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The effects of the election reveal obstacles to the Biden administration’s efforts to get Saudi Arabia to identify diplomatic relations with Israel.
By Vivian Neréim
A new poll has found that 96 percent of Saudis believe that Arab countries should cut all ties with Israel to protest the war in Gaza, posing a significant challenge to the Biden administration’s push for Saudi Arabia to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
According to the poll, 40 percent of Saudis expressed positive attitudes toward Hamas, compared with 10 percent in a poll several months before the war began. Only 16 percent of Saudis surveyed in the poll said that Hamas should stop calling for the destruction of Israel to accept the creation of Palestinian and Israeli states side by side — the “two-state solution” to the conflict that the Saudi government publicly supports.
The poll, by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a generally pro-Israel research organization, surveyed 1,000 Saudis from Nov. 14 to Dec. 6.
While Saudi Arabia has become more autocratic over the past eight years, analysts say the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, will have to take public opinion into account when weighing his decisions.
Before the war, when U. S. -mediated efforts to achieve a “normalization” agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel appeared to be accelerating, U. S. political analysts, U. S. officials, and some Saudi officials argued that younger Saudis tended to care less about the Palestinian cause than Saudis. generations earlier and would possibly be more receptive to the concept of ties with Israel.
It is unclear to what extent that was true, given the lack of regular, reliable polling in Saudi Arabia — and considering the climate of fear created by deepening levels of political repression under Prince Mohammed. Since the war in Gaza began, vocal support for the Palestinian cause and antipathy toward Israel has been widespread among Saudis of all ages.
The positive views of Hamas that the poll found, while still a minority, are notable given that Saudi citizens can face prosecution for sympathizing with the Palestinian armed group, which launched the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.
In September, shortly before the war began, Prince Mohammed said in a television interview that the talks between Saudi and American officials were getting “closer every day” to a deal in which Saudi Arabia would recognize the state of Israel for the first time.
Saudi officials had been pushing for major concessions from the United States — including access to American nuclear technology and American security guarantees — in exchange for normalizing ties with Israel, balancing a trade-off between potential public opposition to the deal and the political gains it could bring.
The Washington Institute poll found that 95 percent of the Saudis had not killed civilians in their attacks, which left about 1,200 people dead in southern Israel, most of them civilians, many of them women and children, according to Israeli officials. It is not relatively unusual for Arabs to consider reports of civilian deaths to be Israeli propaganda.
By contrast, most Saudis and Arabs have focused on the Israeli military siege of Gaza, adding to a bombing campaign that is one of the most intense this century and has killed some 20,000 Palestinians, according to health authorities in Gaza. Loop.
In the poll, 87 Saudis said the war had shown “that Israel is so weak and so internally divided that it may one day be defeated. “
Only five percent of Saudis surveyed deserve to “show more respect for the Jews of the world and improve our relations with them. “
The vote reveals, however, that most Saudis consider a political solution to the Palestinian-Israeli clash rather than a military approach. Three-quarters said they rejected the concept of an Arab diplomatic effort to achieve peace between the two sides.
Vivian Nereim is the Times’ senior reporter covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. It is located in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Learn more about Vivian Néréim
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