Saudis not as hostile to Israel?

 Andrea Widburg:

For a long time, Saudi Arabia was one of the intellectual homes of antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment.  The Wahhabi clerics whom the Saudi royal house supported held a special animus for Jews, and that animus infused education in Saudi Arabia.  Now, though, Saudi Arabia is backing away from this hostility to Israel, and its textbooks are reflecting the increasingly friendly relationship between the two nations.

Two things are responsible for the change to that dynamic.  The first was that Barack Obama worked hard to set Iran on the road to being a nuclear power, something that terrified Saudi Arabia and pushed it closer to Israel.  The second was Trump's Abraham Accords, which sidelined the troublesome Palestinians and encouraged Muslim nations in the Middle East to make separate peace agreements with Israel for both profit and national security.

While Saudi Arabia never officially entered into an Abraham Accords agreement with Israel, Trump (and, I've heard, Jared Kushner, who had a good relationship with Prince Mohammed bin Salman) nevertheless managed to create a behind-the-scenes conduit between Israel and Saudi Arabia.  The external pressures bringing these two nations together have become even stronger as Biden picks up where Obama left off in terms of sheltering Iran on its way to becoming fully nuclear.

As to Israel and Saudi Arabia, the payoff from these trends can be seen most obviously in a startling change in Saudi Arabian education.  According to the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), antisemitism has significantly disappeared from Saudi Arabia's textbooks....

...

Those aren't the only changes. Last year, the textbooks got rid of lessons that demonized not only Jews, but also Christians and other "non-believers," and a unit on jihad vanished from textbooks.  Two years ago, the textbooks lost a chapter called "the Zionist danger" that had all sorts of antisemitic myths and that delegitimized Israel.

...

Both countries have a common enemy in Iran.  Iran is dominated by religious bigots that threaten everyone else in the region with nuclear destruction. 

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