JERUSALEM: Israel’s Tourism Minister Haim Katz arrived in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday for the first such high-level public visit to the country amid talks to secure bilateral ties.

“Katz is the first Israeli minister to head an official delegation in Saudi Ara­bia,” his ministry said in a statement, adding he would attend a United Nat­i­ons World Tourism Organ­i­sation event in Riyadh.

During the two-day visit he is due to hold meetings “with his counterparts”, Katz’s office said, without specifying which countries will be represented in such talks.

The landmark visit comes as Saudi Arabia’s first ambassador to the Palestinians described a decades-old Arab land-for-peace offer as a pillar of any normalisation of ties with Israel, an apparent attempt to signal that Riyadh has not abandoned the Palestinian cause.

Riyadh sends envoy to occupied West Bank with assurance it has not abandoned Palestinian cause

Expectations of a landmark US-brokered Saudi-Israeli deal have grown over the last week, though the timing and terms remain murky.

Nayef al Sudairi, who was appointed non-resident ambassador to the Palestinian territories last month, held talks with senior Palestinian officials, including President Mahmud Abbas.

The diplomatic travels come as the United States presses its allies Israel and Saudi Arabia to normalise ties.

Such a move would break Riyadh’s decades-long stance against recognising Israel before it resolves the conflict with the Palestinians.

Among complicating factors are calls by Riyadh and Washington for the Palestinians to make diplomatic inroads as part of any deal — a prospect unpalatable to Israel’s har­dline coalition government.

Saudi Arabia’s non-resident ambassador to the Palestinians _ a role it unveiled last month _ made a first visit to their seat of government in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, presenting credentials also designating him “consul-general in Jerusalem”.

That title is touchy as Israel considers all of Jeru­salem its own capital and rejects the Palestinians’ claim on East Jerusalem as capital of their hoped-for future state.

The ambassador, Nayef Al Sudairi, told reporters in Ramallah his visit “reaffirms that the Palestinian cause and Palestine and the people of Palestine are of high and important status and that in the coming days there will be a chance for a bigger cooperation between Saudi Arabia and the state of Palestine”.

Referring to the prospect of normalisation with Israel, Al Sudairi said: “It is the normal thing among nations to have peace and stability.

“The Arab initiative, which Saudi Arabia presented in 2002, is a fundamental pillar of any upcoming agreement.”

That referred to a proposal aired by Riyadh, and later adopted by Arab states widely, under which Israel would get pan-Arab recognition only if it quit territories captured in the 1967 war, including lands where the Palestinians want their state.

Israel has been keen to pursue more deals with Arab states without giving up land, having won normalisation from the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and upgraded ties with Morocco and Sudan, in 2020 despite talks with the Palestinians having been frozen for years.

Dismayed at being sidelined in the 2020 diplomacy, the Palestinians have taken a more active role in the Saudi talks.

In a statement published by the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, President Mahmud Abbas said Al Sudairi’s visit “will contribute to reinforcing the strong ties between the two countries and the two fraternal peoples”.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen told a radio network on Tuesday that any Saudi normalisation deal “will be one supported by the right wing” — a reference to religious-nationalist parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netan­yahu’s coalition that refuse to cede occupied West Bank land to Palesti­nians.

Published in Dawn, September 27th, 2023