Israeli PM Netanyahu holds covert meeting with Saudi Crown Prince in first such high level meeting

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel flew to Saudi Arabia for a covert meeting on Sunday night with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, an Israeli cabinet minister confirmed on Monday, as per a report carried by the New York Times.

The visit was the first known meeting between high-level Israeli and Saudi leaders and could signal an acceleration of gradually warming relations between the two powers.

Israeli news outlets first reported the meeting, and it was confirmed publicly by the education minister, Yoav Galant, in a radio interview on Monday afternoon. “The fact that the meeting took place and was made public — even if it was in only a semi-official way — is something of great importance,” he said.

“This is something our ancestors dreamed about,” Mr. Galant added, highlighting what he called the “warm acceptance of Israel by the Sunni world.”

The visit follows agreements by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan to establish formal relations with Israel, moves that the Trump administration had pushed for to crack a boycott of Israel by most Arab states in solidarity with the Palestinians.

A similar agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel would be much more significant because of the kingdom’s size, wealth and standing in the Muslim world as the protector of many of Islam’s holiest sites. But there had been little indication that such a move was imminent.

Netanyahu’s visit was first reported by Army Radio and Kan public radio in Israel, which cited unidentified officials saying that the prime minister had flown with Yossi Cohen, the head of the Mossad spy agency, to Neom, a futuristic city Prince Mohammed is planning near the Red Sea coast. The reports did not detail the content of the meeting, but did note that the leaders discussed Iran, which both countries consider a major threat, in addition to normalization.

Saudi officials and Netanyahu’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

On Monday, Topaz Luk, a media adviser to Netanyahu, posted an article on Twitter about the latest moves of Netanyahu’s defense minister and rival, Benny Gantz, with a comment that read: “Gantz plays politics while the prime minister makes peace,” perhaps hinting at a confirmation of the meeting.

Israel and Saudi Arabia have no formal diplomatic relations, and Saudi officials have said that they would be established only in the context of an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. The Saudis’ Arab Peace Initiative in 2002 offered Israel full normalization with the Arab world only after the Palestinians achieved statehood.

But the kingdom’s tone when speaking about Israel has shifted in recent years.

Prince Mohammed, 35, a son of the Saudi monarch and the kingdom’s de facto ruler, has said that both Israelis and Palestinians have the right to their land and that Israel has overlapping economic and security interests with Arab states, specifically over their shared animosity toward Iran.

The Saudi news media has begun publishing articles about Israeli culture and politics, and last month a Saudi satellite channel aired extensive interviews with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a former intelligence chief and ambassador to Washington, who harshly criticized the Palestinian leadership.

Saudi Arabia played a quiet but instrumental role in aiding the Trump administration’s efforts to broker diplomatic openings between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, according to a senior Israeli official. Last month, Saudi Arabia opened its airspace to commercial flights to and from Israel, saying it had done so at the request of the Emirates. Most Arab states block such overflights as part of their boycott of the Jewish state.

In recent weeks, some Israeli and United States officials have perceived a shift within the Saudi royal court that could make it possible to move ahead with a normalization accord, according to the Israeli official, because of the absence of significant protests within the Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan to their agreements with Israel.

A key question for the Saudis is how pushing ahead with normalization in the waning days of the Trump administration would affect their standing in Washington and relationship with the incoming administration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr

Biden took a tough line on Saudi Arabia during the campaign, vowing to stop American support for the Saudi military in Yemen, impose penalties for human rights violations and treat the Saudis “like the pariah that they are.”

He has not detailed his approach to the kingdom since winning the election, but analysts have said that he will most likely have to work with the kingdom on issues including oil price stability and efforts to contain Iran.

Biden is likely to welcome further Saudi-Israeli rapprochement, although it remains unclear whether his administration will push for it in the same way President Trump has, or seek to use the possibility as leverage in efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Opening diplomatic ties with Israel could also help Prince Mohammed rehabilitate his reputation in Washington, dampening criticisms of the Saudi war in Yemen, crackdowns on activists and the killing of the dissident Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul in 2018.

For Netanyahu, headlines about a possible diplomatic breakthrough — breathlessly covered by the Israeli media — provided a welcome distraction from an unwelcome story: the formation by the defense minister, Benny Gantz, of a government commission of inquiry into Netanyahu’s multibillion-dollar purchase of submarines and missile boats, an episode often described as the worst corruption scandal in Israel’s history.

Netanyahu’s visit to Neom followed the end of the virtual Group of 20 summit meeting hosted by Saudi Arabia over the weekend and coincided with a visit by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who met with Prince Mohammed on Sunday night. Mr. Pompeo’s plane landed in Neom at 8:30 p.m. and departed three hours later.

A State Department statement about the visit did not mention Netanyahu.

The website Flightradar24, which provides live flight tracking, showed a flight leaving Tel Aviv on Monday around 7:30 p.m. which then dropped off the radar near Neom about an hour later. The same plane reappeared and flew back to Tel Aviv after midnight.