Israeli Minister of Tourism Haim Katz became the first minister of an Israeli government to visit Saudi Arabia in a formal capacity this week when he led a delegations to United Nations conference on tourism.
The visit came amid talk by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sulman about a potential deal involving formal recognition, peace, and normalized relations between the two countries.
Al-Monitor.com’s Rina Bassist reported:
A statement issued by the Tourism Ministry said that during the two-day conference marking International Tourism Day, Katz will participate in several events and meetings with his international counterparts, particularly those from the Middle East.
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Katz’s visit to Riyadh comes days after the arrival of a delegation from Israel’s Foreign Ministry for the UNESCO World Heritage Committee’s 45th session. It was the first time that Israeli diplomats have publicly traveled to Saudi Arabia.
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Katz’s visit came as a Saudi envoy made a rare trip to the West Bank on Tuesday and reiterated that the Palestinian cause will be a “cornerstone” of any normalization deal the oil-rich kingdom may strike with Israel.
Israel and the U.S. left UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), which became an organization dominated by anti-Israel bias and antisemitism, as it denied Jewish cultural ties to Jerusalem.
But the U.S. rejoined it under President Joe Biden, reversing an earlier Donald Trump policy, and Israel remained a member of its World Heritage Convention, which designates World Heritage Sites.
During the Riyadh meeting, the UNESCO gathering approved a World Heritage Site near Jericho, a city in Judea (the southern West Bank) in what it called “Palestine,” over Israeli objections, Al-Monitor noted. However, the trip was otherwise without incident.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.