It was the most closely guarded secret in Israel on Sunday night. Even the most senior cabinet ministers had not been informed why the coronavirus cabinet had been delayed. The only people in the know were on the private Gulfstream jet that took off from Ben Gurion airport at 7.30 that evening: –– prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his national security adviser, the Mossad chief and a handful of bodyguards. Even military adjutant Brigadier-General Avi Blut, who also there and was in charge of maintaining secure communications with Israel, had been ordered not to inform his boss, the IDF’s chief of staff, of his whereabouts.
The tight secrecy that preceded the hour-long flight to the Saudi city of Neom and Mr Netanyahu’s meeting there with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were in near total contrast to the openness over it the next day. Unconfirmed and censored reports regarding the visits of senior Israelis to the Saudi kingdom have been in circulation for at least a couple of decades. This time it was all different.
Senior Israeli and Saudi officials were not denying (at least not until later on Monday afternoon, when the Saudi foreign minister tweeted a, by then, unconvincing denial). Perhaps the clearest confirmation came in an angry response by defence minister Benny Gantz, furious at having been duped, who said that it was “a scandal that the Saudi flight was leaked.”
Mr Gantz had ample reason for anger. Not only had the flight’s existence been withheld from him and the defence establishment, the timing of the leak totally overshadowed his challenge to Mr Netanyahu the previous day, when he had commissioned an enquiry in to the “submarines case,” which is anathema to the prime minister.
He, and others on the Israeli political scene, believe that the leak was politically motivated, allowing Mr Netanyahu to wrest control of the news agenda, as he does. But while that could be a secondary motive, it is hard to believe the prime minister would jeopardise his strategic relationship with the de facto Saudi leader just to score a minor point.
Monday’s headlines had the hallmark of a coordinated leak, one which was almost certainly agreed in advance between the prime minister, crown prince and Secretary of State. These are tense weeks in the region. Both Mr Netanyahu and Prince bin Salman are anxious that the incoming Biden administration’s Middle East policy will impact on them negatively. The prime minister is hoping to ward off any significant pressure to make major concessions to the Palestinians. The crown prince is worried that President-elect Biden may act on his threats to treat Saudi Arabia like a “pariah” and cut off arms sales over the kingdom’s human rights record. Both men share an overriding worry that the new administration will re-engage with Iran and rejoin the nuclear agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from in May 2018.
“Both Biden’s key foreign policy appointments, (Secretary of State) Antony Blinken and (National Security Advisor) Jake Sullivan believe in being part of multilateral agreements and it would be natural for them to rejoin the Iran Deal,” said a senior Israeli diplomat. “Netanyahu and bin Salman are making the clearest signal to Biden’s team that the anti-Iran alliance in the region is here to stay and they need to take account of America’s closest allies in the region.”
The third participant in the meeting, Secretary Pompeo, harbours his own presidential ambitions for the 2024 election and is anxious for his own foreign policy legacy or as he calls it the “Pompeo doctrine.”
Publicising the meeting in Neom was just the latest instalment in a series of signals to both the incoming administration in Washington and the Iranian leadership in Tehran. Nine days earlier there was the rare leak of the details of a Mossad assassination, apparently at the CIA’s behest, of a senior Al Qaeda leader in Tehran just four months ago.
Then there were the widespread air strikes against bases of Iran’s expeditionary Quds Force a week ago in Syria, in retaliation for a relatively minor incident – three explosive devices found on the Golan border.
And for weeks there have been the reports of plans by the Trump administration to carry out one last attack in Iran before President Biden’s inauguration.
Senior Israeli military officials are skeptical that there is any real American intention to launch a war with Iran in the coming weeks but the reports have kept coming, amid a surprising deployment of B-52 bombers to the region. The IDF has been instructed to prepare itself for such a scenario, despite there being no concrete intelligence of an attack being planned. Precautions are necessary, though war probably won’t break out before Mr Biden takes over on 20 January. But psychological warfare is already raging.
