No, Israel Should Not Normalise Evil

Why the Saudi “Peace” Deal Is a Suicide Pact

October 7th was not the start.

It was the visible tip of an iceberg. Underneath it sits decades of evasion, appeasement, and a kind of so-called “realism” that refuses to judge evil as evil. One might think that after the events of that disastrous day, the Israeli leadership would try to change course, but no. That same amoral (thus immoral) mentality is now fully back in force under a new slogan:

“Normalisation with Saudi Arabia.”

We are told that normalisation is “historic”, “strategic”, and “a once-in-a-generation opportunity”. We are told that the price of this miracle is “only” a Palestinian state, some territorial concessions, and a gesture here and there. We are told that practical people understand that you sometimes have to hold your nose and deal with unsavoury regimes, because that’s how “the real world” works.

No.
This is not realism.
This is national suicide dressed up as diplomacy.

What is being sold to Israel is not a peace deal. It is a moral inversion; the only moral actor in the region is being asked to legitimise and reward one of the centres of ideological savagery in the Middle East and pay for the privilege with its own security and future.

Let’s strip the euphemisms away and call things by their names.

I. The Mirage of “Realism”

The intellectual framework behind the normalisation push is sometimes called “realism” or “realpolitik”. The script goes roughly like this:

• The world is made of interests, not morals.

• You don’t choose your neighbours.

• You deal with whoever has power.

• Saudi Arabia has power and money.

• Therefore, you cut a deal.

Notice what is missing from this framework: any moral evaluation of Saudi Arabia.

In this mindset, it doesn’t matter that the regime has spent decades exporting Wahhabi ideology, the same religious poison that fuels Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS. It doesn’t matter that it is a theocratic monarchy without individual rights. It doesn’t matter that it has never, in any fundamental sense, accepted Jewish sovereignty as legitimate.

All that matters is that they have oil, money, and a throne. So we pretend that they are “moderates”, “pragmatic”, “a stabilising actor”, and now, a “partner for peace”.

This is not realism. This is strategic blindness. The exact same blindness that looked at Hamas and saw “an asset”, looked at Qatar and saw “mediation”, and looked at the Palestinian Authority and saw “a peace partner”.

October 7th was the price of that blindness.
The Saudi deal is an attempt to double down on it.

II. Saudi Arabia: Stolen Wealth, Primitive Power

There is a lazy cliché repeated in the media that Saudi Arabia and Israel are “the two success stories of the Middle East.”

That is obscene.

Saudi Arabia’s power does not rest on innovation, entrepreneurship, or a culture that honours the mind. It rests on a geological accident and on the appropriation of other people’s work.

In 1933, long before the sand monarchy had any scientific or industrial capacity of its own, the regime signed a concession with Standard Oil of California. The Americans took all the financial risk, all the scientific responsibility, and all the engineering burden. CASOC, a dedicated American company, mapped the terrain, drilled the wells, and built the pipelines, ports, refineries, and global shipping infrastructure.

The Saudis did nothing but sit on their sizzling sand.

Men like Max Steineke spent years crossing the desert, drilling dry wells, inventing new techniques, and pushing deeper until, in 1938, they struck oil at Dammam Well No. 7. That moment did not come from Saudi ingenuity. It came from Western science, Western technology, and Western perseverance.

Over the decades, the Saudi regime did not “negotiate” for a bigger share; it threatened. It leveraged the rising wave of resource nationalism and dangled nationalisation as a knife. First came the coerced 50/50 split in the 1950s, extracted under the implicit threat of seizure. Then came the staged takeovers of the 1970s, each one a gangland shakedown backed by the message: give us more or we take everything. By 1980, Aramco was fully under Saudi control. It was not an overnight theft, but it was theft all the same, the slow-motion appropriation of an entire industrial civilisation’s creation by a monarchy that never built it.

Saudi Arabia’s wealth is not Saudi.
It is a keffiyeh glued to a Western discovery.

Left alone in the desert, sitting in tents, the Saudis would never have become an energy power. They did not discover oil by intellect, did not design rigs, did not create shipping routes, did not build the industrial system they now claim as their achievement. They inherited a machine built by others, turned the key, and sat on the cash flow.

