By Press TV Website Staff
In an interview with the Press TV website, Shaiel Ben-Ephriam, an Israeli-American diplomatic affairs analyst, academic, and podcaster, said Israeli hardliners have long viewed Israel as Western in its orientation while regarding Arabs as culturally inferior.
His remarks came in response to far-right Israeli minister and Religious Zionism party leader Bezalel Smotrich’s inflammatory comments about potential normalization with Saudi Arabia.
“If Saudi Arabia tells us, ‘normalization in exchange for a Palestinian state,’ friends — no thank you. Keep riding camels in the desert in Saudi Arabia,” Smotrich said at a conference earlier this week.
On Monday, he doubled down on those remarks, insisting that “no one… is doing us a favor by normalizing relations with us and joining the Abraham Accords.”
Reports suggest that US President Donald Trump raised the idea of normalizing ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia during a recent meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, as well as in Egypt.
While the Saudi response has not been made public yet, Riyadh has previously linked any normalization agreement with Israel to recognition of a Palestinian state — a condition Smotrich and others in the Israeli cabinet fiercely reject.
On whether genuine normalization between Arab states and Israel is possible when figures like Smotrich promote the vision of a so-called “Greater Israel,” Ben-Ephriam said the answer ultimately lies with Arab governments.
“Israel is not going to change. Yet we’ve seen some Persian Gulf states willing to ignore a genocide in Gaza, the apartheid and discrimination against Palestinians and all the other crimes Israel has committed,” he told the Press TV website, referring to Arab countries that refrained from openly condemning Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which has claimed nearly 70,000 lives so far since October 2023, most of them children and women.
He said Saudi Arabia maintains a red line regarding the establishment of a Palestinian state, but it is “not very firm.”
“The truth is, it’s all a matter of expediency for them. Israel will not make any real sacrifices to pursue normalization, but if Arab states continue to have no standards, maybe there can be normalization,” the former diplomat noted. “But it will be built on an immoral foundation.”
In late 2020, during Trump’s first presidential term, several Arab and Muslim-majority countries normalized relations with Israel under the so-called Abraham Accords.
The US-brokered deals, signed by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan at the time, were widely condemned as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause.
Ben-Ephriam said Smotrich and others like him have “undermined the very foundation” of Israel.
“It (Israel) has always survived because of its technological and economic advantages. But if the world turns against Israel, as just about everyone has, you will not be able to sustain that,” he said, addressing Israel’s hawkish ministers.
“No one will trade with you. The best and brightest will leave. And given how vastly outnumbered Israel is, without that advantage, it will not survive in the long run.”
On the question of whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political downfall is imminent, Ben-Ephriam said Netanyahu is a “master at survival.”
“Whenever people write him off, they have been wrong. He was way behind in the polls, but now, through delaying elections and starting wars with all Israel's neighbors, he has engineered a comeback of sorts,” he told the Press TV website.
“It would not be easy to form a coalition without him, and don't be surprised if you see him in the next coalition. Perhaps even as prime minister.”
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