In the op-ed, Meidan Bar, a former Israeli Air Force serviceman and pilot for El Al, called on MBS – as Salman is known – to travel to Israel and participate in an aviation conference later this year, as well as to work toward formalizing ties between Saudi Arabia and the State of Israel.
Bar noted that the flight from Tel Aviv to Riyadh takes about the same time as a flight to Athens. He said that Israel's airport ground services are capable of servicing MBS’s Boeing and Airbus planes.
“Our air traffic controllers are standing at the ready up in the tower in Tel Aviv, on duty to grant you clearance for landing, and we will be there on the runway to welcome you when you land,” Bar wrote.
Iranian news site Alalam TV translated parts of the op-ed, referring to Israel as the “Occupation” throughout the article. It said that Saudi Arabia has been “secretly and openly normalizing relations with the Israeli occupation entity for some time”.
As an example, it gave the recent trip by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser to India Meir Ben-Shabbat
on an Air Indian flight that crossed over Saudi Arabian airspace.