Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO and founder of Gulf State Analytics, a Washington-based geopolitical risk consultancy.
During his brief stopover in the occupied West Bank last week, after two days in Israel and before flying on to Saudi Arabia, U.S. President Joe Biden reiterated his support for the long-moribund peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. Yet at the same time, he conceded "that the goal of the two states seems so far away" and "the ground is not ripe at this moment to restart negotiations." It was a statement of American intent that, behind Biden's words acknowledging the pain and suffering of Palestinians, including daily "indignities like restrictions on movement and travel," amounted to a continuation of the policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump.
The Trump administration tried to bury the Palestinian question through its openly one-sided support for Israel. Trump's policies attacked the very idea of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, with a proposed peace "vision"—Trump's so-called deal of the century—that guaranteed permanent Israeli occupation and tried to buy off the Palestinian struggle for statehood with a vague and clumsy pitch for $50 billion in private investments, mainly from the Gulf. Trump capped it all off with the Abraham Accords that normalized ties between Israel and four Arab countries, while cutting the Palestinians out.
Today, despite Biden's shift in rhetoric, it is hard to distinguish the substance of his policies toward Israelis and Palestinians from Trump's. Although the Biden administration restored U.S. funding to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, which Trump cut off, and Biden is now engaging with Palestinian leadership at the highest levels, his White House is still carrying on most of Trump's agenda.
The Biden administration has not rescinded two of Trump's biggest policy changes, which both directly contradicted international law and long-standing U.S. policies going back decades: recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv; and declaring that the U.S. would cease to officially recognize Israel's West Bank settlements as illegal under international law. Biden also promised to reopen a consulate in Jerusalem—the de facto American embassy to Palestinians since the 1990s—which the Trump administration closed. That pledge remains unfulfilled.
"One Arab autocratic state after another is effectively throwing the Palestinians under the bus, making separate side deals with Israel, effectively abandoning the Palestinians and leaving them all alone in the region to fend for themselves."
- Nader Hashemi
An announcement about the consulate could have been the high note of Biden's short visit to East Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Instead, his administration announced something much more modest: $316 million in aid for Palestinians—$201 million of it to UNRWA, and the rest to support a network of hospitals in East Jerusalem and to build a 4G telecom network in the West Bank and Gaza by the end of next year, which Israel has long blocked.
"The primary difference is one of tone rather than substance," said Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. "Biden obviously is less overtly hostile to the Palestinians than his predecessor and is willing to reestablish a working relationship with Palestinian leaders, as well as to restore some aid. Beyond that, we have seen very little change from the previous administration—notwithstanding the still-unfulfilled promises to reopen the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem."
The differences between how the Biden and Trump administrations have approached the Palestinians are "substantially negligible" and only amount to "rhetorical cosmetic statements," said Nader Hashemi, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies (and a non-resident fellow at DAWN). "In effect, the policy and the substance are identical to that of the Trump administration. Both the Trump administration and Biden administration completely agree that what matters for the United States is full security for Israeli citizens, for the state of Israel, but not for the Palestinians."
The fact that a Palestinian state is still "far away," as Biden himself admitted during his short press conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, is a consequence of American policy. Israeli settlement expansion continues to surge as Biden, like U.S. presidents before him, refuses to put any pressure whatsoever on Israel to slow it down.
Biden's effective endorsement of Trump's policies is perhaps most evident in the embrace of the Abraham Accords, which his administration is pushing to expand—most of all with Saudi Arabia. Even if the Saudi government appears committed to not formalizing full-fledged diplomatic relations with Israel for now, Riyadh is taking smaller steps toward de facto normalization, such as opening Saudi airspace to Israeli flights and presumably giving Bahrain the green light to normalize its ties with Israel back in September 2020. With Biden's symbolic flight direct from Tel Aviv to Jeddah last week, his administration couldn't be clearer in its strong support and deep enthusiasm for these incremental steps toward a formalized relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
To Israelis, Palestinians and the wider Arab world, it's almost as if Trump never left the White House.
- Giorgio Cafiero
But where does this leave the Palestinians? "One Arab autocratic state after another is effectively throwing the Palestinians under the bus, making separate side deals with Israel, effectively abandoning the Palestinians and leaving them all alone in the region to fend for themselves—that's been the primary impact," Hashemi said of normalization.
Ahlam Muhtaseb, a professor of media studies at California State University, San Bernardino, pointed out that "nothing has hurt Palestinians and the Palestinian struggle more than normalization with Arab and Muslim countries." It has effectively nullified the Arab Peace Initiative, first unveiled in 2002, in which all 22 states in the Arab League offered peace and normalized relations with Israel in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state, with its capital in East Jerusalem, and Israel's withdrawal from all the territories it has occupied since 1967.
The Arab Peace Initiative may have been a dead letter, but for the Palestinians, that stated regional support still mattered. Despite the obvious power imbalance between Israelis and Palestinians, regional backing gave the Palestinians at least some leverage in their engagement with Israel—that is, until 2020. With the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, followed by Sudan and Morocco, all normalizing ties with Israel, this regional consensus eroded. The fact that normalization was brokered by the Trump administration and with major American inducements that looked like quid pro quos—most of all, unilateral U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara—made clear how invested the U.S. was in a seismic reordering of the region that totally isolated the Palestinians. Despite all the hype, the Abraham Accords were hardly about peace.
"The Palestinian cause has been relegated to the nth place on the list of priorities," according to Imad Harb, the director of research and analysis at the Arab Center Washington DC. "The Abraham Accords were pursued specifically to build an Arab-Israel authoritarian axis that, first, helps normalize Israel's colonialist enterprise; second, boosts Israel's economic expansion; and third, absolves Israel, the United States and the Arab states of any responsibility to address one of the most egregious injustices in the world today."
If more countries join the Abraham Accords, this nightmare scenario for the Palestinians will get even worse, effectively ending the decades-old policy of "land for peace" that was behind Egypt's peace treaty with Israel and supposedly still guided the zombie two-state solution. "As the Abraham Accords were signed, Israeli leaders, particularly on the right, were mocking the centrist Israeli leaders who previously said that the only way forward for Israel to establish relations with its neighbors was to exchange land for peace," Hashemi said. "[Then-Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu was explicit two years ago in celebrating how Israel had scored a major victory, when no longer has Israel been forced to exchange land for peace.
"They don't have to give up any land and they're getting the peace that they've always sought," Hashemi added. "This is a major strategic, political, military and moral victory for Israel and a colossal defeat for the Palestinians that reflects the overall imbalance in power that exists between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Abraham Accords are affirmation that these are the darkest days for the Palestinians in their modern existence."
To Israelis, Palestinians and the wider Arab world, it's almost as if Trump never left the White House.
