The de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia recently declared that he could not make peace with Israel unless it facilitated a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. Forget, for a moment, the politics. Look only at the geography.
Over the last century, what has shrunk and what has grown? Israel shrunk dramatically; Saudi Arabia grew dramatically. Yet, the Saudi leader now kindly volunteers Israel to create an Arab state even as his family has destroyed Arab states.
The small area between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River was set aside as the “Jewish National Home,” first by the British, then by the League of Nations. There was no separate “West Bank.”
Contrast: The original Western slice of what is now Saudi Arabia was the Hashemite Kingdom of Hejaz. It was huge compared to Palestine, but small compared to the state of Saudi Arabia, which ibn Saud created by conquering the Hejaz in 1926 and then, in 1932, by conquering other states on the Saudi peninsula to create what we now know as Saudi Arabia.
Israel today, minus the West Bank and Gaza, is 8,469 square miles. Saudi Arabia is roughly 830,000 square miles —1,000 times larger than Israel; yet, as we say, Saudi Arabia preaches to Israel how to divvy up the tiny territory it controls, the territory once designated en toto for Jewish control.
Saudi Arabia is not alone. Israel has many preachers telling it how to risk its security and existence, as if the preachers come from small countries. Not even close. The big lecture the small. The sticklers for international law ignore the international agreements that created Israel as Mandatory Palestine — “from the River to the Sea,” as the saying originally meant.
Things change. Wars happen. Boundaries change. Politics change. Somehow, however, these shifting realities are expected to be taken into account by Israel, but not by Saudi Arabia, which has only expanded over the last century, and not by Israel’s neighbor Jordan (34,283 square miles), whose size is the same as it was in 1922. The clamor that remains is: How much territory is Israel willing to “sacrifice for peace?” The more Israel has sacrificed for peace — such as its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 — the less peace Israel has known.
© IJN 2024
