On Sunday, it published an op-ed by Mohammed Al Saed titled, "Is it time to break with the Palestinian cause?" And his answer is an emphatic "yes." He describes how the Palestinians have been political opponents of Saudi Arabia for over 30 years.
In the year 1990, in the fiercest challenge faced by Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states, following Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, nobody was surprised by the Palestinian leadership’s support for Saddam. Both inside Palestine and in the diaspora, the Palestinians chanted for Saddam and demanded for him to kill the Saudis and destroy their cities with internationally prohibited weapons. The chants of “Chemical, Saddam, from Khafji to Dammam” still resonate in the Saudis’ memory today.32 years have passed since the invasion of Iraq, and the Palestinians have come out time and again against the Saudis in demonstrations, rallies and burning flags, the last of which was at the beginning of this week in support of the Houthis, and their demand that the Iranian backed terrorists bomb Saudi cities and their civilian targets. The years have changed and the Palestinians have not. They are on the same path, making the same wrong choices, and holding the same grudges that hardly leave their elders until their young ones inherit them.In my opinion, it is time for a rupture with the Palestinian cause, for the Saudis did not cause it and do not bear responsibility for the major crimes the Palestinians committed against themselves, from neglecting solving their division, and not finishing the Oslo Accords of 1993....Saudi Arabia has suffered enough for Palestinians, paid a lot for them, overlooked a lot, and borne its burdens.. ..There is no enemy that they have not aligned themselves with. For what, and for whom do we sacrifice our money, positions, and political alliances?They deliberately kept a permanent path to be an obstacle to Arab countries' development. Every country that tries to work for their future is obstructed by the cause and burdened with it, and one can see this with a simple look at Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, Jordan, Beirut and every land that the Palestinian cause has trampled upon.The Palestinians have to live with the mistakes of their fathers and grandfathers. They are not the liberators who sacrificed for their lands as the Vietnamese did, nor are they the skilled politicians who managed their cause professionally and justly as the Indians, except for their wrong alliances, selling lands by consent and acceptance, and agreeing to employment and contracting to any forces that intersect with their psyches and thinking, from Baghdad, the Baath in Damascus, and the new Persians in Tehran and Saada, and the implementation of the policies of the Mongols of the hour in Ankara and Istanbul.
He doesn't say to embrace Israel, but in a region where people think in terms of zero-sum games, that seems the only logical conclusion.
