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abraham accords
Ben-Gvir Endorses Trump, Says He's More Likely to Back War on Iran
The Israeli security minister, who leads the far-right Jewish Power party, accused the Biden administration of thwarting Israel's victory against Hamas.
Jul 24, 2024
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir endorsed former U.S. President Donald Trump—the 2024 Republican nominee—for the White House in an interview published Wednesday in which he accused the Biden administration of preventing Israel from winning its war on Gaza.
"I believe that with Trump, Israel will receive the backing to act against Iran," Ben-Gvir, who heads the far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, toldBloomberg. "With Trump, it will be clearer that enemies must be defeated."
"A cabinet minister is supposed to maintain neutrality," the 48-year-old minister conceded, "but that's impossible to do after [U.S. President Joe] Biden."
"The U.S. has always stood behind Israel in terms of armaments and weapons, yet this time the sense was that we were being reckoned with—that we were trying to be prevented from winning. That happened on Biden's watch and fed Hamas with lots of energy," added Ben-Gvir, who was convicted in 2007 of incitement to racism after he advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
While Biden, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other administration officials have decried Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and high civilian casualties—at least 140,000 Palestinians killed, injured, or missing, according to local and international agencies—the U.S. has approved billions of dollars in new military aid and more than 100 arms sales to Israel since October.
During his White House tenure, Trump—who boasted that he "fought for Israel like no president ever before"—moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab nations Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates.
Trump has said that Israel should "get the job done" in Gaza, while criticizing the Israel Defense Forces for posting videos showing its obliteration of the embattled Palestinian enclave.
"I don't know why they released wartime shots like that. I guess it makes them look tough. But to me, it doesn't make them look tough," Trump said in April. "They're losing the PR war. They're losing it big. But they've got to finish what they started, and they've got to finish it fast, and we have to get on with life."
While Trump says he wants a deal with Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, as president he unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—also known as the Iran nuclear deal—and oversaw a "maximum pressure" campaign against Tehran featuring deadly economic sanctions.
On the advice of Iran hawks in his administration including then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump also ordered the January 2020 assassination of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qasem Soleimani in Iraq.
Ben-Gvir's interview was published as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to address a joint meeting of U.S. Congress Wednesday in Washington, D.C. A growing number of Democratic lawmakers have called for not only a cease-fire in Gaza but also a suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel, whose conduct in the war is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.
Dozens of Democratic lawmakers and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont have signaled they will skip Netanyahu's speech. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is also the Senate president, said she will not preside over Wednesday's session. Harris, who is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in the wake of Biden's withdrawal from the race on Sunday, said she will meet privately with Netanyahu on Thursday.
Echoing calls from groups including CodePink and the Council on American Islamic Relations, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said this week that the prime minister should be arrested for war crimes and genocide.
Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court prosecutor, has
applied for arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders for alleged war crimes including extermination committed on and after October 7.
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Biden Prioritizes US Imperial Ambition Over Palestinian Rights
the administration is working to take advantage of the current crisis for the purpose of strengthening U.S. dominance in the Middle East, regardless of the consequences for the Palestinians.
Jun 15, 2024
While Israel continues its military siege of Gaza, the United States is trying to exploit the situation with the goal of strengthening U.S. power in the Middle East.
Rather than seeking a long-term solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the United States is prioritizing its longstanding goal of normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. With such a deal, which would require calm in Gaza to bring Saudi Arabia on board, the United States would further marginalize the Palestinians while more tightly integrating Israel into its regional network of alliances and partnerships.
“I think we’re at a point where the necessary agreements between the United States and Saudi Arabia are very well within reach,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress last month.
The U.S. Approach
For decades, the United States has dominated the Middle East. A key to U.S. power has been the U.S.-led network of alliances and partnerships that includes Israel and the Arab states. It enables the United States to station tens of thousands of soldiers across the Middle East and quickly surge additional forces into the area.
“It’s a vast strategic advantage,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin explained in 2021, referring to the U.S.-led network. “It is unmatched. It is unparalleled. And it is unrivaled.”
Although U.S. officials have boasted of their power, their approach has been a major source of instability, especially as it concerns relations between Israel and the Arab states. Since the founding of Israel in 1948 and the Nakba for the Palestinians, many Arab states have refused to recognize Israel. Israel and the Arab states have fought several wars.
U.S. officials have been nearly unanimous in hailing the Abraham Accords as a great achievement, but critics have pointed out that the accords exclude the Palestinians.
The international community has favored a two-state solution, which would create a state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel, but the United States has effectively opposed it, even while rhetorically supporting it. Focused on maintaining its regional network, the United States has pursued bilateral deals with Arab states that are willing to establish peaceful relations with Israel. By the end of the 20th century, the United States had played a central role in brokering deals with Egypt and Jordan, both of which now receive extensive economic and military assistance.
