In northern Gaza, at a home that until recently was used by one of the terrorist masterminds of Hamas’ 10/7 attacks on Israel, in a kid’s bedroom, no less, among the artifacts that were recovered after the house was shelled and emptied was a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, naturally translated into Arabic.  Inside the book were Post-it notes in Arabic and several lines of text highlighted and annotated.

President of Israel Isaac Herzog reveals in an interview with BBC: Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" was found in a children's room used as a Hamas terror base in the Gaza Striphttps://t.co/Fw9WzXotZD pic.twitter.com/TEXbnjNrth

— החדשות – N12 (@N12News) November 12, 2023

It wasn’t just that the autobiographical manifesto that led to the Holocaust and World War II was there, but that it was closely read and studied.

Israeli President Michael Herzog appeared on BBC with Laura Kuenssburg over the weekend and didn’t just make the claim, but held up the book that was recovered.

U.S. President Joe Biden, to his credit, has thus far decided to keep the two carrier groups in the Middle East as a backup plan with at least the theory being that if Iran does escalate beyond attacking U.S. interest 50 times without warranting much of a response, there will be hell to pay if Hezbollah starts launching rockets by the hundreds.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, pro-terrorist protests and riots continue through the streets of Londonistan, making one think that the Brits won’t be able to be relied upon this time around if things go sideways. Fortunately, Defence Minister Grant Shapps in an interview on Sky News with Trevor Phillips, showed the kind of moral clarity that’s desperately needed from Western leaders.

But the most interesting power move over the weekend came from a very nefarious source – the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.

In 2017, he was appointed by his father to replace him as ruler of the wealthy oil-rich nation that’s also home to two of the most holy sites in all of Islam, Mecca and Medina. Since then, bin Salman has been a reformer, an absolute authoritarian, and also a ruthless murderer of those who cross him, regardless of whether international borders get in the way.

He promised upon taking the controls of power in the Kingdom of Saud that he would spare no one that was corrupt, whether they were from the royal family or not. Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, who had a lengthy track record as a dissident of the royal family and of befriending terrorist elements around the world, including Osama bin Laden, was savagely snatched off the streets of Istanbul by Saudi agents in 2018 in broad daylight, dragged to the Saudi consulate, and was literally cut to pieces. The free world was horrified. After years of not facing international justice for the crime, Joe Biden declared he was immune from prosecution in the United States as a foreign head of state in 2022, so for all intents and purposes, he got away with it.

He is, however, not a man who ignores what is going on in the region and what the future holds for him and his hold on power. Saudi Arabia, a Sunni Muslim state, has long had to balance access to and protection of Mecca and Medina from all variants of the Islamic faith. He was keenly aware of the early Arab states that signed onto the Abraham Accords with Israel – Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Morrocco. It was long rumored in the waning days of the Trump administration that Saudi Arabia was on the brink of signing a deal with Israel, but the COVID pandemic and the resulting change of leadership in the United States in 2020, which reversed course in the Middle East and began to renew relations with Shia-controlled Iran, scuttled all of that.

A Saudi phase of the Abraham Accords would be the biggest game changer in the Middle East for peace that could be imagined. The four principals behind the Abraham Accords – Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, and special White House advisor Jared Kushner, realized early on in the administration that in the Middle East, the ‘enemy of my enemy can be my friend’ strategy can be exploited under the right conditions. Iran, given a deal by the Obama administration that purported to stop their nuclear weapon ambitions but in fact enabled and protected it, terrified all of the other Sunni players in the Middle East. It began to set off a new nuclear arms race in the region.

Trump’s team came along and convinced four Sunni state governments that Iran was their real and immediate enemy, and that the biggest ally they had in the region was Israel, backed by the power of the United States. The talks quickly led the way to agreements.

Over the weekend, there was an emergency meeting of the Arab League and Organization of Islamic Cooperation held in Riyadh, hosted by bin Salman. Most of the state actors, still hostile to Israel and supportive of the plight of the Gazans, though not willing to accept them as refugees, proposed five different measures that would attempt to cripple Israel’s response to Hamas, and by extension, Iran.  Those measures included blocking U.S. shipments of weapons and ammunition to the IDF, suspending all diplomatic and economic ties to Israel from Arab states, meaning blowing up the Abraham Accords, cutting oil production further to cripple the Americans, restricting Israeli overflights over Arab countries, and pushing internationally as a group for a ceasefire.

All four Abraham Accords signatories were against the measure, as were Egypt and Jordan, who have their own long-standing peace agreements with Israel. But the big player in the region was the host country, Saudi Arabia, who vetoed all five measures. So why would bin Salman do that?

Bin Salman is ruthless and determined at all costs to keep the country, and the House of Saud’s rule of it, together for the long haul. He knows, like everyone else in the world with moral clarity, that Iran’s hegemonic goals do not stop with the eradication of the Jews. Christians are next. And once the world that remains is Muslim, in their fever dream of a utopian world, they turn inward to the wrong kind of Muslims. Sunnis are apostates to the Shia and have been for centuries, and bin Salman, with this move, is recognizing that it’s in his own long-term interest to side with the allies that are going up against his biggest threat in the region.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on Fox News last week, before the Arab League Summit, and was genuinely optimistic about an expansion to the Abraham Accords, in spite of the current crisis, with Saudi Arabia.

With bin Salman’s play this past weekend and Joe Biden’s continuing disaster of a presidency resulting in approval numbers in the 30s, Netanyahu may have very good reason for his optimism.