Why Saudi crown prince MBS will never join Abraham Accords

jpost.com · Feb 20, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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ByZVIKA KLEINFEBRUARY 20, 2026 06:55Updated: FEBRUARY 20, 2026 06:56We allowed ourselves to believe it. After everything – the sirens, the shelters, the grief that has no bottom – we allowed ourselves to believe that something larger was being built from the rubble.When the last Israeli hostages came home, when the ceasefire held, when the guns finally went quiet enough to hear something other than the echo of the October 7 massacre, a quiet consensus formed among Israelis across the political spectrum: The Saudi deal was next. It was inevitable. It was the reward at the end of the longest, most terrible tunnel.Boy, were we wrong.The normalization of Saudi-Israeli relations, that enormous diplomatic prize dangled before us like a carrot on a stick for the better part of a decade, is not merely delayed; it is now in doubt. It is structurally, politically, and perhaps generationally foreclosed.The conditions that once made it seem inevitable have not only disappeared; they have been replaced by countervailing forces so powerful and so entrenched that analysts are no longer debating when the deal might happen but whether the framework that would produce such a deal still exists at all.US President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman look at portraits at the ''Presidential Walk of Fame'' in the Colonnade at the White House in Washington, DC, November 18, 2025. (credit: REUTERS/EVELYN HOCKSTEIN)Why did things turn out this way?Understanding why requires us to dispense with the comfortable narrative that Saudi reluctance is simply about Gaza, or about Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) needing political cover, or about American pressure not being applied forcefully enough.Those explanations are correct to some extent. They are simply insufficient. The truth is deeper, more structural, and considerably more unsettling for those of us who spent the post-October 7 massacre years telling ourselves that Israel’s military transformation of the Middle East would ultimately be rewarded with the one thing it has always wanted: acceptance.The architecture of the grand bargain was always predicated on a simple transactional logic: Saudi Arabia would normalize with Israel, and in exchange, Washington would deliver a mutual defense treaty, advanced weapons platforms, and civilian nuclear cooperation. Israel was the key that unlocked Washington’s vault for Riyadh.That framework is now obsolete, because Saudi Arabia captured most of the prize without paying the price.In late 2025, during MBS’s visit to Washington, the Trump administration finalized what amounted to a sweeping bilateral upgrade for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, entirely decoupled from Israeli normalization.The White House Fact Sheet on the agreement confirmed Saudi Arabia’s designation as a Major Non-NATO Ally, advanced the sale of F-35 fifth-generation stealth jets, and established what officials described as a “Joint Declaration on the Completion of Negotiations on Civil Nuclear Energy Cooperation,” the very civilian nuclear program that was supposed to be Israel’s bargaining chip.Multiple senior Israeli officials have indicated that Washington explicitly dropped its long-standing demand for Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel as a prerequisite for the nuclear deal.From Riyadh’s perspective, the change is not a setback; it is a masterstroke. MBS secured access to advanced American military platforms, nuclear technology transfers, and the formal reaffirmation of the US security umbrella without making a single concession to Jerusalem. The marginal utility of normalization has evaporated. The Kingdom already has what it came for.The Saudi crown prince under pressureThe crown prince is governing under genuine economic pressure. Vision 2030, the ambitious modernization project intended to transform Saudi Arabia into a post-oil global powerhouse, is straining under the weight of its own ambitions.The Saudi Finance Ministry projected a budget deficit of 101 billion Saudi Riyals (about $27 billion) for 2025. Independent analyses from the Arab Gulf States Institute suggest that if oil prices remain around $65 per barrel, which the US Energy Information Administration projected as a realistic trajectory for 2026, the deficit could balloon to $56b., or roughly 5.2% of GDP.The flagship mega-projects are cracking. NEOM’s “The Line,” the futuristic 170-kilometer linear city that was supposed to house up to 1.5 million residents by 2030, has been radically scaled back to a target of 300,000 – triggering layoffs, contract cancellations, and humiliating headlines.The Public Investment Fund, which anchors the entire Vision 2030 strategy with roughly $925b. in assets under management, was forced to mandate a 20% spending reduction across its portfolio and wrote off $8b. in project losses at the end of 2024. Saudi Arabia attracted only $32b. in foreign direct investment in 2024, despite a $100b. target, a failure so stark it led to the dismissal of the investment minister.A leadership navigating this kind of visible economic retrenchment, a leadership whose entire legitimacy contract with its young population was built on the promise of transformational prosperity, cannot absorb the political cost of an unpopular foreign-policy move. Normalization with Israel is currently the most politically toxic option available to Saudi Arabia.Saudi public opinion numbers don't lieBefore October 7, 2023, there were genuine signs of movement in Saudi public opinion. A Washington Institute for Near East Policy survey from August 2023 found that 43% of Saudi citizens supported establishing business and economic ties with Israel, even without formal diplomatic relations.The Israel-Hamas War in Gaza destroyed it.By November and December 2023, the Washington Institute’s follow-up polling found that support for informal business contact with Israelis had collapsed to just 17%. More strikingly, 96% of Saudi respondents agreed that Arab countries should immediately sever all diplomatic, political, economic, and other contacts with Israel. Ninety-six percent.The Arab Barometer documents the broader regional picture across 15 Arab countries in 2024 and 2025, confirming that this decline is not exclusively a Saudi phenomenon. In Morocco, a country that formalized ties with Israel in 2020 under the Abraham Accords, support for normalization fell from 31% in 2022 to 13% following the war. The 2025 Arab Opinion Index found that 87% of citizens across the Arab world completely oppose recognition of Israel.For MBS, these numbers signify a political threshold he cannot cross without provoking the kind of widespread, coordinated domestic unrest that jeopardizes the regime’s stability. This is exactly what he told American policy-makers.According to multiple sourced reports, he explicitly cited hostile Saudi public opinion in rejecting pressure to join the Abraham Accords, insisting that normalization required a concrete, irreversible pathway to Palestinian statehood. Whatever one thinks of the sincerity of that demand, its political function is unmistakable. It is a wall that protects the crown prince from his own people.There is a final, deeper obstacle that gets less attention than it deserves: the shifting regional power balance that has transformed Israel from Saudi Arabia’s natural ally against Iran into something more like Saudi Arabia’s most formidable competitor for regional leadership.This should be a moment of Israeli-Saudi celebration. It is not, because in a post-Iran Middle East, the shared threat that bound Riyadh and Jerusalem together dissolves, and what remains is a question of who leads the region.Israel, with uncontested multi-domain military superiority, is the obvious answer in kinetic terms. MBS, who views Saudi Arabia as the economic, diplomatic, and spiritual hub of the Islamic world, finds this answer unacceptable.The response has been predictable and swift. Last September, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact explicitly mirroring NATO’s collective defense principles. Turkey is in advanced discussions to join the framework.Saudi Arabia is negotiating the purchase of up to 100 KAAN fifth-generation stealth jets from Turkish Aerospace Industries, a deal that US officials have described as alarming – precisely because it represents a deliberate effort to build strategic independence from both Washington and Jerusalem.The contours of what some are calling an “Islamic NATO” are emerging in real time – not as a response to Israel’s enemies, but as a response to Israel’s dominance.Why MBS won't join the Abraham AccordsOne final, underappreciated obstacle: MBS will never join the Abraham Accords. Not because he opposes normalization in principle, he might not, but because the Abraham Accords are irreversibly associated with the United Arab Emirates. The UAE took the political risk in 2020. The UAE built the commercial infrastructure, the tech partnerships, and the defense cooperation.Lebanese commentator Nadim Koteich, the former general manager of Sky News Arabia, has written extensively about what he calls the “Two Middle Easts,” arguing that the UAE now holds at least a decade’s technological and economic advantage over Saudi Arabia, specifically because of its unencumbered cooperation with Israel’s start-up ecosystem.Joining a framework architected by Riyadh’s chief intra-Gulf rival, a framework already branded with Abu Dhabi’s fingerprints, is not something the “king of the Middle East” can accept. Any future normalization will require an entirely Saudi-authored architecture, almost certainly anchored in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative’s demand for an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.We wanted to believe the deal was coming. It was a reasonable thing to want, the notion that October 7’s darkness might ultimately produce a transformed, more stable Middle East, with Israel finally accepted by its most impo