Just a rerun of past failures with the added disgrace of renewed American acquiescence to Palestinian terror
Just a rerun of past failures with the added disgrace of renewed American acquiescence to Palestinian terror
P roposed shifts on Trump’s stands on territory and Palestinian terror subsidies have already been tried and failed.
The message that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is sending to the Palestinian Authority is fairly similar to the one former secretary of state John Kerry flashed to his former Iranian negotiating partners last year: Hang on; help is coming.
In both instances, the point was to make it clear that, should their party take back the White House from President Donald Trump this November, the incumbent’s policy shifts will be largely erased. Just as Kerry’s advice to Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Zarif was intended to reassure Tehran that its leaders can look forward to the United States’ returning to President Obama’s nuclear deal and a relaxation of sanctions on their regime in 2021, Biden seems to be telling the Palestinians that Trump’s attempts to jolt them into reality in order to foster peace will be reversed.
In the past two weeks, the former vice president has said that he intends to prioritize “resuming our dialogue with the Palestinians and pressing Israel not to take actions that make a two state solution impossible.” Echoing Barack Obama’s past statements, Biden said he felt Israel’s leadership was not “willing to take the risks necessary” to achieve peace and was not “immune from criticism.” That language seemed to echo Obama’s policy of “daylight” between the United States and Israel. While Biden stated that he did not intend to move the American embassy back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem, the rest of Trump’s approach to the conflict would be reversed if he wins in November.
At the top of that list is the green light the administration appears to be giving to Israeli annexation of some West Bank settlements in the upcoming months, a move that is in line with the parameters of the peace plan that Trump unveiled earlier this year.
Biden and some congressional Democrats have been loudly declaring that they oppose any decision by Israel to extend the nation’s laws to the areas where hundreds of thousands of its citizens live in the West Bank. The Trump plan envisioned Israel holding onto up to 30 percent of the region as part of a scheme that would also bring into being an independent, though demilitarized, Palestinian state. But Biden, like other Trump critics, insists that annexing any settlements will make a two-state solution impossible.
Biden says he also will reopen the U.S. consulate in eastern Jerusalem that served, until Trump, as an unofficial embassy to the Palestinian Authority in a gesture that signals that he favors a repartition of the city.
Just as important, he intends to resume sending U.S. aid to the Palestinians.
Biden’s statement, and a letter to the Democratic National Committee from 30 former Obama administration staffers about the need for the party platform to be more even-handed in its approach to Israel and the Palestinians, was intended to make it clear to both the P.A. and the new Israeli government that an overhaul of the American approach to the conflict is coming if Trump loses. They hope to calm the Palestinians and deter them from initiating a campaign of violence that would further complicate negotiations. And they want Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partner and former rival, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, to pump the brakes on annexation rather than find themselves the target of a new Democratic administration’s anger.
But the problem with Biden’s approach is that he seems to have forgotten what eight years of the policies he wants to resurrect achieved under Obama.
Eight years of Obama creating more “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel and his tilting of the diplomatic playing field in the direction of the Palestinians never moved either Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas or his Hamas rivals who control Gaza to budge an inch toward a peace deal.
While Obama and Kerry made no secret of their low opinion of Netanyahu, it was Abbas who torpedoed every effort at an agreement. The Palestinians scuttled Kerry’s diplomacy with an end run around the United States–led process by seeking to get the United Nations to recognize their independence without their first agreeing to end the century-long war on Zionism.
It’s important to remember that the Palestinian Authority has already rejected peace offers from Israeli governments that would have given them an independent state in nearly all of the West Bank and a share of Jerusalem, as well as Gaza, in 2000, 2001, and 2008. Since then Abbas has rejected all efforts to resume talks on any basis but demands that several hundred thousand Israelis be tossed out of homes in settlement blocs close to the 1967 borders as well as in Jerusalem.
It’s not just that this is unrealistic but that Israelis lost their faith in the Oslo peace process they had embraced in the 1990s after years of bloody Palestinian terrorism. That consensus on the lack of a peace partner extends across the Israeli political spectrum and is why Gantz, who also campaigned as a hard-liner in three elections held in the past year, endorsed the Trump plan, as did Netanyahu.
Biden and the Democrats may think that resuming aid to the Palestinians would help restore confidence in the peace process. But the cutoff was mandated by the passage of the Taylor Force Act by large bipartisan congressional majorities in 2018. Named after a non-Jewish American military veteran who was slain by a Palestinian terrorist in 2016, it conditioned further U.S. assistance to the Palestinian Authority on its discontinuing its system of paying salaries and pensions to terrorists and their families. The P.A. has refused to do so even after Trump made a direct request to Abbas since it believes ending this scheme — in which higher amounts are paid to those who kill rather than those who merely wound or unsuccessfully attack victims — would be a betrayal of Palestinian nationalism. Resuming aid without an end to the terror subsidies would encourage further intransigence, not moderation.
As for annexation, extending Israeli law to the settlements is a wakeup call to Abbas that if he wants a state, he must compromise rather than continue to pretend that a return to the ’67 lines is possible. Though the borders envisioned by the Trump plan are complicated and might not be manageable, Biden and the Democrats are wrong to characterize them as making two states impossible. The only thing that prevents the Palestinians from having one is their continued refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders might be drawn.
Throughout the 1990s when the Clinton administration championed the Oslo Accords, it did its best to ignore or whitewash Palestinian violence and Yasser Arafat’s support for terror out of the false conviction that doing so enabled peace rather than more bloodshed.
A return to Obama’s policies will be based on the same misconception. It won’t bring peace for the simple reason that they didn’t work in the first place. Trump’s plan won’t magically create peace, either, in the absence of a sea change in Palestinian thinking. But his approach is at least based in trying to force such a transformation. Biden’s gestures will merely bring a rerun of past failures with the added disgrace of renewed American acquiescence to Palestinian terror.