Israel’s Foreign Ministry says a senior official has met with a visiting former military general from Saudi Arabia.
The meeting marks a rare public engagement between countries that have no official relations.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon says Sunday that Director General Dore Gold met with Anwar Eshki at a Jerusalem hotel. Eshki currently heads a Saudi think tank in Jeddah but is believed to have close ties with the kingdom’s rulers.
The Jerusalem Post newspaper said Eshki led a delegation of “businessmen and academics” on a mission to promote a stalled Saudi-led 2002 Arab peace initiative.
It said that he met Major General Yoav Mordechai, head of the military body that coordinates Israeli activities in the West Bank and Gaza, and talked Friday in the West Bank to a group of Israeli opposition MPs.
Eshki and Gold shared a platform in June last year at the Washington headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations and “met to discuss opportunities and challenges in the Middle East” the council said on its website at the time.
“Their speeches focused on the danger Iran posed to their countries, and they revealed that they had been in secret discussions for a year, and had now decided to go public about their talks,” it added.
Israeli army radio on Sunday aired an Arabic telephone interview with Eshki, chairman of the Jeddah-based Middle East Centre for Strategic and Legal Studies, in which he denied that his country had security links with the Jewish state.
“To my knowledge there is no cooperation in the struggle against terrorism,” he said.
Israel and Saudi Arabia have never had diplomatic relations but there have been media reports of intelligence-sharing in the face of shared concerns about Iran and the militant Islamic State group.
Official government permission was likely necessary for Eshki to make such an overt visit.
