A Saudi Prince Declares Independence From Old Obligations
Prince Bandar bin Sultan has accused Palestinians of serial self-harm over many decades. His own country no longer wants to be part of it.
Says Palestinian leaders have failed.
Photographer: Hassan Ammar/APThis week, in a three-part series on government-controlled Al Arabiya television, Saudi Arabia served the Palestinian leadership with a writ of divorce and a stinging bill of particulars that explained the break-up. Delivered by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the country’s leading elder statesman, it brutally laid out the failures of Palestinian leaders going back more than 70 years. It also suggests the futility of present Palestinian policies and the grim future it will bring the people it is supposed to represent.
No Arab government has ever issued such a harsh public denunciation of the Palestinian movement. Bandar, a longtime former Saudi ambassador to Washington and former secretary general of the Saudi National Security Council is now a private citizen, but Israeli intelligence figures and other experts I asked with were in no doubt that he was speaking for the Palace and, more specifically, Crown Prince Muhammed ben Salman. Indeed, the director of the Crown Prince’s bureau, Badr Al-Asaker, publicly praised the series as “full of facts.”