Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar

MBS has been described to us by various intelligence and diplomatic officials who have been in contact with him as highly approachable, having a contagious youthful energy, and possessing a desire to shake up his country. Jason Greenblatt, the Trump administration’s special representative for international negotiations who’d spent countless hours with MBS, said the Saudi Crown Prince had a “willingness to mobilize everybody and anybody” to achieve his vision, which is to modernize his country, adopt a more moderate version of Islam, and prepare it for a future no longer dependent on its production of oil.

From Israel’s point of view, MBS’s vision included a far greater readiness to engage with the Jewish state than his father, King Salman, ever showed. MBS was also far less tied down by historic commitments to the Palestinian cause. On Iran, he denounced Ayatollah Khamenei as ‘the new Hitler’; he excoriated the 2015 Iran nuclear deal cut by the Obama administration as ‘lousy’; and accused the Obama administration of ‘getting cold feet’ in working together to save Yemen, the country on Saudi Arabia’s southern border where Iran has supported the Houthis, a Shiite faction that has been fighting the Sunni dominated government in a vicious civil war. Most important from Israel’s point of view, MBS was looking to Jerusalem for a security alliance.

As it is now altogether well known, MBS has also displayed a brutal, ruthless streak. He ‘jailed’ as many as four hundred Saudi princes and other members of the elite at the gilded Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh, subjecting many of them to beatings and interrogations, sleep deprivation, and blackmail. He accused them of corruption and, according to Saudi officials, eventually some $100 billion was recovered from them and paid into