Category: World

The recent deadly crash near Toronto — in which four people were killed after police chased a suspect through oncoming traffic on a major highway — highlights the challenges officers face when deciding whether to pursue a suspect.

But it also raises questions about whether the policies covering police chases need to be beefed up, and if officers are sufficiently trained when confronted with these incidents.

“If you’re a cop and you’ve got to apply this balancing test in the heat of the chase, you’re being asked to make ridiculously complex decisions in a very heated and stressful situation,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina, who specializes in high-risk police activities.

The recent collision was the result of a police chase that began with an alleged liquor store robbery in Bowmanville, Ont. Police pursued the suspect as he drove the wrong way on Highway 401 in Whitby, about 50 kilometres east of Toronto.

The crash involved at least six vehicles, according to Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, the police watchdog which is investigating. The suspect was also killed. 

Provincial legislation lays out the circumstances in which a police officer can purse a fleeing suspect in a vehicle.

In Ontario, for example, an officer must consider a three-part test.

The officer must believe a criminal offence has been, or is about to be, committed and that pursuit is necessary for identifying the vehicle or a person, Steve Summerville, a former Toronto police officer and Ontario Police College instructor, told CBC’s Metro Morning.

Secondly, the officer must determine that there are no alternatives. And lastly, the officer must conclude that, in order to protect public safety, the immediate need to apprehend or identify the person outweighs the risk to public safety. 

“The officer involved has to make a ton of decisions at the time and assess things in a split second,” Jeff McGuire, executive director of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, also told The Current.

If officers begin a pursuit, they must notify their communications centre or dispatch. Then, the police service is required to have a supervisor monitor the pursuit.

“That supervisor has the autonomy — legislative authority — to call off, to terminate, the pursuit. And if that occurs, officers are duty-bound to comply,” Summerville said.

McGuire says he believes the current legislation is sufficient and adds that many police agencies usually impose more stringent policies than required by the legislation.

“Other than completely outlawing, making chases totally prohibited under any circumstance, I don’t think there needs to be tightening, in my opinion, on, legislation or policy,” McGuire said in a separate interview with CBC News, though he’s also open to looking for any potential gaps. 

As for police training, McGuire says that in Ontario, recruits get 18 hours of training in vehicle operations, though that covers more than just pursuits. Most police services will give their officers additional vehicle training, he said.

But Christian Leuprecht, a professor of political science at Royal Military College of Canada, says he believes there’s too much emphasis on tactical training. There should be more scenario training, in which officers must decide under what circumstances they would want to engage in a pursuit and how they weigh the risks, he says.

“These are, like, classic issues where your heart wants to chase after the guy but your brain should have all sorts of red signals [to], stop right now.”

Finding data about police pursuits in Canada is challenging as each force keeps its own records. A study conducted by the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP found that 77 people died in police pursuits over a 10-year period ending in 2019. But that study was based on media reports and pursuits that failed to make the news were not included.

Still, Leuprecht says he believes there are fewer police chases these days because of increased awareness of the potentially deadly results. As well, there are alternatives to car chases, if the force has the resources, which include aerial pursuits and drones.

Getting the suspect to stop

Meanwhile, Alpert, at the University of South Carolina, says one of the big problems with pursuits is getting the suspect to stop.

“If you don’t want to stop, short of a deadly force application, you’re not going to stop,” he said. 

The pursuit will also make the suspect focus on the police behind them, and not on the road in front, creating a dangerous situation, he says.

A study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that fatal crashes involving a police pursuit peaked at 455 in 2020, the highest since at least 2007 when there were 372.

This led to a report by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a national think-tank on policing standards which recommended police not to start a pursuit unless a violent crime has been committed and the suspect poses an imminent threat.

“A lot of this has to do with the new thinking in policing today, which is about proportionality,” Chuck Wexler, executive director of PERF, said when the report was released. 

