Palestinian leaders want Israel to relinquish control over small parts of the West Bank and tear down some illegal Israeli communities there as part of any US-brokered deal establishing diplomatic ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, said Saudi and Palestinian officials — far short of demands they have publicly made in the past.
The relatively modest Palestinian demands offer another sign that the West Bank leadership is willing to co-operate with White House efforts to broker a landmark Middle East deal.
The requests, reported earlier by Axios and the Times of Israel, signal a shift for Palestinian leaders, who accused the United Arab Emirates of stabbing them in the back in 2020 when the Gulf nation secretly negotiated a US-brokered deal to formally establish diplomatic relations with Israel. That agreement paved the way for Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan to follow suit, creating momentum for Israeli efforts to establish diplomatic ties with more Arab and Muslim nations.
US President Joe Biden is making a push to open up diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel, an agreement that would send a message to other Arab and Muslim nations that their decades of shunning Israel should come to an official end.
The complicated discussions face huge hurdles but securing Palestinian support would give any deal added legitimacy. Saudi Arabia has been a longtime financial and political supporter of Palestinian efforts to create an independent nation alongside Israel, but it cut off funding for the Palestinian Authority in 2021 amid persistent concerns about incompetence and corruption.
Read the article by Dion Nissenbaum and Summer Said in The Australian (from The Wall Street Journal)