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Pakistan, Saudi Arabia Won’t Join Abraham Accord Festivities

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan refused to jump on the Israeli bandwagon following the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates last week, saying his country would never recognize Israel as a sovereign state as long as the Palestinian people would not be given a state of their own. “Whatever any country does, our position is very clear. … We cannot ever accept Israel as long as Palestinians are not given their rights and there is no just settlement,” Khan said in an interview on Wednesday. Following Khan’s remarks, a much more prominent player in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, publicly condemned – though somewhat halfheartedly – the agreement reached by the UAE and Israel. “When we launched the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, we fully envisioned that there would be relations between all Arab states and Israel,” said Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud. “But from our perspective, the conditions for that are clear: Peace must be achieved between the Israelis and the Palestinians.” Still, al-Saud welcomed Israel’s forgoing its plans to annex territories in the West Bank as part of the deal, saying that in that sense, the Abraham Accord “could be viewed as positive.”