“It’s about the sanctity of life and balancing the risk to everyone. Police officers die in pursuits. Suspects die in pursuits and even citizens can be injured or die.”

Alpert, who chaired the working group that produced the report, says there are very few departments or agencies that don’t chase at all.

And that, with 18,000 departments across the U.S., there are are still some with very few restrictions and which don’t train their officers well.

“So cops will chase for anything. The better departments have limited the pursuits to violent crimes.

“It’s what’s the government interest in stopping someone. If you have a rape or robbery, you know, a violent, murder or something of a very violent nature, then the government interest is pretty high,” he said. “If you have a property crime or traffic. Then the government interest is very low and does not justify risk.”

Explosions. Death-defying falls. Swords, guns, car crashes and balls of fire. 

For some, those are terrifying possibilities of a day gone very wrong. But for the new film The Fall Guy, and the stunt performers it seeks to celebrate, it’s just another day at the office.

The new film, starring Ryan Gosling and helmed by stuntman-turned-director David Leitch, ostensibly tells the story of stuntman-turned-investigator Colt Seavers. But at its heart, The Fall Guy is actually about showcasing the indispensable contribution of Hollywood’s stunt performers, and — as Gosling recently said at an L.A. red carpet event for the film: “This movie is just a giant campaign to get stunts an Oscar.”

While there’s been a long-running campaign to do just that, getting the contributions of those workers acknowledged at film’s biggest night has been an uphill battle with seemingly no end in sight.

CBC News talked to three stunt performers from around the country about why it matters to have their work recognized and what it means that The Fall Guy is trying so hard to accomplish it. 

Angelica Lisk-Hann

As the first Black female stunt co-ordinator in Canada, Toronto’s Angelica Lisk-Hann has seen firsthand how much the industry has changed. 

“It’s funny. I remember when I first started performing stunts, the term was ‘Meat Puppet,’ ” she said, of what stunt performers were often called. ” ‘Yeah, here’s some money for the rental of your body for the day,’ type of situation.”

Things have improved since the early days of her career, and that’s partly because of Lisk-Hann herself. After learning that the Canadian Screen Awards did not have a stunt category, she started a campaign to include one.

After seeing the category added to the 2020 ceremony, Lisk-Hann took home the very first stunt trophy for her work on the Canadian drama series Mary Kills People. Now, she says, the goal is to get the same recognition for stunt performers at the Academy Awards.

Other awarding bodies have made moves to celebrate stunts, including the Screen Actors Guild, the Taurus World Stunt Awards and the Vulture Stunt Awards. But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organizing body for the Oscars, has been hesitant to do the same, and Lisk-Hann finds that confusing.

“It is ‘Arts and Sciences,’ right?” she said, noting that in The Fall Guy, there’s a classic stunt known as a cannon roll that features a performer doing eight and a half revolutions in a car crash. “The old record was seven. Do you think that took some science?”

Lisk-Hann believes some of that hesitancy is because there’s a resistance to acknowledging that A-list actors onscreen aren’t always performing the astounding feats that audiences witness. 

But the reality, she explains, is that nearly every iconic character is built equally by their primary actor and their stunt performer. She points to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscar for best actor in The Revenant — and the well-known scene in which his character, played by a stunt performer, is attacked by a bear.

Each of those performances was equally important to building the character, Lisk-Hann says, but only one took home a trophy.

“Without Leo, there’s no award,” she said. “Without the stunter, there’s no award.”

Lauro Chartrand-DelValle

Vancouver’s Lauro Chartrand-DelValle always knew he wanted to be in movies — just not as a standard actor. 

When he was just eight years old, he went to see a Chuck Norris movie with his mother and told her that was what he wanted to do when he grew up. 

“And she said, ‘What, be like Chuck Norris?’ And I said ‘No, like the guy he’s kicking through the wall.'”

