Description:
Saudi analyst Abdul Hamid al-Hakeem has defended the appearance of Saudi and Arab leaders alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a recent conference in Warsaw, asserting that Saudi normalisation of ties with Israel was no cause for embarrassment.
The two-day US-organised Warsaw conference on “peace and security” in the Middle East was widely seen as another major step by certain Arab and Israeli leaders to achieve a normalisation of ties.
Al-Hakeem, the former director of the Jeddah-based Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies, suggested that by achieving peace with Israel, a new Middle East would be created free of the ‘Iranian threat’.
Source: RT Arabic (YouTube)
Date: 14 February, 2019
Transcript:
Host:
Mr Abdul Hamid, you did not answer my question. I did not ask you about the Warsaw meeting in relation to Iran, I asked you about Netanyahu sitting down next to Arab leaders, we ask you about the harmonisation and normalisation of Arab-Israeli (ties). We ask you about Netanyahu when he says: ‘Israel is creating history when we sit next to the Yemeni Foreign Minister’, and even (Mike) Pence says ‘we are witnessing a new age between Netanyahu and the leaders of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates’, all of which are ‘breaking bread together’ in Warsaw as he described it.
This is what we ask about today, and not about confronting Iran. How are we to talk about the harmonisation of Arab-Israeli (ties) which is clear for all eyes to see in Warsaw, this is the main question.
Saudi Analyst:
Okay, you said that they share breaking bread together, they are (actually) sharing between themselves the danger which threatens the security of Israel and the security of the states of the region, and especially the Arab states. They are sharing between them these dangers, because Iran now poses a threat to the security of Israel and the Arab states. There is an intersection of interests with Israel, because the enemy wishes to destroy the region and the region’s history, so that Tehran can have the final say in all matters related to the people of the region.
What joins us with Israel today is an intersection of interests (that require) confronting the danger posed by Iran.
Host:
So there is a harmonisation of Arab-Israeli (ties), a normalisation of Arab-Israeli (ties), in order to confront Iran? Is this what we understand today?
Saudi Analyst:
Well you insist on the word ‘normalisation’, and I don’t see anything embarrassing with the term ‘normalisation’ – ‘normalisation’, ‘achieving peace’, any of the terms which the enemies of peace wish to use – I don’t mean you are one of them – then they can go ahead and use them. We wish to create a new middle east, which realises the aspirations of the region’s peoples, who have suffered 70 years of destruction and foreign interventions by outsiders, such as what Iran did, and just as Turkey is doing, and the Arab citizen – Palestinian or otherwise – is paying the price (of these actions).
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