High on the agenda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting with US President Donald Trump at the White House this week is a potential deal to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Trump wants to move fast on it, having dispatched his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to Riyadh both during the transition and last week.

This historic achievement, which would produce major gains for US national security interests, is within reach. But it is not imminent. A carefully sequenced series of steps, and a corresponding political strategy, has a greater likelihood of success, perhaps even later this year, than a mad rush in the opening weeks of Trump’s term.

Several conditions must fall into place to make this deal viable.

First, the Gaza ceasefire must hold and advance to its second phase. If all goes well, by early March, phase one will be complete, with the release of thirty-three Israeli hostages and a significant surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza. The second phase, for which negotiations are just getting underway, would secure the release of the remaining live Israeli hostages.

While Netanyahu already lost one far-right coalition partner, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, over the deal, and another, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, is a threat to leave Netanyahu’s coalition and bring down his government if phase two occurs, polls show that 73 percent of the Israeli public wants the agreement to proceed. Trump will insist that Netanyahu deliver on this. According to Israeli media reports, Witkoff told the prime minister, “Your coalition is your problem.”

Second, reconstruction in Gaza needs to begin, and there needs to be a credible pathway to some form of Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and his aides have consistently cited this pathway as a requirement for normalization to proceed.

Trump complicated this issue last week by musing about Palestinians being evacuated from Gaza—something Palestinians and Arab states associate with the death of Palestinian aspirations to statehood. An added concern for MBS, whose highest priority is the regional stability necessary for his ambitious Vision 2030 economic and social transformation of the kingdom to succeed, would be the potentially destabilizing effects of such population relocations on two key Arab partners, Egypt and Jordan.

On the Israeli side, there are two problems: the Israeli coalition depends on staunch opponents of Palestinian statehood, and even more centrist Israelis remain traumatized by the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and believe that a Palestinian state entails too great a risk to Israel. Those fears have been stoked by scenes of masked Hamas gunmen reemerging as the muscle on the streets of Gaza since the ceasefire. 

The precise description of a Palestinian state and a timeline for its establishment that MBS needs and that the Israeli public can accept, which would require significant security guarantees for Israel, would need to be carefully negotiated. Trump’s 2020 Middle East peace plan, while insufficient, may offer a starting point. It should be linked to a plan to empower a reformed Palestinian Authority to sideline Hamas and take over governance in Gaza. 

Third, the ceasefire in Lebanon must hold, and Israel will likely need to roll back its outposts in the Syrian Golan Heights. A quiet Israeli-Lebanese border, with the Lebanese Armed Forces preventing Hezbollah from returning to its prior positions in southern Lebanon and Israeli residents feeling secure enough to return to their border communities in northern Israel, would provide a far better backdrop to Israeli-Saudi normalization that a resumption of war. 

The Saudis will also likely push for Israel to relinquish the positions in Syria it took following the fall of the Assad regime to guard against cross-border attacks, in order to assist Saudi efforts to help the post-Assad leadership in Damascus find its footing.

Finally, Trump and MBS must reach agreement on a series of bilateral US-Saudi agreements that undergird a normalization agreement. Former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid them out in a speech at the Atlantic Council shortly before he left office: a security treaty, a defense cooperation agreement, an energy agreement including civil nuclear cooperation, and a trade and investment deal. 

These elements were negotiated in detail during the Biden administration but not finished. Trump must review them and make sure he can support them or seek modifications. There could still be tough bargaining ahead for US and Saudi teams on the nature of US security guarantees to deter Iranian aggression—the real prize for Saudi Arabia in this whole enterprise—and ensuring that Saudi commitments to align exclusively with the United States and not China are rock-solid. MBS’s pledge to invest $600 billion in the United States could help advance these talks, particularly if it includes the purchase of a major US defense platform, such as F-15 aircraft. 

Trump would ultimately need to bring a US-Saudi security treaty to the US Senate for ratification, which will require Democratic votes to meet the necessary two-thirds threshold. That is an achievable goal, but it could be challenged if Trump’s scorched-earth strategy on his domestic agenda alienates Democratic senators, who may be reluctant to grant him a win that might result in a Nobel Peace Prize.

All of these pieces will take time to resolve, and they are not likely to fall into place during Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, DC, in the coming days. A proposed early visit by Trump to Saudi Arabia could help advance the package, but it also may not be enough to complete it.

Here is a proposed sequence that Trump and Netanyahu should discuss:

Lock in the second phase of the hostage deal. If Smotrich bolts, Netanyahu should call a snap election. He would go into that contest with considerable assets: all live Israeli hostages home with their families; visible support from Trump, who remains popular in Israel; and the recent blows Israel has struck against Iran and its terrorist proxies. 

If Netanyahu takes to the Israeli voters the prospect of a Saudi normalization deal, he has reasonable chance of returning as prime minister with more centrist (Benny Gantz or Yair Lapid) or less radical right-wing (Naftali Bennett or Avigdor Lieberman) coalition partners. The Israeli election would also give time for the US-Saudi agreements to mature and for Trump to develop a political strategy that keeps Democratic senators on board for a treaty vote in late 2025.

The downside of this approach is the lost time. Israeli elections and government formation can freeze decision-making for up to six months. Trump surely remembers the repeat Israeli elections during his first term, which cost nearly two years of productive work. But a realistic assessment of the time and political conditions needed to cement this deal reveals that strategic patience is the better part of wisdom.

 

Daniel B. Shapiro served as US ambassador to Israel from 2011 to 2017 and, most recently, as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy. He also previously served as the director of the Atlantic Council’s N7 Initiative.