After his first stunt role on the TV series MacGyver in 1991, he moved on to stepping in for stars like Antonio Banderas, and appearing in films including The Cabin in the Woods, Rumble in the Bronx, 2012, Deadpool and the new series Shogun.

Despite the head-on motorcycle collisions, 70-foot free falls and fights Chartrand-DelValle has performed, he says the primary intent of his work as a stunt actor is to be forgotten.

“I remember when I first started, my mom was always so excited: ‘Oh, can’t wait to see you in this movie,’ ” he recalled, adding that he would tell her she probably wouldn’t see him. “If you see me, I didn’t do my job properly.”

In the earlier days of film, Chartrand-DelValle says stunt performers rarely asked for or received any credit, and for stunt performers to appear in the credits at all was rare. 

While he says the work alone used to be enough, there’s a growing trend for stunt performers to share in the accolades and earn an acknowledgement of their importance in a story’s creation. 

“When you’re not invited to the party, that always hurts a little bit,” he said. And when a movie that does well is celebrated for its action scenes, he says he can’t help but wonder, “Who provided that action?”

But Chartrand-DelValle says The Fall Guy is a step in the right direction. 

“Everybody’s really proud and excited that it may bring the recognition that stunt people deserve.”

Jean Frenette

Montreal stunt performer and co-ordinator Jean Frenette has a special interest in the success of The Fall Guy.

A longtime stuntman with credits stretching back four decades, Frenette not only worked alongside David Leitch in Deadpool 2 and 300, the two are close friends.

WATCH |

The sun was shining and the leaves were coming out of their buds Friday afternoon as a relative calm reigned over an encampment set up by pro-Palestinian student protesters on the front lawn of McGill University’s downtown campus. 

The day before had been misty and grey, and filled with relentless noise from opposing protests led on one side by the students and pro-Israel groups on the other. Chants on loudspeakers flooded the campus grounds, while upbeat music in Hebrew filled Sherbrooke Street. 

“The calm today is reassuring, but it also highlights a lot of contrast from yesterday’s protests,” said Ghayas Osseiran, 24, who had studied politics, philosophy and economics at the university.

Osseiran, sitting on a blanket underneath a tree near the encampment on Friday, said he was a supporter of the student protesters. He was among many on campus trying to process the events of the past week. 

“Morale is good. It’s nice to have a calmer day,” said Ari Nahman by text, a Concordia University religions and cultures student and Independent Jewish Voices member, who was among the first protesters to set up camp at McGill on Saturday.

Days earlier, Nahman had pointed out the dark circles around their eyes when asked by a CBC News reporter about the intermittent rain, lighting and thunder that punctuated several of the camp’s days and nights. 

The bad weather seemed to accompany other pressures the pro-Palestinian student protesters faced to leave: the university administration’s staunch opposition to their presence from the start and an injunction request filed in Quebec Superior Court Tuesday on behalf of two McGill students accusing the group of antisemitism and asking a judge to prevent them from protesting near McGill buildings.

Several university encampments and occupations in the United States faced aggressive police intervention and mass arrests this week, including UCLA in Los Angeles, the University of Texas in Austin and Columbia University in New York, adding to apprehensions on the Montreal campus. 

By Friday, some of the American education institutions had begun to show openness to encampment demands. Brown University, Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota all made commitments to discuss their investment policies in exchange for protesters to take down their camps. 

Wednesday, McGill president Deep Saini offered to hold a forum to discuss students’ demands, but was met with skepticism from protesters, who said they wouldn’t budge until the university pulls investments in companies such as Lockheed Martin, a weapons manufacturer with direct ties to the Israel Defence Forces and Safran, a French air defence company.

But Mayada Elsabbagh, a McGill professor at the school’s medical faculty who has been supporting the students’ encampment, said she felt hopeful McGill would do more than it has in the past in response to similar demands — “especially after the success of the rejection of the injunction that happened in courts a few days ago, which demonstrated without doubt that this form of protest is both democratic, legal and should be welcomed in our institutions.”

