Wednesday, September 6, 2023

Thomas Friedman against Saudi normalization deal: Israel’s government is not normal

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman published a column on Tuesday in which he urged the US and Saudi Arabia not to go through with a deal to normalize Saudi-Israeli relations, claiming that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “is not normal”.

Friedman wrote that the deal that the Biden administration is promoting “would normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, forge a deeper security relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, and concretely advance a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians”.

He noted that the deal “does it all on terms that would almost certainly cause the breakup of the current Israeli ruling coalition, which is led by far-right Jewish supremacists the likes of which have never held national security powers in Israel before.” READ MORE