Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that he does not personally care about the “Palestinian issue,” according to a report from The Atlantic.
The report, which details Washington’s negotiations in the Middle East following the outbreak of war in Gaza, revealed that the crown prince made the statement during a meeting in al-Ula, Saudi Arabia, in January 2024.
During the meeting, which focused on potential normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel amid the ongoing conflict, Blinken asked if the Saudis could tolerate Israeli forces re-entering Gaza periodically. Mohammed bin Salman reportedly replied, “They can come back in six months, a year, but not on the back end of my signing something like this.”
He further explained, “Seventy percent of my population is younger than me. For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t.”
However, a Saudi official has since refuted this account, calling it “incorrect.”
In his public statements, the crown prince has consistently maintained that Saudi Arabia would not normalize ties with Israel without the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Mohammed bin Salman also reportedly told Blinken that a normalization deal with Israel could carry significant personal risks. He referenced the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who was killed after signing a peace accord with Israel, saying, “Half my advisers say that the deal is not worth the risk…I could end up getting killed because of this deal.”
While polls early in the Gaza war showed that over 90 percent of Saudis believed Arab states should cut ties with Israel, reports have surfaced of a crackdown on expressions of Palestinian solidarity within the kingdom.
Despite these reports, senior Saudi royal Prince Turki al-Faisal recently denied any such restrictions, stating, “What I see of the Saudi press, whether written or on television or in social media, is full support for Palestine and no restriction on expressing support for Palestinians.”
Prince Turki added that, given Israel’s current stance on Palestinian statehood, the chances of normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel were slim. “The whole [Israeli] government is saying no Palestinian state. So how can there be normalization between us and them with those positions in place?”