Movement tied to wider struggles

An event with performances and talks by academics and artists took place near the encampment around noon. Later, a workshop was held by the Kanien’kehá:ka Kahnistensera, also known as the Mohawk Mothers, a group who has been calling on McGill to let them search for possible unmarked graves at a former Montreal hospital site the university now owns.

“I’m really touched and impressed by the students’ ability to organize things on the fly,” Elsabbagh said. “We, as activists, were not as well informed and eloquent, as what I’m seeing in this advocacy movement today.”

Elsabbagh said this year’s movement was linked to other global struggles, including climate change. 

“People who are concerned with justice are essentially seeing a lot of symbolism and affinity and attachment, to what’s happening with the genocide in Gaza right now,” she said. 

Kevin Yuen-Kit Lo, an assistant professor teaching design at Concordia, said he, too, had been involved in early 2000s activism for Palestinian rights and had noticed a broadening of the cause. 

“I think it’s a struggle that is obviously first and foremost about the Palestinians and their the right to land. But it’s also reflecting on on the mechanisms of settler colonialism globally,” he said. 

Osseiran, the former McGill student, said he believes those struggles were reflected in the mood on the pro-Palestinian side of Thursday’s opposing protests.  

“We had a lot of people on on this side of the fence who have a lot of pain, a lot of anguish and disappointment in the institutions that are still investing in Israeli apartheid and the genocide in Gaza. And, we see a lot of that pain in the chants, while on the other side of the fence, there was a lot more, joy, which was sort of dystopian to see,” Osseiran said.

‘Dissonance’ amid opposing protests

“There’s a lot of dissonance between their celebration and the ongoing struggle that the Palestinians are resisting,” he added.

Protesters on the pro-Israel side said their joy was about creating visibility for the Jewish community as pro-Palestinian encampments dominated this week’s news cycle. 

“We’re not going to let one side take control of the narrative. The ultimate thing is that we’re just here in peace,” said Avishai Infeld, a former McGill student who helped organize the pro-Israel demonstration with Hillel Montreal. Though several people at the protest called for the encampment to be dismantled, Infeld said that wasn’t his organization’s goal. 

One protester was less diplomatic. “I think they don’t know s—. They say, ‘Free, free Palestine;’ other than that, they don’t know anything,” said Danni Morris, who said she had moved to Montreal from central Israel a year-and-a-half ago.

Morris said she was most concerned about the roughly 130 Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza.

After the Oct. 7 attack in Israel that officials there say killed 1,200, another 253 people were taken hostage. Slightly more than 100 hostages have been released, most as part of a November ceasefire deal.  

Since October, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip, according to the Health Ministry there. Morris said she doesn’t believe those numbers because they are published by Hamas. 

“I’m thinking about my people, not theirs right now,” she said at the protest on Thursday. 

The most grave allegation levelled during the foreign interference saga of the last many months was that the Liberal government willfully turned a blind eye to Chinese state meddling in Canada’s democracy because it benefited the Liberals politically. Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s initial report seems to at least cast significant doubt on that claim.

“In my opinion, the evidence I have heard to date does not demonstrate bad faith on anyone’s part, or that information was deliberately and improperly withheld,” Hogue says at page 150.

Hogue repeated her finding about an absence of bad faith in her prepared remarks to reporters on Friday. But in both cases, she attached a caveat.

The evidence, she wrote, “does suggest that on some occasions, information related to foreign interference did not reach its intended recipient, while on others the information was not properly understood by those who received it.”

In her remarks, she said “there were some communication problems and a certain lack of understanding of the role that everyone plays, or should play, in combating foreign interference.”

These are far less sensational problems. But they’re still problems.

In assessing the impact of foreign interference during the 2019 and 2021 elections, Hogue states clearly and unequivocally that she does not believe any meddling undermined the integrity of the electoral system or affected which party formed government. It could have affected the result in a specific riding, she says, although she also concedes that she cannot say so with certainty.