And what have they done with that wealth?
Did they build a society where the mind is free?
Did they build a country fit for human flourishing?
Did they create a culture capable of innovation?

Quite the opposite.

Saudi Arabia is one of the darkest, most anti-human regimes on earth, a primitive furnace cult draped in glass towers. A living hell for anyone who is not a sheikh or a loyal servant of the palace.

Inside the polished façade, what actually exists?

• A theocratic monarchy built on medieval dogma, where legitimacy comes from lineage and clerics, not law or reason.

• Women are treated as second-class beings, still bound to male guardianship and denied autonomy over movement, marriage, and career. Honour killings are very common, and the Saudi injustice system doesn’t interfere. Most legal services for women require the male sponsor's permission.

• A legal system based on religious punishments, floggings, amputations, and beheadings for “apostasy”, “witchcraft”, or “insulting Islam”.

• Brutal repression of dissent: imprisonment, torture, disappearance, and execution. Even mild criticism can cost you your life.

• Zero freedom of speech. Zero political rights. Zero individual protection from the state.

• Religious police patrolling daily life, enforcing dress codes, segregation, and dogma.

• Institutionalised discrimination against non-Muslims, no open practice of faith, no houses of worship, no equality before the law. Non-muslims are banned from entering certain cities and locations.

• A culture of fear where silence is survival, and the individual is property of the throne.

• A monarchy that executes teenagers for protests and murders critics abroad (Khashoggi is only the famous one).

• An economy that produces nothing, dependent on foreign labour, foreign experts, and foreign engineers to keep the oil machine running.

• A megalomaniacal obsession with delusional projects like NEOM, a trillion-dollar fever dream where floating cities and mirrored “Lines” pretend to disguise a society incapable of building a normal town square. North Korea looks modest next to these Potemkin fantasies.

This is not a civilisation.
This is a medieval cult with skyscrapers.
And its educational system reflects the same moral universe.

For decades, Saudi textbooks have taught that Israel is “stolen land”, that Jews stole “Palestinian land”, and that the existence of the Jewish state is a historical crime awaiting correction. This is not fringe extremism. It is the official curriculum.

A Saudi child does not grow up learning how to think.
He grows up learning that Israel is illegitimate, temporary, an aberration, and a wound on Islamic land. He learns about the importance of the Palestinian “resistance” campaigns, in which the intifada, that is, the mass killings of civilians by means of terrorism, is a prime example.

The intellectual groundwork for genocide is laid in the classroom.

And beyond the political indoctrination, the curriculum is aggressively anti-reason and anti-science. Students are taught that Western scientific thought is corrupt; that evolution is a lie; that critical inquiry is dangerous; that democracy, freedom, and individual rights are Western diseases meant to weaken Islam. Modernity is permitted only in its hardware, cars, air conditioning, and American-made drilling equipment, but never in its software: free inquiry, rational thought, or the sovereignty of the individual mind.

The message is simple:

Use Western technology.
Despise Western civilisation.

And the poison does not stay inside Saudi borders.

For decades, the regime has poured billions into Western universities, buying institutes, departments, and academic chairs. You see the results after October 7th: Western students chanting jihadist slogans, parroting the same falsifications taught in Saudi classrooms, that Israel is colonial, temporary, and illegitimate.

Saudi Arabia teaches its own children that Israel is a crime and pays Western universities to teach the same thing.

This is the “moderate partner” Israel is told to trust.

III. Israel: Deliberate Civilisation, Not Accidental Wealth

Now contrast that with Israel.

Israel did not stumble onto oil.
Israel did not sit on a geological lottery ticket.
Israel did not inherit pipelines, ports, refineries, or Western-built mega-industries and merely switched the ownership papers.
Israel had nothing and built everything.

Israel took a strip of land with scarcely a drop of oil, scarcely a patch of fertile soil, and turned it into a nation of ideas, medicine, science, culture, and free minds. It built a society where the individual has dignity, where the law has meaning, where a woman is a full human being, where the mind is sovereign, and where a child grows up learning to think, not to obey.

