Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the United Nations on Friday that Israel is on the “cusp” of normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia and that Palestinians should not get to “veto” the move.
Addressing the General Assembly in New York, Netanyahu said agreements in 2020 to establish formal ties with three other Arab states had already “heralded the dawn of a new age of peace.”
Netanyahu firmly rejected the insistence of Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, in his own UN speech on Thursday, that there could be no peace in the Middle East without a Palestinian state.
US President Joe Biden’s administration has been leading talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia, whose crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, recently said that the two sides were getting closer.
Israel in 2020 established relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, its first normalizations with the Arab world in decades after making peace with neighboring Egypt and Jordan.
Netanyahu said that Israel and the Arab states were united by feeling a threat from the “tyrants of Tehran”, the Shiite clerics who have ruled Iran since 1979.
He made a veiled threat of nuclear attack if Iran pursues its own atomic bomb.
Israel has a widely known but undeclared nuclear program.
Tehran denies seeking a nuclear bomb but has breached limits on uranium enrichment set in a US-brokered 2015 deal following former president Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement and reimposition sweeping sanctions.
Khalil Wakim, with AFP