But she does find that foreign interference has now undermined public confidence in Canadian democracy. 

“While awareness and foreign interference may at one time have been largely within the domain of security and intelligence agencies and hidden from public view, the cat is now out of the proverbial bag,” Hogue writes. “The result has been to shake the confidence of Canadians in their electoral processes.”

“Ironically,” she adds, “I note that undermining faith in democracy and government is a primary aim of many of the states that engage in foreign interference.”

Which is why it’s most unfortunate that this report is only coming out now — and not eight months or a year earlier.  

In its own defence, the Liberal government can fairly argue that it established new bodies and formal processes to deal with foreign interference — a threat that fully came into view in the wake of the American presidential election in 2016.

Within the apparatus of government and federal elections, there now exists the SITE task force, the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol and the Rapid Response Mechanism (a veritable alphabet of new acronyms to learn).

(There is also the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, the body that, if cooler heads had prevailed, might have been the right forum to address the allegations raised by media reports in 2022 and 2023.)

Hogue’s inquiry has illuminated those mechanisms and raised useful questions about how well they work, how they can be improved and under what parameters they should operate. Some of the problems she raises might have simple fixes. But repeatedly, Hogue found issues that will require further consideration as her inquiry continues.

Hogue empathized with Kenny Chiu, the former Conservative MP, whose re-election campaign was the subject of “erroneous information” that spread online.

“It is not obvious what help the government could or should have provided at the time,” she writes. “But it raises an important question about when and how government should intervene to respond to online misinformation and disinformation.” 

Hogue notes that government officials could not definitively attribute online misinformation about Chiu or the Conservative Party to a state actor. But she notes that such attribution is inherently difficult. And that raises further questions.

“If we cannot expect Canada’s security and intelligence community to attribute online activity to foreign countries with certainty, are we setting the bar too high by requiring certain attribution before the government intervenes?” Hogue asks. “Or are there good reasons to practice restraint, even if there will rarely be a direct response to disinformation like what Mr. Chiu faced?”

Hogue finds that a later response by the SITE task force to Conservative officials was “unnecessarily confusing.”

“It would be helpful if government agencies making such assessments would use words that clearly convey their position,” Hogue writes — advice that can be fairly applied to all levels and manners of modern government communication.

More broadly, there remains the scourge of excessive reticence. CSIS, Hogue writes at one point, can be “circumspect with details when informing others of the intelligence it has gathered and the conclusions it has drawn.”

If the Liberals can be happy that Hogue did not find bad faith, they still face the challenge of responding to such issues and concerns before the next federal election.

In the wake of allegations about how former Liberal MP Han Dong won the party’s nomination in Don Valley North, Hogue also questions whether the Liberal nomination process is stringent enough. And she notes that it’s unclear what, if anything, was done within the government to follow up on those allegations after the 2019 election.

‘This report concerns us all’

In her preface, Hogue writes that, “The following pages are about our democracy, our values and what can threaten them. That is why this report concerns us all.”

Nearly a year ago, when he issued his own report into sensational allegations of foreign interference, former governor general David Johnston said “democracy is challenged. And my heavens, if any country in the world should be making democracy work, it’s this country, Canada. And that’s what we must get about.”

The original leaker(s) might take solace from the fact that the blaring headlines ultimately led to greater public awareness and a detailed exploration of both the problem of foreign interference and how the federal government is responding to it. 

But it also remains fair to conclude that no one has covered themselves in glory over the past 18 months — that it took too long to get to Friday’s report and there are no heroes in the story of how Canadian politics got here. If public confidence has been shaken, it’s not just because of the allegations of foreign interference. It’s also because of how those allegations were handled and framed.

With her initial hearings and first report — a second report that looks more deeply at the issues is due later this year — Hogue has at least laid the foundation for a real conversation about the threat, assuming that political actors are still interested in such a conversation.

