Saudi Arabia’s Future: Palestine or Zion?

 

By James M. Dorsey

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Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may have opened a Pandorra’s Box when he suggested creating a Palestinian state on Saudi territory.

Mr. Netanyahu wasn’t just throwing a hand grenade into US efforts to engineer Saudi recognition of Israel when he told Israeli television, “The Saudis can create a Palestinian state in Saudi Arabia; they have a lot of land over there.”

A quick Saudi retort hinted at the Pandorra’s Box, a decades-old assertion, as fantastical as it may sound, that Judaism’s Zion was in Saudi Arabia, not in Palestine.

Saudi Shura Council member Yousef bin Trad Al-Saadoun

Saudi Shura Council member Yousef bin Trad Al-Saadoun ridiculed Mr. Netanyahu’s suggestion with an anti-Semitic undertone. Mr. Al-Saadoun countered the prime minister’s proposition by recommending that US President Donald J. Trump relocate Israelis temporarily to Alaska until he has acquired Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory.

In a sharply worded statement, the Saudi foreign ministry denounced Mr. Netanyahu’s proposition as the expression of an “extremist, occupying mentality” and an attempt to “divert attention from the continuous crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian brothers in Gaza.”

Mr. Trump insists that the United States must take ownership of Greenland in order to preserve “international security.”

Portraying Mr. Trump’s jaw-dropping plan to resettle the bulk of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians in Egypt, Jordan, and any other country willing to accept them as a Jewish conspiracy, Mr. Al-Saadoun offered a distorted version of history.

“The capabilities of the Jews to provoke sedition and wars is rooted throughout human history. Therefore, it is unsurprising that many Western countries expelled them from their lands between the 13th and 16th centuries,” Mr. Al-Saadoun said.

“Their malicious cunning is not hidden from view. They are adept at misleading public opinion and pushing opponents to adopt defensive positions by creating an imaginary reality in which fictional ideas and projects are open for discussion,” he added.

“The Zionists and their associates must know that they will not be able to lure the Saudi leadership and government into the traps set by media manipulation and false political pressure,” Mr. Al-Saadoun said.

With Mr. Netanyahu heading the most ultra-nationalist, expansionist government in Israeli history and a US president who believes he can imperially take control of whatever territory he wants, Israeli claims to Arab territory, as absurd as some of those assertions may be, take on a real-life quality.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds a map of "The New Middle East" without Palestine

Mr. Netanyahu and members of his Cabinet claim title to Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, and Syria’s Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967, and assert that Jordan is Palestine.

Defense Minister Israel Katz last week ordered the military to draw up a plan for the "voluntary departure" of Gazan Palestinians. With a new round of promotions on the horizon, Mr. Katz signalled that support of expulsion would be a consideration in promotions in the military.

Noting that Bezalel Smotrich, Mr. Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist finance minister, defined voluntary as the "management of humanitarian aid," the throttling of the flow of desperately needed existential goods into Gaza, Haaretz journalist Aluf Benn cautioned that a resumption of the Gaza war coupled with a policy of starvation would enable moving Gazans out of the Strip.

“This is the first time Israel has announced a practical plan for the expulsion of Arabs from territory it controls. From now on, transfer is government policy,” Mr. Benn said. Transfer is a euphemism in Israeli parlour for expulsion.

 

In response, Hamas has delayed further exchanges in stages of hostages it captured during its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel for Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli prisons, asserting that Israel’s blocking of the entry of relief supplies into Gaza violated the 42-day first phase of the Gaza ceasefire that ends on March 1.

Hamas has so far released in five stages 18 of the 33 hostages it agreed to free in the first phase in exchange for 550 Palestinians. The final 59 captives are scheduled for release in the second phase, provided Hamas and Israel agree on the terms.

Palestinians and aid workers say Israel initially complied with the flow of aid agreed as part of the ceasefire, but has more recently slowed the flow down.

In Washington last week, Mr. Netanyahu lobbied US Congress members to support Mr. Trump’s resettlement plan. Mr. Netanyahu’s aides sought to persuade American columnists to write favourably about the plan.

Mr. Netanyahu and his aides sought to counter criticism of Mr. Trump’s plan among Republicans, including Senators Rand Paul and Lindsay Graham and former national security advisor John Bolton.

A CBS news poll concluded that 47 per cent of Americans opposed the president’s plan, while only 13 per cent supported it.

Similarly, opinions among American Jews, according to Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, vary.

A poll before the Hamas attack in the largely liberal Portland Jewish community of 75,000 showed that 52 per cent of those polled did not identify as Zionists; only 38 per cent said it was important for Israel to be a Jewish state. A mere 21 per cent believed Israel lived up to its values in terms of human rights.

“It’s a snapshot that suggests that there is far more variety among American Jews today than we tend to recognise when we make a broad generalisation based on either what American Jewish organisations say or what public intellectuals say,” said Debra Dash Moore, a preeminent historian of American Jewry.

