Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s retreat from normalization with Israel is being widely misread as a reaction to Gaza or Arab public opinion. It isn’t. What we are witnessing is the geopolitical fallout of a collapsing personal myth and a destabilized palace equilibrium. At the center of this shift is not Hamas or regional pressure: It is Neom and his mother.
Neom – the $500-billion megaproject meant to transform Saudi Arabia into a futuristic tech powerhouse – is no longer unfolding as promised. Even the Asian Winter Olympics meant to be hosted there in 2029 have been postponed. Launched as a spectacle of futurism, Neom now looks like a balloon that burst mid-ascent, leaking prestige, investor confidence, and personal credibility.
For a ruler who staked his legitimacy on visionary modernity, this produces not just frustration, but a culturally specific form of honor-injury. In Arab tribal culture, shame is not private: it is a social, existential wound. Public failure of this magnitude threatens masculine legitimacy and dynastic authority, and demands symbolic repair. For Mohammed bin Salman, Neom has been intimately bound up with his identity.
The significance of Neom
In dynastic cultures, legitimacy is performed through spectacular acts offered to the maternal witness. One need only recall the Hamas terrorists’ phone calls to their mothers, boasting of murder – grotesque, but culturally revealing. These were acts of performative masculine legitimacy directed at Ummi – my mother. Creation and destruction alike are offered to the maternal witness.
Even Neom’s name was engineered to carry civilizational symbolism. It fuses the Greek root “neo,” meaning “new,” with the Arabic letter mīm, shorthand for mostaqbal (“future”) and associated with Mohammed bin Salman himself. Conceptually, Neom means “new future.”
But Western analysts have missed a deeper resonance. The Arabic letter mīm is phonetically identical to the opening sound of Ummi. In a dynastic culture where sons perform legitimacy through spectacular acts of creation, Neom reads less like a development project than a symbolic offering: “Look what I built for the future.” And perhaps more quietly: “Look what I built for you, Mom.”
This is what I mean by a maternal cameo: a symbolic maternal presence embedded unconsciously in a national myth. It does not mean the project was consciously “for his mother.” It means maternal authority remains an internal organizing presence in a male ruler’s legitimacy architecture. Neom thus becomes a bid for cultural and psychological attunement between mother and son.
This is why Neom’s disappointment is not just a development problem: It is a political moral honor-injury in Saudi culture. Neom embodied Mohammed bin Salman’s self-image as the man who would carry Saudi Arabia into the future. When rulers in honor cultures experience public humiliation as moral injury, they do not recalibrate policy rationally: They seek symbolic repair.
Normalization with Israel lived inside the same symbolic architecture as Neom: modernity, futurism, Western legitimacy, and post-Islamist identity. As Neom recalibrates, Israel normalization becomes emotionally contaminated by the same disappointment.
So, Mohammed bin Salman is doing what destabilized monarchs in honor cultures often do: retreat into tribal legitimacy signaling – re-centering Islamic authenticity, posturing as an Arab defender of Gaza, cooling Abraham Accords momentum, distancing himself from Israel, and venting about Western hypocrisy. This is not strategic realignment: It is symbolic self-repair.
The maternal trip-wire
There is a second variable analysts avoid naming: the maternal trip-wire. Western diplomatic and intelligence reporting has repeatedly linked palace tensions to fluctuations in the crown prince’s volatility and risk tolerance. Investigative reporting in 2018-2019 noted that periods of intensified palace strain coincided with elite purges and the Khashoggi catastrophe. As Washington Institute scholar Simon Henderson has long observed, Saudi Arabia’s internal palace dynamics are inseparable from its external behavior.
In Gulf monarchies, senior women are dynastic stabilizers and legitimacy managers. The clearest example is Sheikha Moza bint Nasser – “Mama Moza” – the second wife of Qatar’s ruler from 1995-2013, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, and mother of his successor, Qatar’s current emir, Sheikh Tamim. She curated Qatar’s Western legitimacy and managed succession politics to install her son. Qatar’s strategic coherence is not accidental: It is maternally curated.
Put these pieces together: Neom hurts. Israel normalization now carries reputational and ideological risk. Gaza provides a moral pretext for regression. Palace emotional dynamics appear destabilized. So, Israel is becoming the symbolic casualty.
Saudi Arabia is not governed by institutions: It is governed by one man navigating dynastic legitimacy, maternal authority, and civilizational rupture. Israel normalization was misread by us as structurally secure – yet another konseptzia. It depended on one future-myth of Neom holding together; that myth is now under strain.
This does not mean normalization is dead, nor is this a call for a bailout. It is a call for cultural intelligence.
And it is where the Abraham Accords come back in – not as leverage but as stabilization architecture.
Strategies to revitalize normalization
Three constructive strategies to revitalize normalization via Neom should be undertaken:
1. Reframe Neom as the civilizational capital of Abrahamic cooperation.
Neom should be repositioned not as a stalled megaproject, but as the civilizational capital of Abrahamic cooperation – a city hosting peace forums, religious diplomacy, and modernization initiatives, alongside the UAE’s Abrahamic Family House.
2. Decouple normalization from Western humiliation optics.
Normalization should be framed as an Abrahamic civilizational leadership act, not submission to Western liberal order. This means directly involving Saudi religious authorities, cultural institutions, and regional Islamic legitimacy brokers.
3. Use the Abraham Accords as stabilization architecture – with Saudi civilizational authorship at the center.
Rather than pressuring Saudi Arabia, Israel and the West should present the Abraham Accords as a dignified place for Saudi leadership – one that restores symbolic authority and modernizes without rupture.
The accords could institutionalize a Saudi-chaired Abrahamic Civilizational Council and a Council of Abrahamic Religious Guardians – all on equal footing. They should also anchor a Red Sea-Horn of Africa Civilizational Corridor Initiative linking Neom, Eilat, Aqaba, Jeddah, Yanbu, and Berbera.
This is not appeasement. It is dynastic diplomacy.
Reimagining normalization
Bottom line: Mohammed bin Salman is not retreating from normalization because of Gaza alone: He is navigating a moment of civilizational strain in which Neom, his future-mythic city, has collided with public disappointment and honor-injury. Normalization is not dead, but now requires cultural intelligence, new strategic architecture, and civilizational authorship.
If the Abraham Accords are reimagined as Abrahamic destiny – offering Saudi Arabia dignified leadership anchored in Mecca, Medina, Neom, and the Red Sea – normalization can be revived.
The question is not whether the Gulf kingdom will normalize: It is whether Israel and the West know how to frame normalization as Saudi leadership.
The writer is a psychoanalyst counterterrorism expert.