Regardless, the end result might be an improved approach to foreign interference and a more resilient democracy. 

In one incident, a mixed-race Surrey Police Service officer allegedly saw Surrey RCMP members play a game mocking a Black male suspect.

In another, an RCMP officer was heard yelling “hide the food” before trying to touch a Surrey Police Service officer’s stomach with his hand.

And in yet another, a Surrey Police Service officer — assigned to work with the RCMP’s special victims unit as part of a transition from the federal force to a municipal squad — said she was told “the RCMP had not planned for SPS officers to stay beyond a week.”

All three incidents are detailed — along with dozens more — in a summary of a Surrey Police Service (SPS) investigative report filed in B.C. Supreme Court Thursday that concluded RCMP officers had subjected their municipal counterparts to “harassment and a toxic work environment”

“Harassment by the RCMP has negatively affected the health and welfare of SPS officers,” wrote the author of the report, SPS Insp. Bal Brach, who himself joined the SPS after a 25-year career with the RCMP.

As an example, Brach then cited the experience of the officer who served with the special victims unit (SVU) — a 14-year veteran of the New Westminster police who claimed the assignment led to her being unjustly barred from working with the Surrey detachment.

“She felt that her time deployed to SVU was dehumanizing, full of hatred and trickery and was oppressive and emotionally and psychologically exhausting,” Brach wrote.

“She now has increased anxiety in the workplace and fears that her professional reputation, that she worked hard to build for nearly 15 years, has been slandered because of the ill intentions of [eight RCMP non-commissioned officers].”

Three SPS officers barred from detachment

Brach’s unredacted 10-page summary was filed with the court despite arguments from a government lawyer who claimed making them public could cause “undue public concern about the state of affairs at the Surrey RCMP detachment.”

The document is part of an affidavit filed by Surrey Police Service union President Rick Stewart in a failed attempt by the union for intervenor status in the city’s bid to overturn Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth’s decision ordering a transition to a municipal police force.

Hundreds of SPS officers have been hired to work alongside members of the Surrey RCMP as the two forces prepare for the municipal squad to take over as Surrey’s police of jurisdiction at the end of November.

According to the documents, the events leading to Brach’s investigation began with the RCMP’s decision to end the assignments of three senior SPS officers — including the woman who has been assigned to the special victims unit. 

“The termination of the assignments resulted in the SPS [officers] being barred from working with the Surrey detachment,” Brach wrote.

“The events and circumstances related to the termination of the SPS [officers] and the experiences of the three witness officers deployed to the Surrey detachment SVU suggested the RCMP had breached its obligation to provide a healthy workplace for SPS staff.”

‘Too many ‘Black people’

What follows is a litany of complaints from Brach’s interviews with 12 SPS officers, all of whom joined the municipal police force after serving with other Canadian police departments, including the RCMP, where some of them spent decades.

The officers claimed RCMP colleagues subjected them to ridicule, intimidation and demeaning behaviour. They also accused RCMP officers of misuse or abuse of authority.

In one case, an officer who spent 20 years with Vancouver police said RCMP management denied requests by members of the police mental health outreach team to “ride as two-person cars” after a Burnaby RCMP officer was stabbed to death while making a wellness check.

The same mixed-race SPS officer — who came to the municipal force after 15 years with the Toronto Police Service — claimed that an RCMP or City of Surrey employee said they “disliked the city of Toronto as there are too many ‘Black people’ in the city.”

Brach’s report also includes two photographs — one of a cluttered storage area in the Surrey detachment where a Surrey Police Service officer was forced to work, and the other of a sign on the desk of a senior RCMP officer reading ‘Keep the RCMP in Surrey.'”

A policing void?

Beyond the investigative report, Stewart’s affidavit also contains the collective agreement between the Surrey Police Board and the Surrey Police Union, which stipulates SPS officers receive 18 months notice in the event of a decision to reverse the transition to a municipal force.