Hamas official Basem Naim used Messrs. Netanyahu and Trump’s proposals to urge Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to drop notions of recognising Israel. “This entity…poses a threat to the entire region, not just to the Palestinians,” Mr. Naim said.

The irony is that the notion of a potential Israeli claim to Saudi territory was first developed by one of the 20^th-century Arab world’s foremost historians, Kamal Salibi, a Greek Orthodox Christian-turned-Anglican Protestant from Lebanon.

The founder of the Institute for Inter-Faith Studies in Amman, Mr. Salibi, kicked up a storm in 1985 when he concluded in a linguistic exegesis, reinforced by archaeological and geographic research, that Judaism’s Zion was in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, today’s Saudi Arabia.

Originally published in German, Mr. Salibi’s bombshell book, The Bible Came from Arabia, gained traction when it was translated and published by a prominent British publisher.

Israelis, Jews, Saudis, Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians found common ground at the time to denounce Mr. Salibi in stark terms.

Israelis, Jews, and Evangelists charged that Mr. Salibi’s thesis constituted an attempt to delegitimize the Jewish State and undermine its historic claim to modern-day Israel. Israeli historians and rabbis denounced the theory as mythology, science fiction, and nonsense.

A photo believed to be showing members of the Narjan Jewish community in Saudi Arabia. Source: Twitter

Saudis, afraid that Israelis might take Mr. Salibi seriously and attempt to colonise the mountains of Sarawat, which the scholar believed was the Jordan Valley referred to in the Bible, bulldozed dozens of villages, which contained buildings or structures from Biblical antiquity.

In another twist of irony, the Saudi government’s publication in 1977 of a comprehensive list of thousands of place names in the kingdom inspired Mr. Salibi’s exegesis. The list sparked Mr. Salibi’s interest because he had found little source material for the early period of Arabian history he was writing about.

''I was simply searching for the names of places of non-Arabic origin in west Arabia when the evidence that the whole Bible land was here struck me in the face. Nearly all the biblical place names were concentrated in an area about 600 km long by 200 km wide, comprising what today (Saudi Arabia's) Asir (province) and the southern part of the Hijaz is," Mr. Salibi said in his exegesis.

Mr. Salibi concluded that Arabian Jews migrated to Palestine in the second century BC, establishing the Hasmonean kingdom under Simon Maccabaeus. Mr. Salibi argued that Biblical place names were reinterpreted over time to apply to the new land as the Jews replaced Hebrew with Aramaic.

The Lebanese scholar contended that the language change distorted the Jews’ historical narrative by falsely asserting that Biblical events occurred in what Jews call Eretz Israel rather than in Arabia.

Writing in The Times of Israel in 2016, journalist Jessica Steinberg noted that a vibrant Jewish community had populated 3,000 years ago areas that today are part of Saudi Arabia and that the cities of Medina, Khaybar, and Taymar hosted large numbers of Jews in the 6^th and 7^th century.

 

Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela. Source: Wiki Commons

Mr. Bejamin described the places he visited and the people he met, providing a demographic rundown of Jews in every town and country.

Today, a dying generation of elderly Saudis of Yemeni origin who live in towns and cities along Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen recall the days before the establishment of the State of Israel when Jews were part of their community.

Anticipating a day when Israelis might be able to visit Saudi Arabia, Ms. Steinberg offered a primer of five Jewish sites in the kingdom’s Khaybar Valley and the ancient city of Taymar that can be accessed virtually:

n  -- Khaybar, a date-growing valley and oasis with natural wells, home to a Jewish community and served as a stop on the incense trade route from Yemen to Syria and Lebanon. Although its 1,400-year-old cemetery is void of headstones, locals recall its Jewish history.

n  -- Khaybar Fortress, the 1,400-year-old Fortress of the Jews, perched on a hill overlooking the oasis that Prophet Mohammed conquered. His nephew and son-in-law, Ali, unlocked the fortress’ gate, letting the Prophet’s army enter and conquer it.

n  -- The Palace of the Jewish Tribe’s Head, also located in Khaybar, home to the Jewish tribe of Marhab, famous for its gold and jewellery trade.

n  -- Tayma a fortified Jewish city, where travellers stopped at the oasis to visit the Al-Naslaa Rock Formation, one of the most photogenic petroglyphs, or rock art, depicting the life and times of ancient communities.

n  -- Bir Haddaj, a large well at the centre of Tayma that dates to the middle of the 6^th century BC. The well is mentioned in the Book of Isaiah as the place where the descendants of Ishmael’s son, Tema, lived.

 St   Ms. Steinberg noted, “Saudi Arabia is not high on the list of Jewish travel destinations… Yet 3,000 years ago, around the time of the First Temple, there was a strong, vibrant Jewish community in the area of what is today Saudi Arabia.”

Cynics have long joked that Israel’s tourism slogan should be, ‘Visit us before we visit you.’

In today’s Middle East, Mr. Salibi’s thesis and Mr. Netanyahu’s suggestion of creating a Palestinian state on Saudi territory take on a life of their own.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.