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Will Saudi Arabia Push Abbas to Curb Campaign Against Trump?

(Jerusalem Post) Ben Lynfield - PA President Mahmoud Abbas met on Wednesday with Saudi King Salman in Riyadh, seeking support for his efforts to reject President Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. But Israeli analysts say the Saudis, given their close alliance with the U.S., are likely to press Abbas to halt his campaign against Trump's move and show openness to American ideas for peacemaking. Gabriel Ben-Dor, a Middle East scholar at the University of Haifa, said, "The Saudis want Abbas to lower the flames and stop inflaming everyone against the U.S. and the recent pronouncement on Jerusalem. The Saudis want peace and quiet, they want the U.S. to play a prominent role in the Middle East, they want to weaken the radicals in the region, and the last thing they are interested in is the kind of rabble-rousing Abbas has been engaged in." "The Saudis have made a major decision to take on the Iranians in the fight for mastery of the Middle East, and they want to be allied with the U.S. in this huge effort, and everything else is subservient to this goal which is the primary force driving Saudi foreign policy today." Israel is seen by Riyadh as a "surreptitious strategic partner in the struggle with Iran. They would like to quiet down the entire Israeli-Palestinian issue to mobilize Arab support for standing up to Iran." Joshua Teitelbaum, a Saudi specialist at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, said, "The Saudis are probably telling [Abbas] he should put the Jerusalem issue behind him and play ball with what the Americans are cooking up now; that there's no other game in town. That it's us and the Americans who are the only ones who can move the Israelis."
2017-12-21 00:00:00
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