[Jpost] Saudi Arabia may not publicly want Israel in Rafah, but Riyadh has been watching the war closely since October 7.
Israel faces several challenges almost seven months into the war in Gaza. Hamas is still not defeated, and international pressure on Israel is growing. A recent column at The New York Times suggested that “Israel has a choice to make: Rafah or Riyadh.” This is what columnist Thomas Friedman argues. “US officials tell me that if Israel does mount a major military operation in Rafah, over the administration’s objections, President Biden would consider restricting certain arms sales to Israel.”
The article also claims that Saudi Arabia and other Arab states could agree to an Arab peacekeeping force in Gaza. “Israel’s long-term interests are in Riyadh, not Rafah,” the article concludes.
Israel continues to fight Hamas almost seven months after one of the worst terror attacks in history which led to the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. However, the war in Gaza has not been fought with the urgency that one would expect a response to such mass murder would entail. Instead, Israel has approached the war against Hamas with slow, cautious operations of campaigns in Gaza, and the terrorist group continues to thrive in the Strip.
Now, most of the focus has moved to Rafah, the southern city in Gaza along the Egyptian border that is controlled by Hamas. It is believed Hamas has several “battalions” of fighters there and that it uses Rafah to control aid entering the embattled enclave and also uses it to smuggle weapons. Many Gazans who fled fighting in the north in October and November are now displaced in Rafah.Any Israeli operation in Rafah is now under the international spotlight and Israel has been encouraged to refrain from an operation there or to at least help the civilians move out of the way.
The assertion that Israel should end the war in Gaza, withdraw, and set its sights on normalization with Riyadh would appear to indicate that the Jewish state should basically give up on security for its citizens and its border in exchange for normalization with Saudi Arabia.
This is a strange theory. Most countries don’t sacrifice security for peace, and there is no evidence that giving up on security on the Gaza border will bring peace. If it was true that giving up on securing the Gaza border would bring peace, then how does one explain the lack of peace on October 6?
In October, Israel left the Gaza border relatively undefended and trusted that Hamas was deterred, a message conveyed to Israel repeatedly in recent years. Hamas is hosted by America’s major non-NATO ally Qatar and apparently Washington, Doha and others thought Hamas was not going to do anything against Israel.
This raises a key problem with the “Rafah or Riyadh” argument. On October 6 Hamas controlled all of Gaza, and Israel wasn’t contemplating any ground operation in Rafah, and yet there was no normalization with Riyadh. In fact, Hamas sought to sabotage any peace deal by launching its massive war. Now Israel is being told to leave Gaza and basically greet October 7 with a shrug to get normalization with Riyadh.
The fact is that if Israel sacrifices its security on the border for normalization deals, it will get more massacres and war, and the deals will be in jeopardy. This is because Hamas, backed by Iran, Russia, Turkey and other countries, are all seeking to sabotage the normalization agreements and Abraham Accords. It should be recalled that before the UAE agreed to the accords, Turkey threatened to break relations with Abu Dhabi if it proceeded.
In short, the pro-Iran axis in the region has systematically sought to prevent normalization between Israel and other states. October 7 was one of those attempts.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
