Saudi Iran
A charter member of the Arab League, Saudi Arabia has supported Palestinian rights to sovereignty, and called for withdrawal from the West Bank and other territory occupied by Israel since 1967.[citation needed] However Saudi Arabia never participated in the Arab-Israeli wars and has not taken part in conflict with Israel in battle[citation needed]. The 1981 Israel operation Operation Opera, a preemptive strike on nuclear reactor purchased by Iraq from France in 1976, allegedly[by whom?] took place with the cooperation of Saudi Arabia, as the flightpath was over Saudi territory.[citation needed]. In recent years[when?] Saudi Arabia has changed its viewpoint concerning the validity of negotiating with Israel[citation needed], which it previously refused[citation needed]. It calls for Israel's withdrawal from territory occupied in June 1967. In 2002 then-Crown Prince Abdullah extended a multilateral peace proposal based on withdrawal that would follow the borders of two state solution. At that time, Israel did not respond to the offer. In 2007 Saudi Arabia again officially supported a peaceful resolution of the Arab–Israeli conflict in which Israel was to concede to withdraw to the borders set in the two state solutions, which generated more official negative reactions from Israeli authorities, citing the Oslo Accords and the Saudis' deviation from those accords. At this time, no demands were made of any other party other than of Israel.
Saudi Arabia rejected the Camp David Accords, claiming that they would be unable to achieve a comprehensive political solution that would ensure Palestinian Arabs can all move to Israel and the division of Jerusalem. In response to Egypt "betraying" the Arab States and signing peace with Israel, Saudi Arabia, along with all the Arab States, broke diplomatic relations with and suspended aid to Egypt; the two countries renewed formal ties in 1987. Simultaneously Saudi Arabia and Israel initiated their early steps towards a secret dialogue.[5]
Saudi Arabia does not have official diplomatic relations with Israel. In 2005, Saudi Arabia announced the end of its ban on Israeli goods and services, due to its application to the World Trade Organization, where one member country cannot have a total ban on another. However, as of August 2006, the Saudi boycott was not cancelled.[6][7][8] However, Saudi Arabia recognizes that its ally, the United States, has a strong and supportive relationship of Israel.[citation needed]
In spite of not having official diplomatic relations, they cooperate with each other by intelligence exchange, especially about Iran[citation needed]. In a meeting at the Washington office of the Council on Foreign Relations, Anwar Eshki, a retired major general in the Saudi armed forces and Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, discussed "their common interests in opposing Iran".[9]
Saudi Arabia played an active role in attempting to bring the Palestinians towards a self-governing condition which would permit negotiations with Israel. It has done so primarily by trying to mend the schism between Fatah and Hamas, most notably when King Abdullah invited the two factions to negotiations in Mecca resulting in the Mecca Agreement of February 7, 2007. The agreement soon failed, but Saudi Arabia has continued to support a national unity government for the Palestinians, and strongly opposed the war in Gaza in early 2009.
The Times has reported that Saudi Arabia has tested the ability to stand down their air defenses to allow an Israeli strike on Iran to pass through their airspace.[10] Both nations have denied this.[11][12]
After the Arab Spring, Israel views the Saudi government as "guarantor of stability", according to the New York Times. In 2011, Israel approved a German sale of 200 Leopard tanks to Saudi Arabia.[13] The approval came from Uzi Arad, the national security advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu.[14]
During the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, Middle East Eye editor David Hearst wrote an article claiming that Saudi Arabia was supportive of Israel's actions in the conflict, and that officials from Mossad and the Saudi intelligence agencies met regularly.[15] The Saudi ambassador to the United Kingdom, Mohammed bin Nawwaf bin Abdulaziz, denied that the Saudi government was allied with Israel, describing Israel's actions against civilians in Gaza as "crimes against humanity" - however he did not deny that the two countries had contact, saying that "any dealings by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with Israel have been limited to attempts to bring about a plan for peace".[16]
According to a May 23 article by The Times of Israel, the London-based Arab paper Rai al-Youm reported that Israel had offered to provide Saudi Arabia with Iron Dome technology against rockets from bordering Yemen. The proposal was reportedly sent via American diplomats during a meeting in Amman, Jordan, and subsequently refused. Official sources have not confirmed the report.[17]
A political analyst by the name of "Mujtahid" who has been leaking information against Saudi Arabia on Twitter since early 2000s alleged that an upcoming drone-assembly plant in Saudi Arabia that is being developed with cooperation from South Africa is actually a guise for a clandenstine Israeli-Saudi Arabian deal for buying Israeli drones via South Africa. The Israeli drones are first sent to South Africa where they are disassembled and shipped to Saudi Arabia where they are assembled again.[18]
After Egypt agreed to the transferring the Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia in April 2016, the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia said that his country would honor the terms of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty regarding the islands however they will have no direct contact with Israel over the matter.[19] The Israeli government did not signal any opposition to the deal.
Iran–Israel relations
Iranian–Israeli relations can be divided into four major phases: the period from 1947–53, the friendly period during the era of the Pahlavi dynasty, the worsening period from the 1979 Iranian Revolution to 1990, and finally the hostility since the end of the First Gulf War. In 1947, Iran was among 13 countries that voted against the UN Partition Plan for Palestine. Two years later, Iran also voted against Israel's admission to the United Nations. Nevertheless, Iran was the second Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel as a sovereign state after Turkey. After the 1953 coup d'état, which brought pro-Western Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power, relations between the two countries significantly improved. After the 1979 Revolution, Iran severed all diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel, and its Islamic government does not recognize the legitimacy of Israel as a state.
Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in office from August 2005 to August 2013, at the October 2005 "World Without Zionism" conference in Tehran[109][110] adopted a sharp anti-Zionist stance. On 8 December 2005, during a summit of Muslim nations in Islam's holy city of Mecca, Ahmadinejad told Iran's Arabic channel Al-Alam a complicated story on the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel. Since then, the Iranian president has made statements pertaining to these topics.[citation needed]
Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami[edit]
In August 2012, a senior cleric and Tehran's provisional Friday Prayers Leader Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, speaking about Qods Day, called for the annihilation of the "Zionist regime," emphasizing that the spread of the "Islamic Awakening" in the Middle East "heralds annihilation of the Zionist regime.
To see further how the anti-Israeli sentiments in Iran are deep rooted and are not limited to the Islamic Republic's hardliners, watch the following interview with Iran's last king (before the Islamic revolution) known as the Shah, who is often mentioned as a friend of Israel (which he was in many ways, by the way). In this short video the Shah complains about the Jews wielding too much influence in the American government and advancing Israel's interests.
Democracy: I believe the most important reason why most Arab countries are not as anti-Israel as Iran is that they are not democratic. In fact the people of these countries have stronger anti-Israeli sentiments compared with the Iranian people, but they don't have a say in what their government does. Notice that this is about those Arab countries being non-democratic, rather than being about Iran being democratic. The point is that if Arab nations had democratic governments, they would be way more anti-Israel than they are now. If this sounds odd to you, remember how Egypt's Mubarak and the Jordanian kingdom became friends of Israel in the face of their peoples' feelings, and notice how an anti-Israeli Morsi was elected as president in Egypt as soon as Mubarak was ousted.
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