Why Trump’s flight from Saudi Arabia to Israel is such a big deal
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/05/22/why-trumps-flight-from-saudi-arabia-to-israel-is-such-a-big-deal/?utm_term=.a1b30fabf83cEarly Monday, President Trump left Saudi Arabia and flew aboard Air Force One to Israel. It was a notable journey, and not just because it was part of Trump's first foreign trip as the U.S. commander in chief: His flight has been widely described as the first direct one between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
On Twitter, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders wrote that the flight was a “historic moment.” At the least, it was extremely unusual.
Like other Muslim-majority nations, Saudi Arabia has no formal diplomatic relations with Israel because of the latter's ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. This has several practical consequences — most notoriously, Israeli passport holders are refused entry to many Muslim-majority nations except in special circumstances.
In the past, Israeli Muslim citizens have been required to get a temporary Jordanian passport if they wanted to perform the hajj in Saudi Arabia's Mecca, for example. A number of Israeli journalists were denied visas to Saudi Arabia to report on Trump's trip. Orly Azoulay, Washington bureau chief for the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, told the Forward that it was “an act of humiliation aimed at the White House.”
Trump's flight appears to have been a first, though perhaps in a slightly more limited sense than has been widely portrayed. Government officials told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that they were not aware of a similar flight before — or at least not one that was so widely reported in the press. Two previous U.S. presidents, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, had flown directly from Syria to Israel, but no sitting U.S. president has made the trip from Saudi Arabia directly before....