And what did Israelis build, not with petrodollars, but with intellect?

• Universities, not madrassas.

• Startups, not cults.

• Hospitals and research labs, not secret police bureaus.

• Orchestras and theatres, not morality police patrols.

• Agricultural innovation, not imported rice and foreign labour.

• Democracy, not dynastic rule.

• A culture of debate, not a culture of fear.

• A society that absorbs refugees, not a society that creates them.

Israel took refugees from Europe, from Yemen, from Iraq, from Morocco, from Ethiopia, and from Russia, many arriving penniless, stateless, and scarred, and turned them into citizens, not permanent inferiors. There is no caste system here. No subjects of a throne. No hereditary hierarchy. No dynastic holiness.

Israel’s power is not an accident of geology; it is the product of human character.

Among other things, Israel is the child of:

• Freedom

• Science

• Capitalism

• Individual rights

Israel is not just a functioning country.

It is a miracle of civilisation built by people who had every excuse to fall into despair and chose to build instead.

Saudi Arabia is a paper tiger draped in oil money.

Israel is a real lion, made not of sand and superstition but of knowledge, industry, and moral purpose.

And this is why the comparison is morally obscene.

When think-tank analysts lazily speak of “two successful models” in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Israel, they are erasing the fundamental difference between earned greatness and unearned power, between civilisation and tribalism, and between a society built by free minds and a theocracy held together by fear and clerics.

It is the difference between a country that teaches mathematics, medicine, and freedom, and a country that teaches dogma, submission, and Jew-hatred.

Equating these two is not merely ignorant.
It is dangerous.

Once you pretend they are morally equivalent, it becomes “reasonable” to demand that Israel weaken itself to impress the sheikhs.

But there is no equivalence.
There never was.

Israel is the moral, scientific, cultural, and political opposite of Saudi Arabia.

One is the beacon of light in this region, the only place where the mind is free, where the individual has dignity, where human life has meaning, and where civilisation breathes.

The other is its black, oily stain, a regime built on sand, superstition, and the unearned wealth pumped from a hole someone else dug.

One is a civilisation.
The other is a devil in disguise.

IV. The Palestinian State, America’s Betrayal, and the Verdict of October 7th

Let’s be clear about the hierarchy here.
Saudi Arabia is not in a position to make demands of Israel.
If anything, they should be begging for us, not the other way around.

Israel is the only free, modern, creative society in this region:
the only place where a young woman can become a scientist or an entrepreneur without needing a male guardian,
the only place where the law exists to protect the individual from the state rather than the state from the individual.

And yet the core proposal on the table is brutally simple:

Saudi Arabia will recognise Israel if Israel agrees to destroy itself.

Because that’s what a Palestinian state is.
Not a concession.
Not a diplomatic experiment.
Not “taking a risk for peace.”

A Palestinian state is national suicide. Full stop.

Calling it a “ransom” is too gentle.
A ransom means you give something painful to save yourself.
Here, the payment is your own annihilation.

A sovereign Palestinian entity on the heights of Judea and Samaria is not an abstraction.
It is Gaza with altitude, Hamas with embassies, a permanent artillery platform aimed at Israel’s spine.
No serious person can pretend otherwise, certainly not after October 7th.

Yet Israel is told:

Hand over land.
Legitimise the ideology that just butchered your people.
Accept a terror state built on the dream of your destruction.
Call it “peace.”

This is not historic progress.
This is the most dangerous proposal ever marketed as diplomacy.

Under its current culture and leadership, a Palestinian state cannot be:

• Demilitarised beyond paperwork

• Detached from Iran, Qatar, Turkey, or the Muslim Brotherhood

• Re-educated to accept a Jewish neighbour

• Economically independent rather than eternally extorting the world

We tried “autonomy” in Gaza.
We saw what it produced.
A fully sovereign state would produce the same thing, only closer, higher, and deadlier.

To trade Israel’s strategic heartland for a smile from Riyadh is not realism.
It is what a man does when he sells his house’s foundation for a new car.

And behind this whole farce stands another actor: the United States.