The judicial review is expected to wrap at the end of the week. In its arguments, the City of Surrey claims Farnworth is trying to impose a municipal force on the city that will increase the annual cost of policing by at least $75 million — a hike of about 46 per cent.

The city’s lawyers claim Farnworth’s decision is unreasonable and is undermining the democratic will of Surrey taxpayers who voted in 2022 to stick with the RCMP.

The city claims Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke and Premier David Eby had reached a deal to proceed, but that Farnworth then “pulled the rug out” from under Surrey voters in July 2023 by concluding that a switch back to the RCMP would endanger public safety.

The province fears a return to the RCMP could throw Surrey into a policing void if newly hired municipal officers leave en masse once it becomes clear their jobs are doomed. And pulling RCMP officers from other jurisdictions to fill the gaps could create problems elsewhere.

Dawn Roberts, a spokesperson with the B.C. RCMP, said Thursday in an email she could not comment on the allegations in Brach’s report because the RCMP does not have a copy of it nor the affidavits filed in court.

“The RCMP is committed to providing a healthy, safe and respectful work place for all employees, free of harassment and discrimination,” Roberts wrote. 

“Surrey RCMP and SPS officers have worked together in the detachment for over two years and have done so with professionalism. The RCMP takes all respectful workplace allegations seriously, and has robust measures in place for any issues raised by personnel in the detachment, including RCMP members and assigned Surrey Police Service officers.”

Saudi Arabia and the United States are finalizing the details of a landmark deal to strengthen bilateral trade and defense – but an agreement will not be reached if the kingdom and Israel do not establish diplomatic relations, US officials said.

A defense treaty would solidify the seven-decade security alliance between Saudi Arabia and the US, and tie them ever closer to each other as US adversaries like Iran, Russia and China seek to expand their influence in the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long sought relations with Saudi Arabia, home of Islam’s holiest sites, as the move could domino across the wider Muslim world.

The US is currently negotiating one mega-deal involving three components, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Thursday.

The first component includes a package of agreements between the US and Saudi Arabia, another component has the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and a third component for a pathway to a Palestinian state.

“All of them are linked together. None go forward without the others,” Miller said.

For normalization to be realized between Saudi Arabia and Israel, there has to be a pathway for a Palestinian state and “calm in Gaza,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a panel at an economic conference in Riyadh this week.

“The work that Saudi Arabia and the United States have been doing together in terms of our own agreements, I think is potentially very close to completion, but then in order to move forward with normalization two things will be required: calm in Gaza and a credible pathway to a Palestinian state,” he said.

On the sidelines of the forum, Blinken met Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) to discuss the deal, the State Department said. Experts describe the Saudi-US pact as a “comprehensive set of understandings” that would include security, economic and technological guarantees to the kingdom, as well as support for its civilian nuclear program.

The normalization deal is expected to be modeled on the Abraham Accords, a set of treaties that saw four Arab states recognize Israel in 2020 that sidestepped the longstanding Arab demand for an independent Palestinian state as a prerequisite to recognition of Israel. MBS had said earlier that a pact with Israel would be “the biggest historical deal since the Cold War.”

In 2021, Netanyahu described the Accords as enabling Israel to replace “the old and dangerous doctrine of territories in exchange for peace and brought peace in exchange for peace, without giving up a single inch” and sought to expand what he called the “circle of peace.”

Since then, the Biden administration has made Israel-Saudi normalization central to its Middle East policy. The US and Saudi Arabia had continued discussions on the pact in 2023, and Blinken was expected to fly to Riyadh on October 10 last year to discuss the details, just three days before Hamas attacked Israel, postponing the effort.

The subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza, which has left the enclave in ruins and killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, may have changed the parameters of the deal for Saudi Arabia, analysts say. Now Israel’s acceptance of a component calling for an “irreversible” pathway to a Palestinian state would be key to the crucial normalization component of the wider deal.

