Riyadh stalls peace with Israel, citing Syria and Palestinians while excusing Arab instability and terror.
Saudi Arabia is once again hardening its posture toward normalization with Israel, signaling to Washington that Jerusalem—not regional chaos or Arab failure—is allegedly responsible for stalled diplomacy. According to reporting by Kan News, Saudi officials have told American counterparts that Israel’s security actions in Syria are now being framed as a new obstacle to rapprochement.
A source within the Saudi royal household claimed that there is a growing belief in Riyadh that Israel prefers a fragmented Syria rather than a stable one—an assertion that conveniently ignores the reality that Syria has been destroyed by Arab dictators, Iranian militias, Hezbollah, and Islamist terror long before Israel acted to defend its borders. Israel’s actions in southern Syria are defensive, aimed at blocking Iranian entrenchment—not territorial expansion.
Despite this, Saudi Arabia continues to insist that any normalization agreement must be conditioned on “meaningful progress” toward a two-state solution. This demand persists even as Palestinian leadership remains divided, corrupt, rejectionist, and openly hostile to Israel’s existence. The kingdom’s stance effectively rewards decades of Palestinian intransigence while penalizing Israel for refusing to gamble its security.
The Saudi source went further, alleging that Israel seeks influence over southern Syria—an accusation that aligns closely with Iranian and Arab propaganda narratives. Such claims deflect attention from the true destabilizers of the region: Tehran’s proxies, Arab regimes that collapsed their own states, and Palestinian factions that export violence while rejecting every peace offer.
For Israel, the picture is clear. Jerusalem seeks quiet borders, not fractured neighbors. It is Iran, Hezbollah, and Assad’s regime that benefit from chaos—not Israel. Yet Riyadh’s messaging suggests that normalization is being used less as a peace incentive and more as political leverage to extract unilateral concessions from Israel.
This posture exposes a familiar pattern. Arab states publicly praise peace while privately demanding that Israel absorb the costs of Arab dysfunction—from Gaza to Ramallah to Damascus. Meanwhile, Israel remains the only actor consistently defending regional stability, confronting Iran, and preventing jihadist spillover.
Normalization with Saudi Arabia remains possible—but only when Riyadh abandons the fiction that Israel is responsible for Arab collapse and Palestinian failure. Peace cannot be built on blame, denial, and conditional ultimatums. It requires realism—and recognition of who is actually defending the Middle East from chaos.
