Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman still wants peace even after October 7

Photos: AP Images

An enlightened despot who is determined to propel his country into a modern future, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman still wants peace even after October 7. But as his Pharaonic building projects are scaled back, will a breakthrough with Israel likewise vanish like a desert mirage?

ON Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast, a massive construction project is underway. Satellite images show hundreds of excavators literally moving mountains to carve a massive furrow into the landscape. The manmade canyon is some 70 to 150 meters wide, extending dozens of miles to the east into Saudi Arabia’s interior.

Information on the megaproject is patchy; analysts have noticed unusual gaps in the images taken by commercial satellite firms, suggesting that a deep-pocketed customer has been buying them up to keep details of construction progress secret.

All this attention is focused on “The Line,” a stupendous moonshot of a civil engineering project in the form of a blade-like, glass-walled city meant to stretch for 105 miles across the Saudi desert. (That distance would span the width of the state of Connecticut, from Stamford through New Haven and Norwich, all the way to the border with Rhode Island.) The Line is only the most eye-catching district of a new city, called NEOM, Saudi Arabia’s answer to the Gulf states glitz and Chinese megaprojects.

For sheer Pharaonic megalomania, it’s hard to beat, and it’s all the brainchild of one man: Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the desert kingdom.

All of this should matter to Israel, its neighbor along the Red Sea. Because The Line is one giant metaphor slashed through the desert sands for the leadership of its chief visionary.

Known as MBS, Bin Salman is the Arabian version of an enlightened despot — determined to thrust his people forward to a better future, and willing to trample anyone in his way. He has introduced elements of westernization in the face of the kingdom’s Wahhabi clerics, but at the same time has ordered the dismemberment of a pesky journalist in the country’s embassy in Turkey.

The friends that MBS keeps are even more telling. In the halcyon days of the Trump administration, he hobnobbed with Jared Kushner and his Jewish team, with a side helping of Mossad chief Yossi Cohen. Clearly, MBS feels little obligation to anti-Israel history, but is he the man to complete the breakthrough with the Arab world?

The answer to that question partly depends on the enigma of who exactly the imposing MBS actually is. When the crown prince greenlighted the Abraham Accords in 2020, it was a clear signal of approval for the historic realignment in Israel’s favor from the man set to rule the Arabian peninsula’s anchor state for decades to come. Despite the shockwaves of Hamas’s attack on Israel, the messages coming out of Riyadh are that MBS hasn’t changed his mind, and he still views an opening to Israel as the way forward for his country.

So the metaphor of The Line becomes relevant. Rumors of a drastic scaling-back of plans signal that notwithstanding the lavish PR around the project, it has run into trouble. Despite the diggers in the desert, the gouges in the Saudi wasteland may be all that remains of the audacious plans.

The same questions hover over peace with the Saudis. Even if Israel isn’t required to make an Oslo-style sacrifice of its security for a piece of paper, can the crown prince deliver? Could MBS take his fundamentalist country with him, or is the Israeli-Saudi breakthrough destined to remain a mirage in the Arabian sands?