Saudi media takes an anti-Israel turn

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Saudi Arabia’s state-backed media has been taking an increasingly anti-Israel tone, a further indication of the diminishing prospects for diplomatic normalization between the two Middle East powers. In one example, a January editorial in the daily Al Riyadh criticized Israel for disregarding international law and state sovereignty.

“Wherever Israel is present, there is ruin and destruction," the editorial said. Saudi clerics have amplified the message. “Oh God, deal with the Jews who have seized and occupied, for they cannot escape your power," Sheikh Saleh bin Humaid, an imam at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, said during a sermon in December.

The recent shift in tone has been driven in part by Saudi Arabia’s escalating public feud with the United Arab Emirates, a rival for economic leadership of the Gulf that has taken opposing sides to the kingdom in conflicts around the Middle East. The U.A.E. is also the most prominent signatory of the Abraham Accords—a series of U.S.-backed normalization deals between Israel and Muslim-majority countries.

The Saudi media campaign has been directed by the kingdom’s leadership and takes aim at those ties, which make for an easy target to swing public opinion, Saudi officials said. “The impostor from Abu Dhabi believes that the shortest path to avenging past grudges and healing the state of jealousy and feelings of inferiority toward the Kingdom is by throwing oneself into the arms of Zionism and accepting that the Emirates become the Israeli Trojan horse in the Arab world," Saudi columnist Ahmed bin Othman Al-Tuwaijri wrote in an online editorial last month for the Saudi publication Al-Jazirah. Saudi Arabia disputes the idea that the coverage is