From the outset of its tenure, the administration of US President Joe Biden has been averse to engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian file, particularly where the expenditure of political capital might be required. Initially, Biden chose to focus US efforts in the Middle East on Iran, and negotiations over the conditions under which Washington would resume compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 international agreement with Tehran that his predecessor, Donald Trump, unilaterally renounced in 2018. Since early 2022, and on account of the war in Ukraine, the US has shifted priorities; pride of place has since been accorded to weakening Russian influence in the region, and persuading its energy producers to increase exports in order to offset sanctions on Russia’s oil and gas industries.
The policy approach chosen by the US administration towards Israel and the Palestinians has been the perpetuation of the status quo, on the pretext that circumstances are not conducive to initiatives to change it. This strategic neglect is designed to keep the Question of Palestine off the regional and international agenda so that Washington can attend to its priorities, whether in Ukraine or with respect to China.
In practice, this policy amounts to continued US support for the consolidation of permanent Israeli rule over the Palestinians, and Israeli impunity as it pursues its annexationist objectives. Tellingly, and apart from restoring US funding to UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, the Biden administration pointedly declined to repeal the numerous measures and initiatives implemented during the Trump years in support of Israel’s annexationist agenda. It also adopted its signature policy of pursuing Arab-Israeli normalization in order to further marginalize the Question of Palestine. And just as tellingly, Washington continues to oppose Palestinian initiatives, such as recourse to the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, intended to challenge annexation.
This approach to the Palestinians came naturally to Biden and his Secretary of State (and longstanding foreign policy aide), Antony Blinken, both stalwart supporters of Israel and its policies. (The pair had also energetically promoted the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, and thereafter advocated for its partition. Blinken additionally championed the 2011 military intervention in Libya; promoted US involvement with the 2015 Saudi-led war on Yemen; and lamented the Obama administration’s decision to refrain from bombing Syrian government targets.)
The fly in the ointment, in the form of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his vocal identification with Biden’s nemesis, Donald Trump, was removed from the scene shortly after Biden took office. Strengthening the fractious coalition that deposed Netanyahu became an added incentive for Washington to support Israel as it expanded its colonization of the West Bank and in 2022 killed the highest number of Palestinians in that territory since the conclusion of the 2000-2004 Al-Aqsa Uprising.
The problem for Washington is that the status quo—creeping annexation—is inherently dynamic rather than static. Therefore, and assuming that the purpose of strategic neglect is to enable the US to further marginalize the Question of Palestine, it is not proving particularly successful. This was visibly demonstrated to Biden and Blinken during their first months in office, when Israeli assaults on the Shaikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque escalated into confrontations throughout Israel and the occupied territories that resulted in several thousand casualties. As pro-Palestinian demonstrations expanded to a massive scale throughout the Arab world and Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley warned of “broader destabilization” if Israel’s rampage continued, high-level US involvement was required to bring it to a halt.
2023 is developing into yet another demonstration of the folly of Washington’s policy, as well as its lethal consequences. With Netanyahu once again at the helm of Israeli politics, and a supporting cast that would fit right into a Mussolini cabinet, Israel’s leaders are engaging in systematic provocations against the Palestinians and have further escalated the level of violence in the West Bank.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, exposed as an illegitimate and ineffectual appendage to Israeli rule by this reality, earlier this year responded with a statement—the veracity of which remains unconfirmed—that the Palestinian Authority (PA) was suspending coordination with the Israeli security forces, and ordered his diplomats to promote a United Nations Security Council resolution that would reconfirm the illegality of Israeli settlements. With Washington unwilling to censure Israel for violations of international law, and similarly reluctant to function as the lone voice in support of Israeli annexation while demanding that the rest of the planet denounce Russian annexation of Ukrainian territory, officials and analysts alike noted that the Palestinians were in the enviable position to exercise leverage over the Americans.
Nevertheless, the US successfully engineered the withdrawal of the draft resolution and its replacement with an anodyne presidential statement in which the only “obligation” of a named party is that of the “Palestinian Authority to renounce and confront terror.” The price it paid for avoiding an embarrassing veto was a commitment to invite Abbas to the White House later this year.
According to Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, a further US “concern” was that a Security Council vote “would have led to further escalation between the Israelis and Palestinians ahead of the [upcoming] historically sensitive period of Passover and the holy month of Ramadan”. Yet escalation is precisely, and entirely predictably, what Blinken’s efforts to shield Israel from accountability for its actions produced. On 22 February, less than 48 hours after the Security Council timidly called on “all parties to observe calm and restraint” and for “de-escalating the situation on the ground”, eleven Palestinians were killed in a massive Israeli mid-morning assault on Nablus.
Washington responded on 26 February by, together with Jordan and Egypt, convening high-level Israeli-Palestinian talks in the Jordanian port of Aqaba, which produced their first joint communique in years. In it, Israel pledged to temporarily refrain from additional settlement initiatives, deliberations for which had in any case already been scheduled after the commitment expires. Netanyahu and other senior officials also made clear that their “commitment to work to immediately end unilateral measures” would not affect the implementation of existing decisions on settlement expansion.
As the parties thanked Washington for its “indispensable role in efforts to prevent deterioration and find horizons for peace,” the disconnect between the proceedings in Aqaba and reality west of the River Jordan, and the PA’s irrelevance to this reality, was underscored that same day by the shooting deaths of two settlers in Huwwara on the southern approaches to Nablus in retaliation for the Nablus raid, and a settler rampage through Huwwara that evening which was characterized by numerous Israeli mainstream commentators as well as Major-General Yehuda Fuchs, the most senior Israeli military commander in the West Bank, as a “pogrom”. As if to underscore the point, Israel’s Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, demanded that Israel act “in a way that conveys that the mast of the house has gone crazy”, and several days after the rampage declared that “Huwwara needs to be erased.”
Claims that the Israeli military failed to prevent the Huwwara rampage because it was caught off-guard by settlers whose leaders were openly announcing their intentions on social media, are at best laughable. The reality is that armed settlers have consistently been enabled and protected by the military as a matter of policy, and effectively function as an auxiliary militia in the service of the Israeli state. Settlers and enthusiasts of their agenda are well-represented within the Israeli military, and a number of their most fanatical leaders currently occupy not only Palestinian land but also high offices of state. Had the military by contrast been caught unprepared by residents of Huwwara swarming through the nearby settlement of Yizhhar established on its lands, the incident would not have lasted more than a few minutes.
As it happened, the army several days later performed with exemplary efficiency when it prevented a group of activists from entering Huwwara to express their solidarity with its residents, in the process manhandling former speaker of the Israeli parliament, Avraham Burg. Yet on 6 March soldiers again allowed a group of settlers to rampage through the town, this time dancing with them in the streets in celebration of Purim. The killing of six more Palestinians by the Israeli military in Jenin the following day, and Washington’s endorsement of the attack as Israel’s “legitimate right”, are entirely consistent with the flow of events.
Although Israel is the primary beneficiary and the Palestinian people the main casualty of Washington’s policy of strategic neglect, it is above all designed to serve US interests. Yet, as recent events have made increasingly clear, it is based on the flawed premise that Israel is sufficiently powerful and rational, and the Palestinians sufficiently powerless, to produce prolonged stability between the Mediterranean Sea and River Jordan, and thus keep the Question of Palestine off the regional and international agenda. How Israeli-Palestinian relations will develop in the coming weeks and months is difficult to predict and subject to numerous variables. It is however already evident that Washington’s policy is doomed to failure and heading towards a cliff with increasing velocity.
[An earlier version of this article appeared in Afkar, a publication of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.]