Shortly before the 7 October 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel, the Harris Poll headlined on September 13th, “New Poll: Many Americans Oppose a Defense Pact with Saudi Arabia” (but then they changed its URL so that fewer people would ever find it, and now its URL is here, and that has been archived here and I archived it also here, so as to preserve the record of its existence) and reported:
Just over half of Americans (55%) would oppose an agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that would establish diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel in exchange for the U.S. committing American soldiers to defend Saudi Arabia in the event of a war, according to a Quincy Institute/Harris Poll survey released today.
The survey found that when presented with the prospective details* of the deal the Biden administration is currently pursuing with Saudi Arabia, nearly 3 in 5 Americans (58%) feel this is a bad deal for the U.S. and there is no justification for committing U.S. soldiers to defend Saudi Arabia. There were no significant differences on views of this deal among political affiliation.
* The United States is currently pursuing a deal with Saudi Arabia which would normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. As part of the agreement, the U.S. is reportedly considering offering Saudi Arabia a defense pact in which U.S. soldiers would defend them in the event of war, and the U.S. would provide them with more arms sales and nuclear technology, which could be used for the development of nuclear weapons. Some say this deal is worthwhile if it means Saudi Arabia and Israel establish diplomatic relations, and Saudi Arabia draws closer to the U.S. than to China. While others say the U.S. military should not engage in more Middle East wars, and that U.S. soldiers should not be deployed to defend the authoritarian regime in Saudi Arabia.
That proposed U.S.-Saudi Agreement was to be the crowning achievement of Donald Trump’s “Abraham Accords” agreements (basically like that with Saudi Arabia which was being negotiated prior to October 7th between Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud), between all of the major Sunni Muslim Arab countries and Israel. (Here, for example, is the one that Netanyahu and Trump had signed with UAE’s Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan on 15 September 2020.) And The Saudi version of it was to include explicitly a commitment by the U.S. Government to put down any revolution that might occur in that country to overthrow the Saud family who lead that country. The U.S. Government would guarantee the Saud family that they won’t be overthrown — will always own that country (as they now do). The deal would also include a renewed commitment by that family to purchase $350 billion of U.S.-made weapons over a ten-year period (the largest arms-deal in history — that deal had actually been negotiated by Trump in 2018).
The Abraham Accords grant recognition to Israel’s Government without requiring it to achieve any settlement with the Palestinians. They are agreements between those Sunni Arab Governments granting this official recognition to Israel and thereby leaving ONLY the Shiite Muslim countries — Iran, Iraq, and Syria — still actively supporting rights for Palestinians.
President Biden 100% backs Trump’s Abraham Accords.
The reason why Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th was to prevent the Sauds from signing, because, if they did, then the entire Palestinian cause would, in effect, have no defenders outside Palestine itself. Palestinians would be abandoned to whatever Israel wants to do to them. The independent Middle-Eastern journalist Steven Sahiounie headlined on October 29th, “The US has betrayed Egypt again”, and explained that (Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al-) “Sisi knows there is an Israeli plan, condoned and supported by Biden, to remove all Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt, where they will be supported by humanitarian aid, but can never repopulate Gaza again. They will be permanently homeless and stateless refugees.” And, as Sahiounie also explained, “the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine, met on October 21” and agreed to stand firm against that plan by Netanyahu and Biden.
Biden had hoped to achieve a signed agreement — Abraham Accords — with the Sauds, as being a fait accompli, so as to leave the Palestinians in the ditch, to their Israeli fate, and so as to get the Sauds to recommit to fulfilling their promise, which they had made to Trump, to spend the full $350 billion on purchases of U.S. armaments within the specified 2018-2028 time-frame.
So: it was do-or-die for Palestinian rights, and Hamas therefore attacked on October 7th. It was done in order to prevent the Sauds from signing Abraham Accords. The Trump-Biden-Netanyahu plan was for these Arab countries to grant recognition to Israel without there having been any settlement reached between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Arabs were to do this in order to please the Americans. But now, all of that will become mere dust.
Consequently, the Sauds probably will not end up buying that $350 billion worth of U.S.-made armaments after all. (They might buy that much in weaponry, but now that the U.S. is so hated in all Islamic countries, the more of those weapons that are made in America, the higher the likelihood of a revolution to overthrow those rulers will be.) Trump’s plan for the Middle East is likely to produce nothing but the biggest and most destructive Middle Eastern war there ever was, and possibly even WW III if Biden carries out his threats to — with Israel’s help — destroy Iran and destroy its supporters in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.
Whether Russia and/or China would come to the defense of Iran and its Middle Eastern allies if the U.S. and/or Israel try to destroy them, is not known, but, if it happens, then that would be WW III. And if it won’t happen, then the almost universal revulsion to what Israel and America had done would mean that “The American Century” would already be over, in any case — merely pariah-nations. The “brand-value” of them would be like a stench.
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