace Initiative, announced at the Arab summit in Beirut on March 28, 2002, by carrying out the devastating terrorist attack at the Park Hotel in Netanya the previous day, during the Passover Seder, so too did it seek to sabotage the normalization process through its military operation.
On the Israeli side, warning papers issued by research institutes – and perhaps by intelligence agencies as well – failed to identify the threat that normalization posed to Hamas. In many assessments, it was the internal rift within Israeli society resulting from the judicial overhaul that was seen as posing a threat to Israel’s national security.
Another example appeared in Israel Weekly War Summary published by the Israel Defense and Security Forum. Its main headline on October 5, two days before the attack, declared that “Israeli-Saudi normalization seems closer than ever.”
The same briefing also analyzed the escalation initiated by Hamas along the Gaza border but portrayed it as an attempt to pressure Israel and Qatar into granting economic concessions, without connecting it to Saudi normalization.
Three years after October 7, it is becoming increasingly clear that the question of normalization with Saudi Arabia lay at the heart of the calculations and thinking on both sides.
Sinwar, on the one hand, and Netanyahu, on the other, understood the strategic importance of the process: One sought to sabotage it, while the other did everything in his power to advance it. The former succeeded in his mission, while the latter failed – precisely because of the desire to keep the situation calm and prepare the ground for the normalization initiative.
The writer teaches in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of the board of Mitvim – The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies – and a member of the Coalition for Regional Security.