TIMES OF ISRAEL
Khashoggi disliked Israel, but his brutal murder puts Jerusalem in tough spot
by Raphael Ahren
October 23, 2018
Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was brutally murdered in Istanbul earlier this month, was not fond of Israel, to say the least. “The Jews are without history in Palestine. Therefore, they invented the Wailing Wall, which is a Mamluk structure,” he tweeted in 2015. Khashoggi also opposed Saudi Arabia’s covert cooperation with Israel, arguing that Riyadh did not need it and that any ties with the the Jewish state would unnecessarily tarnish his country’s reputation in the wider Arab world, according to Professor Joshua Teitelbaum, an expert on Saudi Arabia at Bar-Ilan University who knew Khashoggi well. READ MORE
ATLANTIC Jonathan Schanzer: The Experts Were Wrong About the Middle East There is a rare and growing bipartisan consensus in Congress about the need to smack Saudi Arabia with human-rights sanctions, or perhaps even tougher penalties…Sanctions seem inevitable. The only problem is that many of the same experts pushing for sanctions against Saudi Arabia have previously argued, in other contexts, that sanctions don’t work.
NEW YORK POST Tony Badran and Michael Doran: Why the Saudis despised Jamal Khashoggi With the likelihood growing that the Saudi government was behind the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, pressure has built for severe, swift action. As President Trump awaits more answers and contemplates a response, it’s worth considering who Khashoggi actually was, what he stood for and why the regime might have wanted him dead. This is not to suggest that the killing of Khashoggi is justified. It is, however, meant to observe that characterizations of him in the media are not fully accurate.