Jeddah

Overview

Jeddah is a port city on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. It has long served as a gateway for pilgrims traveling to Mecca, which stands in a narrow valley about 70 kilometers inland. That relationship links the city’s maritime role to the religious importance of Mecca: travelers arriving by sea historically passed through Jeddah before continuing inland. Jeddah remains a center for commerce, transport and international contact, as well as a venue for meetings between Saudi officials and foreign governments.

Those roles have placed Jeddah at the center of events extending beyond its municipal boundaries. The city entered Ibn Saud’s kingdom after surrendering in 1925. In December 2004, Al-Qaeda attackers assaulted the United States consulate and killed five non-American staff members. Later diplomatic meetings addressed oil markets, regional security, religious tolerance and the civil war in Sudan. Jeddah also contains a public non-Islamic cemetery, an exception to Saudi policy that generally bars burial of non-Muslims in the country. An Islamic State bombing struck a memorial at that cemetery in 2020.

Geography

Jeddah’s coastal position gives it a different function from inland Mecca. Its port connects Saudi Arabia to Red Sea shipping routes, while roads carry passengers and goods eastward toward Mecca and other Saudi cities. The city’s location made it a practical arrival point for pilgrims and an enduring commercial outlet for the surrounding region. It also makes Jeddah a natural setting for meetings involving Red Sea transport, energy supply and relations among governments on both sides of the sea.

Commercial plans continue to use Jeddah as a northern Red Sea hub. In April 2024, Saudi Arabia’s Folk Maritime and France’s CMA CGM launched an upgraded North Red Sea Express service linking Jeddah with NEOM, Ain Sokhna in Egypt, Aqaba in Jordan, and Yanbu. The Chinese-flagged Jin Shun He left Jeddah for NEOM on the service on April 9. These connections illustrate the port’s continuing role in regional trade, even as Saudi development plans create new destinations along the Red Sea coast.

Jewish history

Jeddah’s recent record concerning Jews is chiefly one of encounters through diplomacy, visitors and public discourse; the material available here does not establish a continuous modern Jewish community in the city. At the annual Jeddah International Book Fair, vendors sold The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic forgery, and Mein Kampf. Other titles linked Jews to conspiracies. Their sale spread Jew hatred through a public cultural venue and stood in tension with efforts to present the city as a place of international exchange.

On July 17, 2022, an Orthodox Jewish-American rabbi met Ahmed al-Ghamdi, a former chief of the religious police’s Mecca branch, in Jeddah. The meeting was a specific encounter, not evidence by itself of broader changes to the legal status of Jewish worship in Saudi Arabia. It occurred during a period of greater public attention to Saudi contacts involving Jews and Israel. During President Joe Biden’s visit that month, Saudi Arabia announced that it would permit civilian flights to and from Israel through its airspace, a decision Biden welcomed in Jeddah.

Modern history

Jeddah surrendered to Ibn Saud in 1925 and was incorporated into the kingdom he was building across the Arabian Peninsula. Its port continued to matter to the new Saudi state as a point of entry for pilgrims, a commercial outlet and a place where the government dealt with foreign representatives. In later negotiations over oil royalties, Ibn Saud demanded that Aramco calculate gold payments at the Jidda rate, roughly twice the New York rate. The demand reflected the significance of local exchange terms to Saudi rulers during the kingdom’s early oil era.

In 2008, Jeddah hosted an international energy meeting amid concern over high oil prices. Saudi Arabia planned to raise production by about 500,000 barrels per day. United States Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman represented Washington. The meeting brought energy consumers and producers to a city central to Saudi Arabia’s foreign commerce, but increasing output could address only one part of the pressures on oil prices. Political risks, including unrest in Nigeria and confrontation over the Iranian nuclear program, were also part of the market discussion. The Iranian regime publicly objected to the proposed Saudi production increase ahead of the meeting.

Saudi policy later identified Jeddah, alongside Riyadh and Dammam, as a possible location for regional headquarters under rules tying such headquarters to eligibility for government contracts. The policy recognized Jeddah’s continued standing as a business center. Its commercial role, however, has developed within a political and legal system that imposes substantial restrictions on religious expression and personal conduct.

In June 2006, Saudi police arrested two Ethiopian and two Eritrean church leaders during a private Christian service in Jeddah. Authorities deported them the following month. A Filipino Christian arrested in Jeddah in October 2006 was held for eight months, given 60 lashes for proselytizing and deported in May 2007. On December 15, 2011, police arrested 35 Ethiopian Christians, including 29 women, during a private Christmas prayer gathering; the group faced deportation. Together, these cases show that private Christian meetings could bring detention and expulsion, not merely restrictions on public worship.

Saudi controls also affected Muslims whose practices or opinions fell outside state-approved boundaries. Jeddah had no licensed Shia mosques in 2022, leaving Shia worshippers to pray in private homes and community centers. In 2022, a Saudi court sentenced Abdullah Basfar, a Jeddah professor and imam, to 12 years in prison after he had led prayers on the grounds of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul in 2014. The precise grounds for his imprisonment were reported as unclear. His case illustrates the reach of Saudi religious enforcement beyond restrictions on Christian and Shia worship.

