Prince Turki Al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia spoke to the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations in Washington last month. The speech was reprinted in the latest Washington Report for Middle East Affairs (I subscribe; this issue’s not online yet). Some staggering excerpts, emphases mine:
Saudi Arabia has had a clear view of where it is going and how to get there. In 1981, the late King Fahd issued what came to be known as the Fahd Peace Plan in which he called for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories which Israel seized in 1967. He also called for the recognition of the de facto borders of all countries, prior to June 4, 1967. That meant recognition for the first time by all the Arab states for Israel in pre-1967 borders. All the Arab countries agreed to the plan. Israel, on the other hand, did not even say that it heard of it. The U.S. totally ignored it.
What followed? The tragedies of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982; the continued Lebanese civil war, which was brought to an end by Saudi action, as I mentioned before; the Iraq-Iran war; the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, thanks to joint Saudi-American-Pakistani- Mujahedeen action; the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and subsequent liberation, thanks to Saudi-American action; the Madrid talks, thanks to Saudi-American action; the Oslo agreements and the initial euphoria which was alas deflated by the assassination of an Israeli Prime Minister by an Israeli terrorist who publically stated that he was inspired, at the time by the rhetoric of the present Israeli Prime Minister; the officially published stripping of bin Laden of his Saudi citizenship, and his departure from Sudan to Afghanistan, where he was given refuge by the Taliban; the first terrorist act by al-Qaida at the Saudi National Guard building in Riyadh, drawing the first blood in its continuous campaign against the Kingdom and her friends; the subsequent efforts of the then newly elected Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu; you can see him on You-Tube promising to derail the Oslo Accords; the Camp David talks and Taba Accords, the elections of both George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon, one with the aim of turning his back to the Middle East, the other with the aim of destroying the nascent Palestinian Authority; then Crown Prince Abdullah’s letter to President Bush, alerting him to the dire and probable bloody consequences of ignoring the Palestinian issue; the vicious and cowardly attacks of September 11, 2001; America’s anger and hurt at the loss of human life and her need for succor and support from the world community; Saudi Arabia’s soul searching and introspection in dealing with the reality of that criminally inhuman act; Saudi Arabia’s continued resolve to meet the al-Qaida challenge, head on, by police work and by educational and cultural revisions of where we were and where we wanted to go…
Today, as the people of the United States reel under the heel of the worst recession, more money, knowhow, and economic advantage is ceded to Israel by the American people. Within the make-up of this administration, there are officials who rationalize, excuse, and condone Israeli intransigence while seeking to put more pressure on the Palestinians to concede even more. These same officials believe that the Palestinian problem is not the root cause of Arab and Muslim antagonism to the United States. It is these officials who proposed that the Netanyahu government should be rewarded for its intransigence, rather than sanctioned. In the public sphere, there are journalists whose view is so distorted by the neo-conservative mantle, or as I call it, a burqa that they wear, that they cannot see that the call for independence from Middle East oil is a canard. It defrauds the average consumer of energy by promising him clean energy which is non-existent, and to pay a higher price for that energy, regardless of the abundant availability of the secure source of energy which comes from the Middle East, and at a cheaper price.
To these media pundits, ladies and gentlemen, who want Saudi Arabia to do more, I say that we have done more to further the cause of peace than any other country. We have stood up to the challenge of terrorist nihilism promoted in the name Islam and cast its cult and ethos to destruction. We will continue to push for a more just application of American policy and practice in our part of the world. Israel is a drain on the United States and not an asset, and foreign policy should follow national interest and not that of moneyed political lobbyists and journalist hacks.
