NYT’s Tom Friedman says he has the inside scoop on Saudi-US pact

It was a mixed weekend, with no single story driving the conversation on Saudi in the international press.

On an agreement with the US: Israeli media sounds more optimistic than do Foreign Policy and CNN, with the Times of Israel saying that Riyadh and Washington a “very close” to an agreement that hinges on how normalization plays out, citing remarks by State Department spokesman Matthew Miller on Thursday.

NYT columnist Thomas Friedman claims to have in inside scoop: “Get out of Gaza, freeze the building of settlements in the West Bank and embark on a three- to five-year ‘pathway’ to establish a Palestinian state,” he says of Saudi’s conditions. “The good news is that they are 90 percent done with the mutual defense treaty that they have drawn up, both sides tell me,” he writes.

What’s next? “The US and the Saudis are considering finalizing the deal and taking it to Congress with the stated proviso that Saudi Arabia will normalize relations with Israel the minute Israel has a government ready to meet the Saudi-US terms,” Friedman writes.

Bloomberg continues to up the volume of coverage it is giving the Kingdom, covering how global banks are moving staff to Riyadh in the wake of the regional HQ law and the Saudi Pro League’s ambition of landing a “Drive to Survive” style documentary with a major streaming video platform.

AND- Liv Golf looks like it wants to own golf courses — and mixed-use developments: “Think about LIV owning all their own golf courses, each team having a home venue and they host. And now you can build out around that. It's not just a golf course. You bring in education, you bring in hospitality, you bring in real estate, you bring in merchandise, you bring in management, you bring in all these other different opportunities that the game of golf has to deliver to a community, to a region. We are gonna be doing that,” said CEO and Commission Greg Norman.