RIYADH: From scrubbing hate-filled school textbooks to a taboo-defying religious sermon, Saudi Arabia is pushing for another kind of normalisation after declining to establish formal relations with Israel — co-existence with Jews.
Saudi Arabia has said it will not follow its allies Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates in establishing diplomatic relations without a resolution to the Palestinian issue, even as it cultivates clandestine ties with the Jewish state.
Having Saudi Arabia, an Arab powerhouse and epicentre of Islam, forge a similar deal would be the ultimate diplomatic prize for Israel, but the kingdom is wary that its citizens — sympathetic to the Palestinian cause — may not be ready for a full embrace.
Saudi Arabia, however, is pushing to change public perceptions about Jews with a risky outreach to a community that has long
been vilified by the kingdom’s clerical establishment and media, laying the groundwork for an eventual recognition.
School textbooks, once well-known for denigrating Jews and other non-Muslims as “swines” and “apes”, are undergoing
revision as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s campaign to combat extremism in education, officials say.
“The Saudi government has also decided to prohibit the disparagement of Jews and Christians in mosques,” said Saudi analyst Najah al-Otaibi.
“Anti-Jewish rhetoric was common at Friday prayers of the imams in mosques used to address Muslims around the world.”
In a stunning U-turn, a preacher in the holy city of Mecca triggered a social media storm this month when he spoke of Prophet Mohammed’s friendly relations with Jews to advocate religious tolerance.
The sermon was by Abdulrahman al-Sudais, the imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque who courted controversy in the past for strongly anti-Semitic views.
Mohammed al-Issa, a Saudi cleric who heads the Muslim World League, won praise from Israel in January after he travelled to
Poland for events marking 75 years since the Nazi death camp Auschwitz was liberated.
Earlier this year, the kingdom announced the screening of a Holocaust-themed film for the first time at a movie festival, before it was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The kingdom has also pursued a bold outreach to Jewish figures, including in February when King Salman hosted a Jerusalembased rabbi, David Rosen, for the first time in modern history.
“When it comes to Saudi Arabia and Israel establishing relations, it is a question of ‘when’, not ‘if’,” said Marc Schneier, an American rabbi with close relations to Gulf rulers.
“Part of the process that all Gulf countries have and are going through on the road to normalisation is first pushing warmer ties between Muslims and Jews and then moving more boldly into discussing Israel and the Gulf.”
Arab News, the kingdom’s main English-language daily, whipped up a social media storm at the weekend when it briefly
changed its social media banner on Twitter and Facebook with a greeting in Hebrew for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
The newspaper recently published a lengthy series on the Jews of Lebanon, and plans a similar instalment on an ancient
Jewish community that lived in what is today Saudi Arabia.
The newspaper’s editor Faisal Abbas told AFP the coverage “was not tied to Israel” but aimed at connecting with “Arab Jews worldwide”. —PTI

Press Trust of India