Israel and Saudi Arabia have admitted to holding five secret meetings to discuss their common enemy, Iran.
The two countries can’t agree on Palestine, but they have made common cause against Iran.
“We discovered we have the same problems and same challenges and some of the same answers,” retired Israeli Brig. Gen. Shimon Shapira told Bloomberg.
The two countries announced their secret talks at a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington Thursday. At that event, retired Saudi Gen. Anwar Majed Eshki and former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold said both of their countries have found common ground in preventing Iran from overrunning the Middle East, according to Bloomberg.
Op-eds in both countries point to the warmed relations. A March, 2015 article published in the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah praised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for addressing the U.S. Congress, and castigated President Obama for being an “ally of political Islam, [which is] the caring mother of [all] the terrorist organizations.”
Eshki highlighted the Iranian regime’s terrorism, brutality, hostage-taking and aggression, according to Bloomberg. He laid out a plan for the Middle East that hinged on peace between Israelis and the Arabs.
The second point in his plan was regime-change in Iran, and that was followed by greater Arab unity, the establishment of an Arab regional military force, and a call for an independent Kurdistan to be made up of territory now belonging to Iraq, Turkey and Iran.
Gold didn’t call for toppling Tehran. But he warned of Iran’s ambitions in the region and said he hoped the current cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia would lead to resolution of “all the differences that our countries have shared over the years,” Bloomberg reported.
Although Saudi Arabia and Israel are power-players in the Middle East, neither country is party to the nuclear negotiations with Iran.
