In December 1967, Saudi King Faisal bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud added a new responsibility to his younger brother Prince Salman's duties as the governor of Riyadh: raise funds to support Palestinians resisting the Israeli takeover of Jerusalem. The funding was part of a broader change in Saudi foreign policy 50 years ago that put the kingdom on a collision course with the United States. Changes in American policy toward Jerusalem could do it again.

The 31-year-old prince took up his new mission with zeal and found an enthusiastic audience among Saudis — royals and the general public — eager to support the Palestinian resistance after the humiliation of the 1967 war. The Popular Committee for Aiding Martyrs, Families and Mujahedeen in Palestine raised tens of millions in the kingdom and is still at work today.

It was a milestone for Salman. He was so good at the fundraising mission that 12 years later, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Faisal's successor King Khalid bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud gave Salman the task of raising money for the mujahedeen to fight the Soviets. In the first years of the Afghan war, Salman raised more money from the Saudi public for the mujahedeen's cause than the CIA provided them each year. Later, King Fahd bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud gave Salman the same task in Bosnia.

Before 1967, Faisal's foreign policy priority had been to thwart Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's quest to unite the Arab world behind his own brand of revolutionary Arab nationalism. Egypt was an existential threat to the monarchy. Faisal worked to bog Egypt down in a quagmire in Yemen by backing a royalist Zaydi insurgency against the Egyptian and Soviet-backed republican government in Sanaa. Nasser's June 1967 defeat in the Sinai Peninsula was due in large part to the Yemen war, as the best of his army was suffering in Yemen instead of fighting the Israelis.