“We have the broad outlines on what needs to happen on the Palestinian front…credible, irreversible [pathway to a Palestinian state],” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan told a World Economic Forum panel without referencing normalization with Israel.

Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected the prospect of an independent Palestinian state, arguing that it would hurt Israel’s security, and is adamant on pressing ahead with the Gaza war until Hamas is eliminated.

Those obstacles might see the kingdom attempt to close the bilateral deal without the normalization component of the agreement, analysts say. But such an approach would face major hurdles. An agreement establishing a firm US military commitment to Saudi Arabia’s security, without the normalization component, is unlikely to pass through the US Congress, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has said.

“If there is a mutual defense agreement negotiated in the form of a treaty, it needs 67 votes in the Senate to become binding. Without normalizing the Israeli-Saudi relationship and ensuring the security needs of Israel regarding the Palestinian file, there would be very few votes for a mutual defense agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia,” Graham said on X in response to reports of Saudi Arabia opting for a “plan B” to the agreement.

Experts say that Biden could be able to bypass Congress to reach the agreement by modeling it around another security agreement it signed with Bahrain last year.

“There is another pathway, modeled around the Comprehensive Security Integration and Prosperity Agreement the Biden administration signed with Bahrain in September of 2023,” according to Firas Maksad, Senior Fellow and Director for Strategic Outreach at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC. The text of that pact “explicitly states that other parties may be invited to join,” he said.

However, there has been no indication that the Biden administration would opt to bypass Congress for the bilateral agreement with Saudi Arabia to pass.

For Saudi Arabia, a bilateral agreement with the US would be a major victory, marking an end to the era when Biden sought to undermine MBS by pledging to turn his country into a “pariah” after the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi intelligence officials in Turkey.

The deal would also “consolidate America’s dominance in the Middle East for generations and would blunt the growing challenge posed by both China and Russia,” Maksad said.

MBS is eager to bolster the kingdom’s defenses and diversify the Saudi economy away from hydrocarbons, as he pursues an ambitious economic policy dubbed Vision 2030. The kingdom has a nascent civilian nuclear program that the Crown Prince is keen to develop with US support.

“Saudi Arabia would like to make a deal with the United States and this is probably the best time during the Biden administration to help some of the stickier issues get through Congress,” according to Karen Young, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, referring to enrichment of nuclear materials.

Another sticking point in any US support for such a program is American opposition to local enrichment of uranium, a key component for nuclear power that could also be used to develop nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia is rich in uranium deposits and has insisted on being able to enrich it domestically, which would be a first for an Arab state. Neighboring United Arab Emirates, for example, imports enriched uranium to power its nuclear plants.

On Wednesday, Democratic Senator Edward J. Markey, co-chair of the Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group, called on the Biden administration to ensure that Riyadh commits to forego enrichment and reprocessing of nuclear material, citing MBS as saying previously that Saudi Arabia would develop a nuclear weapon if Iran does too.

“The path towards Middle East peace should not include the prospect of a nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia, which would undermine the interests of the US, allies, and partners across the region,” he said in his letter.

The Saudi-US pact would make it incumbent on both countries to work together to deter and confront any external aggression, but doesn’t formalize it as a treaty alliance, according to Maksad.

“It is often described as Article 4.5, stopping just short of a treaty alliance that requires Senate approval but providing for a written commitment of mutual defense,” Maksad said, referring to the NATO treaty’s Article 5, which obliges all member states to come to the defense of any state facing attack.

“There will still be room for a multilateral security agreement that eventually includes Israel, along with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the U.S. and others, when political circumstances allow…the choice will be Israel’s, when it’s ready to put something on the table that moves the ball forward towards a two-state solution with the Palestinians,” Maksad said.

Header image credit:Secretary of State Antony Blinken walks with Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan bin Abdullah to a Joint Ministerial Meeting of the GCC-US Strategic Partnership on April 29, 204 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters/Pool