During the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Jerusalem in 1977, Barbara Walters managed to arrange a joint interview, aired on American television, with him and Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The famed broadcast journalist, who died last week at the age of ninety-three, called it “the most important interview of my career.” In it, she asked the two leaders if their respective ambassadors in Washington would meet with one another—a question Begin and Sadat answered in the affirmative. Walters then took it upon herself to make this unprecedented meeting happen. Martin Kramer tells the story:

Walters counted among her Washington friends the suave Ashraf Ghorbal, Egyptian ambassador and an old pro. A Harvard PhD, he had been in the Egyptian diplomatic service for almost 30 years. He’d run the Egyptian interests section in Washington after 1967, did a stint as a security adviser and press spokesperson for Sadat, and returned to Washington as ambassador upon the resumption of U.S.-Egyptian relations in 1974. Ghorbal knew how to roll with the punches. . . . But how far would he go? This is what Barbara Walters set out to test.

As soon as Sadat left Jerusalem, she went straight to Ghorbal and to Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Simcha Dinitz, another career pro. Would they agree to be interviewed together on ABC News’s Sunday afternoon weekly, Issues and Answers? A foreign ambassador couldn’t dream of more media exposure than that.

Dinitz agreed, but Ghorbal demurred. He was prepared to meet Dinitz, but not on television. Fine; would Ghorbal meet Dinitz before an audience? Ghorbal agreed, provided the meeting was off the record.

How could Walters leverage an off-the-record meeting into the talk of the town? Her solution: invite an A-list of officials and media celebrities to dinner. ABC, Walters’s network, booked a banquet room at the Madison Hotel, and she invited 50 people to dinner in honor of the two ambassadors. Yes, it would be off the record, but word would reach all the right people. Perhaps that would set the stage for another scoop. After all, the Israeli-Egyptian show had only just begun.

As Kramer goes on to explain, the dinner “helped galvanize the Carter administration” to work toward bringing Cairo and Jerusalem to the negotiating table, and had other repercussions as well.

On March 5, Riyadh appointed Salman al-Dosari—a prominent journalist and vocal supporter of the Abraham Accords—as its new minister of information. Hussain Abdul-Hussain takes this choice as one of several signals that Saudi Arabia is inching closer to normalization with Israel:

Saudi Arabia has been the biggest supporter of Palestinians since before the establishment of Israel in 1948. When the kingdom’s founder Abdulaziz Ibn Saud met with the U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the USS Quincy in the Red Sea in 1945, the Saudi king demanded that Jews in Palestine be settled elsewhere. But unlimited Saudi support has only bought Palestinian ungratefulness and at times, downright hate. After the Abraham Accords were announced in August 2020, Palestinians in Gaza and Ramallah burned pictures not only of the leaders of the UAE and Bahrain but also of Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS).

Since then, many Palestinian pundits and activists have been accusing Saudi Arabia of betraying the cause, even though the Saudis have said repeatedly, and as late as January, that their peace with Israel is incumbent on the establishment of a Palestinian state.

While the Saudi Arabian government has practiced self-restraint by not reciprocating Palestinian hate, Saudi Arabian columnists, cartoonists, and social-media activists have been punching back. After the burning of the pictures of Saudi Arabian leaders, al-Dosari wrote that with their aggression against Saudi Arabia, the Palestinians “have liberated the kingdom from any ethical or political commitment to these parties in the future.”