Israeli envoy to Washington suggests peace with Syria and Lebanon could precede Saudi normalization

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, assessed in a Thursday interview that peace with Syria and Lebanon might be reached before a potential normalization deal with Saudi Arabia.

"There's no reason now why we wouldn't be moving into accommodation with Syria and Lebanon," Leiter told Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU, the world’s leading conservative nonprofit focused on changing minds through the creative use of digital media.

"We have dramatically changed the paradigm there. I'm very upbeat about the potential for an Abraham Accord with Syria and Lebanon, and that may actually precede Saudi Arabia," Leiter continued.

The Israeli ambassador believes Lebanon could significantly benefit from normalized ties with Israel. "Lebanon has the opportunity to 'emerge from its failed state status and reassert itself as a civil society," he said.

Turning to Syria, a country with longstanding tensions with Israel and the West, Leiter argued that U.S. President Donald Trump should have delayed lifting all sanctions against it.

He specifically urged the United States to wait and see how the new Syrian regime, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, protects vulnerable minorities like Christians, Druze and Alawites. Sharaa, previously linked to Al Qaeda-affiliated groups, claims to have reformed and now supports peace. However, some analysts in Israel and abroad caution that he may be attempting to mislead Western audiences.

Earlier this month, U.S.-based Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Pastor Johnnie Moore announced that they would soon travel to Syria to gain firsthand insight into the situation on the ground.

"There's not a long history of jihadis becoming Jeffersonians," he explained. "We also can't allow jihadis to be on our border; we learned that from October 7. We'd like to see al-Sharaa move in a direction where he's disbanding the jihadi groups, outlawing terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, and protecting minorities, adding that the removal of sanctions must be "performance-based."

Leiter emphasized that any potential peace with Lebanon would require the disarmament of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group.

"To the degree that Lebanon disarms Hezbollah, to that degree, we're moving towards accommodation and peace," he said. "We removed our troops. We have five installations on the border; we'll remove them too."

In 2020, then-U.S. President Trump brokered the historic Abraham Accords, which resulted in the establishment of diplomatic ties between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. While Saudi Arabia did not formally join the Abraham Accords, it reportedly played a leading role in advancing the agreements.

Leiter argued that the Saudi Kingdom seriously considered joining the Abraham Accords in 2020 "because in 2019, they weren't very far away. If President Trump had remained in office in 2020, we probably would've reached that point – a complete normalization with Saudi Arabia."

Leiter addressed what he described as the duplicitous nature of Qatar, stating he is "more uncomfortable with them than anyone else."

"It's unfortunate to see journalists in certain areas of public discussion here supporting Qatar and saying that they're actually allies of the West, and they're not. They have an agenda, and it's not a pro-Western agenda," Leiter warned.