A nation founded on individual rights now pressures its only genuine ally in the region to cripple itself to please a theocratic monarchy.

It sells weapons to a regime that shares the moral premises of jihadism.
It grants legitimacy to a monarchy that bankrolled the theology that produced Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and ISIS.
And instead of demanding liberalisation from Riyadh, Washington demands concessions from Jerusalem.

The message could not be clearer:

“We will stand with you, as long as you weaken yourself.”

This is not an alliance.
This is extortion dressed as statecraft.

Washington bends over backwards for medieval theocrats while lecturing the only liberal democracy in the region about “restraint.”
The Saudi–Palestinian package deal is not merely misguided.
It is moral treason against the West’s own principles.

And October 7th delivered its verdict on this entire worldview, the worldview that says you “manage” evil rather than destroy it.

For years, Israel was told:

Let Qatar fund Gaza.
Let Hamas rule it.
Let the rockets remain within “acceptable” limits.
Treat a genocidal death cult as an inconvenient neighbour rather than an enemy that must be eliminated.

That was realism.
That was “interests over morality.”
That was the doctrine of managing evil instead of judging it.

The result was thousands of Israelis butchered, tortured, raped, and kidnapped, because evil was never named and never crushed.

And now the same school of thought reappears and says:

Trust us.
Sign with the House of Saud.
Recognise a Palestinian state.
This time, it will work.

No.

We’ve seen this movie.
We’ve buried its victims.
We will not repeat it.

You cannot fight evil on one front while legitimising it on another.
You cannot destroy Hamas while rewarding the ideology that created Hamas.
You cannot claim to be at war with jihad while handing a diplomatic prize to the regime that spent decades exporting the theology behind it.

V. The Only Moral Answer: No

So what should Israel say to a Saudi normalisation-for-Palestine deal?

No.

Not “Maybe later.”
Not “With tweaks.”
Not “If the Americans guarantee it.”

Just: No.

Israel does not owe Saudi Arabia its land, its security, its sovereignty, or its future.
If Saudi Arabia truly wants normalisation, it can start with:

• Free your women.

• Free your people.

• End your export of jihadist ideology.

• Recognise the Jewish state as rightful and permanent.

Until then, “normalisation” is not peace.
It is self-betrayal.

Israel is not the side that should be begging for acceptance.
Israel is the one fragile, precious outpost of civilisation in a region poisoned by tyranny and fanaticism.

And to survive, Israel must finally internalise one principle that every healthy nation understands:

We do not normalise evil.
We do not negotiate with it.
We do not flatter it.
We defeat it.

And we refuse, absolutely refuse, to trade our future for a photo-op.

Not because we reject idealism, but because we embrace it.
Idealism, when it is grounded in truth and moral clarity, is the only approach that has ever worked for Israel, for the Jewish people, and for any free society.

What has failed again and again is the cynical “realism” preached by diplomats, generals, and pundits.
This realism told us to appease Hamas.
It told us to trust Qatar.
It told us to “manage” Gaza.
It insisted that evil can be contained rather than confronted.

Their realism was the fantasy.
Their pragmatism was the delusion.
They were the impractical ones, and the price was paid in blood on October 7th.

Our entire history proves one thing: the moral approach is the practical approach.
Naming evil is practical.
Judging evil is practical.
Standing against evil is practical.
Destroying evil when necessary is the most practical act of all.

There is nothing naive about moral clarity.
What is naive is believing that a terror ideology becomes peaceful when you give it borders, a flag, and a press release.

True realism means looking at the world as it is.
A regime that exports jihad is not a partner.
A movement committed to your destruction is not a neighbour.
A Palestinian state under its current ideology is not a risk. It is annihilation.

This is not abstract philosophy.
This is the hard, unforgiving ledger of Jewish survival.

So yes, we stand on idealism.
The moral idealism that is rooted in reality.
The idealism that built Israel out of nothing, that turned refugees into citizens, that faced down hostile armies and terror states and refused to bow.

The idealism that says truth matters.
Morality matters.
Life matters.
And evil must never be normalised.

A nation survives only when it refuses to bend to evil.
Israel will live because it still knows how to say no.

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