US Should Resist Saudi Pressure

The Saudis want to play the old game with the United States and the US should dictate new rules. The US wants the Saudis to attend a planned Israel-Palestinian peace conference President Bush announced earlier this month, and now the Saudis are trying to shift conference's focus away from Palestinian reform and toward US pressure on Israel. The US should push back and resist Saudi pressure.

"We are interested in a peace conference that deals with substantive matters of peace, issues of real substance, not non-substantive issues," the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said at a news conference with [US Secretary of State] Rice and [US Secretary of Defense] Gates in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. "If that does so, that becomes of great interest to Saudi Arabia. . . . We would look very closely and very hard at attending." (Washington Post, August 2, 2007)

"Substantive matters of peace" is code for Israel's withdrawal to the 1967 borders and vacating all West Bank settlements. However, as the Gaza disengagement proved, the impediments to lasting peace do not involve land and settlements but lack of a serious partner among the Palestinians ready to make compromises for peace, among them ending terrorism once and for all as a negotiating strategy and recognizing Israel's right to secure and defendable borders. In order to succeed, the conference must focus on creating a reformed, accountable Palestinian Authority that can take public support away from Hamas. Otherwise, it will fail and peace will be further delayed. That's why the US must insist to the Saudis that there's a new game in town, with new rules, and that the US has sobered up and will no longer fall for their tricks if Israeli-Palestinian peace is ever to be achieved.