Other Jeddah cases exposed the breadth of social policing. On February 21, 2008, religious-police members arrested a woman and man at a Jeddah mall over their presence together and later released them. In February 2009, a judge in Jeddah sentenced a pregnant gang-rape victim to one year in jail and 100 lashes for adultery. In 2011, a Saudi court ordered Shaima Jastaniya to receive 10 lashes for driving in defiance of the kingdom’s ban on women driving. These penalties concerned different rules and proceedings, but each drew attention to the consequences of Saudi restrictions on personal freedom.

A case concerning online expression began before the best-known Jeddah religious-freedom conference. In May 2008, prosecutors sent the online-writing case of Ra’if Bedawi al-Shammary to a Jeddah court, seeking five years in prison and a three-million-riyal fine. His writing criticized abuses by the religious police and questioned the government’s interpretation of Islam. By June 2015, blogger Raif Badawi remained imprisoned in Jeddah while Saudi Arabia hosted a UN-backed conference on religious intolerance and discrimination. The conference was the fifth Istanbul Process meeting on implementing UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18. At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s highest court upheld Badawi’s sentence of 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for religious dissent. His imprisonment and flogging sentence exposed a clear gap between the conference’s message and Saudi practice.

Security

On November 9, 2004, Saudi security forces killed one suspected attacker and arrested three others in a Jeddah shootout. Less than a month later, on December 6, Al-Qaeda attackers assaulted the United States consulate in the city, ending roughly six months of relative calm in Saudi Arabia. The consulate was among the kingdom’s most heavily protected facilities. Five non-American staff members were killed. In the preceding month, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had called for attacks on United States interests, underscoring the threat faced by diplomatic personnel.

Inside the compound, the attackers asked local staff where to find American citizens. Some carried machetes and video cameras, indicating an intent to behead American captives. About 20 minutes into the assault, nearly all American citizens at the consulate had reached the defended Chancery building. The attackers could not breach its locked, bulletproof main entrance with small arms. They fired at upper-story windows instead, wounding one American citizen. Vice Consul Monica Lemieux suffered a light gunshot wound while escaping and was hidden by non-American consulate staff.

The attackers also lowered and partially burned the United States flag. Pipe bombs set the consulate’s empty Marine house ablaze, sending smoke across central Jeddah. The attack combined an attempt to reach American personnel with violence against local employees who worked at the mission. Its outcome showed the value of the Chancery’s defenses while demonstrating that a fortified site could still suffer fatal losses among staff outside its protected core.

Jeddah faced another attack on November 11, 2020, when an explosive device detonated at its non-Muslim cemetery during a memorial marking the end of World War I. European diplomats attended, including a French delegation. A Greek consulate official and a Saudi security officer were lightly wounded. The Islamic State’s Hejaz Province claimed responsibility and identified the French consul as its principal target. The bombing struck a rare non-Islamic burial site during a ceremony attended by foreign representatives, making both the gathering and its setting significant to the attack.

Jeddah also appeared in broader counterterrorism diplomacy. In September 2014, the United States and six Gulf monarchies adopted a Jeddah communiqué setting out commitments against the Islamic State, including action on foreign fighters, terrorist finance and extremist messaging. Implementation varied among the Gulf states. The communiqué illustrates Jeddah’s use as a meeting place for security policy at a time when the Islamic State threatened Saudi Arabia and its neighbors.

Present day

Jeddah remains a venue for regional diplomacy. During President Biden’s July 2022 visit, the city hosted a security and development summit involving the United States, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan. Biden met King Abdullah II and affirmed United States support for his leadership. He also met Mohammed bin Zayed on July 16. Saudi Arabia’s decision to open its airspace to civilian carriers flying to and from Israel was welcomed during the visit. Biden did not secure the Saudi oil-production increase he had sought.

In May 2023, Saudi Arabia and the United States launched the Jeddah Platform to bring the warring parties in the Sudanese civil war into indirect negotiations focused on humanitarian issues. The process produced chiefly humanitarian ceasefire commitments. It lacked binding means to enforce them, limiting its effect on the war. A later proposal to combine the Jeddah process with talks among Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the United States called for a joint executive secretariat in Jeddah. That proposal sought to join the platform’s access to Sudanese parties with stronger international diplomatic pressure; it did not, by itself, resolve the platform’s enforcement problem.

Jeddah’s diplomatic standing also made it a stage for confrontation over Israel. At a March 2025 meeting of foreign ministers of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in the city, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called for collective sanctions against Israel over its operations in Gaza. He pressed members to assist the Arabs of Gaza and advance reconstruction. His intervention was an effort by the Iranian regime to turn a multilateral meeting in Saudi Arabia into coordinated diplomatic pressure on Israel. It formed part of Jeddah’s continuing role as a meeting point where governments pursue sharply different regional priorities.

Across these events, Jeddah’s defining features remain closely connected. The Red Sea port supports trade and travel; its proximity to Mecca sustains its historic gateway function; and its infrastructure gives Saudi Arabia a prominent site for international meetings. The same record shows persistent constraints on religious worship and expression, alongside security threats to diplomatic personnel and visitors. Jeddah’s importance therefore rests on both its longstanding geography and the political decisions made there.