We allowed ourselves to believe it. After everything – the sirens, the shelters, the grief that has no bottom – we allowed ourselves to believe that something larger was being built from the rubble.
When the last Israeli hostages came home, when the ceasefire held, when the guns finally went quiet enough to hear something other than the echo of the October 7 massacre, a quiet consensus formed among Israelis across the political spectrum: The Saudi deal was next. It was inevitable. It was the reward at the end of the longest, most terrible tunnel.
Boy, were we wrong.
The normalization of Saudi-Israeli relations, that enormous diplomatic prize dangled before us like a carrot on a stick for the better part of a decade, is not merely delayed; it is now in doubt. It is structurally, politically, and perhaps generationally foreclosed.
The conditions that once made it seem inevitable have not only disappeared; they have been replaced by countervailing forces so powerful and so entrenched that analysts are no longer debating when the deal might happen but whether the framework that would produce such a deal still exists at all.
US President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman look at portraits at the ''Presidential Walk of Fame'' in the Colonnade at the White House in Washington, DC, November 18, 2025. (credit: REUTERS/EVELYN HOCKSTEIN)
Why did things turn out this way?
Understanding why requires us to dispense with the comfortable narrative that
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