TheChek News Flow

David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security was often quoted by Netanyahu as a critic of Obama's Iran deal. His latest warnings on a deal with Riyadh, however, will probably find a less receptive audience in Jerusalem

On Tuesday, President Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan made sure to lower everyone’s expectations of an Israeli-Saudi breakthrough. There’s still a long way to go, he said, before the administration can announce any real progress on this front. That much is clear to Netanyahu as well, but the prime minister won’t lose hope. After all the ups-and-downs of his career, he still expects one last lifebelt that will save him from the actions of his own extremist government.

Netanyahu believes peace with Saudi Arabia will be a death blow to the protest movement against his current coalition. He thinks that the Gulf's oil money will flood the Israeli market, erasing the local economic damage caused by his judicial overhaul and bringing back some of his disappointed supporters who have vowed to leave Likud over pocketbook woes.

The Saudis have presented three key demands to the United States: a NATO-style defense pact; access to advanced American weapons; and U.S. support for a civilian nuclear project. For Israel, the last demand is the most problematic one.

Public debate on the issue grew louder this week after Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s closest adviser, told PBS that Israel won’t necessarily oppose nuclear enrichment on Saudi soil. Several experts on nuclear proliferation who spoke with Haaretz following Dermer’s interview expressed strong reservations about his position, warning that Saudi enrichment on the kingdom’s own soil could lead down the road to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

Those voices are now joined by David Albright, one of the world's most prominent experts on this issue, who leads the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. Last decade, Albright criticized Iran’s conduct and the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with the Islamic Republic; as a result, Netanyahu and Dermer often quoted his observations in briefings to Israeli and international media outlets. But they probably won’t be quoting what he has to say this time.

Albright told Haaretz that he supports American involvement in producing a civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia, and even thinks the U.S. should consider “bending the rules a little bit” to make it happen. But providing enrichment capabilities to the Saudis on their own soil, he warned, is something else entirely.

The Saudis, he explained, say that they have vast reserves of underground uranium that they can utilize. “They may have it, we can’t say for sure, but there’s another question – is it economically and commercially viable to recover it from there? I would argue it’s clearly not. Russian enrichment is cheap compared to what the Saudis would need to pay to do everything on their own. There’s justified resistance to seeing enrichment spread to other countries, as a general practice, but especially in cases where it doesn’t make sense economically for a country to do their own enrichment.”

Albright says the lack of economic reasoning raises the concern that Saudi Arabia may have other plans in the long run. He brings as an example the Iranian case: “What’s true for Saudi Arabia is doubly true for Iran. Their enrichment is very expensive, and they’re not even bothering to pretend there’s an economic motivation behind it. Certainly the Saudis could try the same path – declare civilian purposes but actually have their program prepared for a time when they’ll decide to transform it for military purposes.” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, it should be noted, said in 2018 that he wants his country to match whatever nuclear capabilities Iran has.

Albright also disagrees with Dermer’s comment to PBS that if the U.S. won’t provide the Saudis with everything they want, the kingdom will turn its back on Washington and receive nuclear enrichment capabilities from another country, like China or France.

He says that, while the Chinese option can’t be ruled out, such a move will carry big risks for both sides. China, he explains, will be providing its nuclear technologies to a country with a decades-long history of military and intelligence cooperation with the U.S., while Saudi Arabia risks massive retaliation from the U.S. Congress. Albright adds that for a leader who wants to repair their standing in Washington, this move will achieve the exact opposite. As for France, Albright believes that as a liberal European country, it will demand the same terms from the Saudis as the U.S. does.

He thinks that the more disturbing alternatives would be that the Saudis will try to procure nuclear capabilities from either Russia or Pakistan. Albright points to the Iranian reactor in Busher, which uses Russian technology and “has got all kinds of safety problems,” as an example. Still, he believes that if the Saudis tried this path of action, the U.S. will have ways to block it. “You can tell the Saudis that we’ll put an embargo, we’ll use sanctions, we’ll provide no more military equipment – you have leverage there.”

A preferable policy, from his perspective, is to tell the Saudis that the U.S. does want to cooperate with them on nuclear energy production – but to set clear red lines from the start. “The enrichment part is very complicated, and if they can’t justify it economically, it makes no sense to do it,” he says. “It will be perceived very negatively by other countries, which have agreed over the years to American constraints on their own nuclear programs.”

It’s not clear, however, if the Saudi crown prince would accept such conditions. In the past, the most important question in Israeli politics was: What does Netanyahu want? Not anymore. The prime minister’s current intentions are incredibly transparent: He wants to weaken the Israeli judicial system, end his own corruption trial and break the massive Israeli protest movement standing in his way. A historic agreement with the Saudis will help him achieve these goals, and therefore, he’ll agree to pay almost any price – except perhaps in the Palestinian arena, where concessions could endanger the support of his far-right coalition partners.

The same cannot be said of MBS. His intentions are still uncertain to Israeli decision makers, who admit that they’re struggling to understand his recent moves. On the one hand, he continues to discuss the normalization deal with top Biden administration officials. On the other hand, he met with Iran's foreign minister last week, and announced the creation of an envoy position representing Saudi Arabia to the Palestinians a week prior to that.

One view inside the Israeli establishment is that MBS isn’t very enthusiastic about a normalization deal – certainly not as much as Netanyahu and Biden, both of whom see this issue through an electoral-political lens. “MBS tells himself: I’ll put up maximalist demands, almost impossible for them to accept,” says one Israeli official involved in the talks. “If the Americans and the Israelis agree, that’s great. If not, they will be responsible for the failure of the negotiations.”