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Saudi Sheikh Salman Awdah, a popular but controversial religious scholar who has been mostly in solitary confinement since 2017, appeared in court recently only to hear that his case had been adjourned yet again for four months. Charged with more than 30 counts of terrorism, a term that is broadly defined in Saudi Arabia to include adherence to atheism and peaceful dissent, prosecutors are demanding the death sentence.
The normalization of Israeli-UAE relations will have significant strategic and political ramifications for the Middle East as a whole and Israel in particular. However, Israel’s regional standing relies quintessentially on the perception of its technological and military superiority and not on the fluid nature of reversible political agreements. In the Middle East, peace treaties—as the Egyptian and Jordanian examples show—need to be protected through security arrangements that discourage their violation rather than through the provision of military capabilities that may one day, under a change of leadership and intent, encourage a challenge to Israel.  
The recent revelations about Sa’ad Jabri, an Islamist and corrupt former Saudi intelligence officer, highlight the discrepancy between Western institutions' criticism of Saudi Arabia in the name of human rights and their support for the former officials most responsible for human rights abuses and security threats associated with the Kingdom. A tangled web of relations between pro-Brotherhood Muhammad bin Nayef regime apparatchiks, pro-Qatar members of US law enforcement (like Ali Soufan), and ideologically sympathetic intermediaries (like Jamal Khashoggi) are threatened by Muhammad bin Salman's reforms.

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