Last week SUSRIS.com we reported over the weekend on a diplomatic encounter between Prince Turki Al Faisal of Saudi Arabia, former Ambassador to the United States, and Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon at the Munich Security Conference. It seems there was a question about Mr. Ayalon participating in a panel alongside Prince Turki and hard feelings about his dressing down of the Turkish Ambassador to Israel last month. You can get more details, including a statement by Prince Turki at the SUSRIS Item of Interest. Meanwhile, we’ve got a video from the conference showing the two diplomats closing out the “spat” with a handshake.
Marc Lynch’s take (Abu Aardvark blog) described it as not “especially interesting on its merits,” but goes on to provide very insightful analysis of the encounter and put it in context of the state of Arab-Israeli relations and public impressions in the Arab world. Among his perspectives:
The handshake affair is worth a post because it both reinforces and undermines the emerging conventional wisdom in Washington that the Arab regimes and Israelis are increasingly allies against Iran. Such expectations of an Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran are hardly new. The Saudis and Egyptians were more or less openly aligned with Israel in its war against Hezbollah in 2006 (remember Condi Rice’s “birth pangs of the new Middle East”?), and to a lesser extent in the war on Gaza in 2008. Even in public, the “new Arab cold war” of the last few years has fairly openly and directly aligned the conservative Arab regimes with Israel against Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the “Resistance” bloc. Much of the official and Saudi-owned Arab media has for years been waging a heavy-handed campaign against the Resistance bloc, implicitly adopting many Israeli frames (Hamas and Hezbollah irrationality and irresponsibility, Arab moderation, Iranian threat).
But the Saudi pushback on the photo also shows the ongoing sensitivity of such relations, and the limits of the official media campaign in support of this supposed Arab-Israeli alignment. The images from Gaza and the ongoing impact of Netanyahu and Lieberman’s foreign policy has more than overwhelmed all the efforts to justify and legitimate such an approach to the broader Arab public. That anger is real, and quite potent in many Arab countries and in the wider Arab public sphere. The Saudis prefer to keep such relations private because of this very real outrage, and the real political costs of being on the wrong side in public.