Most Arab states rejected such deals, insisting that there must first be a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but some of them changed their positions during the Trump administration. Under the Abraham Accords, several additional Arab states vowed to normalize relations with Israel. They entered into agreements with Israel, enticed by special deals with the United States.
U.S. officials have been nearly unanimous in hailing the Abraham Accords as a great achievement, but critics have pointed out that the accords exclude the Palestinians. In Foreign Policy in Focus, John Feffer has warned that it would be unwise to wish away the Palestinians, especially if there is genuine interest in ending the “fratricide” that has been so destructive to Israelis and Palestinians.
Officials in Washington are aware of the criticisms. “It has been fashionable in some foreign policy circles to believe… that you could somehow achieve peace and stability and security by jumping over the Palestinian issue,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) acknowledged last month.
Few officials have taken such concerns seriously, however. Before Hamas carried out its October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, the Biden administration had been trying to expand the accords by including Saudi Arabia.
President Joe Biden had once promised to make Saudi Arabia into a pariah over its killing of a Washington Post columnist, but he wanted a deal even more, knowing that Saudi Arabia had dropped its longstanding insistence upon the establishment of a Palestinian state as a condition for normalization with Israel. Saudi leaders, it was reported, sought a deal that would merely keep open the possibility of a Palestinian state.
“We’ve been working—this goes back well before October 7—working with Saudi Arabia and with Israel to pursue normalization between the two countries,” Blinken acknowledged in May. “This would be a game changer.”
One of the most striking things about U.S. policy is that the Biden administration has not changed its approach since October 7. Not only has it continued its one-sided support of Israel, but it has moved forward with its plans to bring Saudi Arabia into the accords, even while indicating that the accords may have led to the current crisis.
“I’m convinced one of the reasons Hamas attacked when they did—and I have no proof of this; just my instinct tells me—is because of the progress we were making towards regional integration for Israel and regional integration overall,” Biden said on October 25, just weeks after the attack. “And we can’t leave that work behind.”
The Purpose of U.S. Plans
As the Biden administration has chased its imperial ambitions, officials have insisted that relations between Israel and Palestine must change. Without a new arrangement, they say, the cycle of violence will continue. There will be what Blinken called “endless cycles of violence, destruction, death, and insecurity.”
At a congressional hearing in May, State Department official Barbara Leaf called the status quo “terrible,” especially for the Palestinians. They live “in a state of everything ranging from unhappiness to frustration to rage to despair to militancy,” Leaf said. “It’s a terrible recipe for militancy, for radicalization.”
In fact, the Biden administration has insisted that it supports a two-state solution. Its plans for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, administration officials say, will eventually lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. They are even endorsing plans for a cease-fire in Gaza, a move that follows their acknowledgment that Saudi Arabia now requires a period of calm and a pathway to a Palestinian state to enter into a deal.
The Biden administration remains focused on the goal of integrating Israel into the U.S.-led network of alliances and partnerships in the Middle East, just as it had been trying to do before October 7.
Still, the Biden administration has made it clear that it opposes the creation of a viable Palestinian state. As it has blocked efforts at the United Nations to establish a Palestinian state, it has worked to impose constraints on Palestine.
A major priority of the Biden administration is to limit Palestine’s security. Administration officials insist that any future Palestinian state must be demilitarized.
“There are a number of types of two-state solutions,” Biden claimed earlier this year. “There’s a number of countries that are members of the U.N. that… don’t have their own militaries. Number of states that have limitations… And so I think there’s ways in which this could work.”
The Biden administration is also requiring Israel to have a say in the creation of a Palestinian state. It demands that the Palestinians negotiate with the Israelis, despite the fact that the Israeli government and the Israeli public oppose a two-state solution.
When Congress questioned Blinken last month about the administration’s plans for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Blinken made note of another condition, which is that any deal would not result in the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state. In fact, Blinken indicated that the U.S. vision of a longer pathway to a Palestinian state is not intended to fulfill the aspirations of the Palestinian people.
“The whole point of normalization but also the whole point of the establishment of a Palestinian state is to make sure that Israel’s security is better ensured,” Blinken said.
Indeed, the Biden administration remains focused on the goal of integrating Israel into the U.S.-led network of alliances and partnerships in the Middle East, just as it had been trying to do before October 7. Rather than trying to achieve a two-state solution that could bring an end to what one U.S. representative recently called “75 years of misery,” the administration is working to take advantage of the current crisis for the purpose of strengthening U.S. dominance, regardless of the consequences for the Palestinians.
“Despite the fact that we say those words”—two-state solution—“we have never addressed our policy to use our influence to make it happen,” Van Hollen acknowledged.
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What the Abraham Accords Got Wrong
The Palestinian issue could not simply be wished away, and the signing of the pacts created a set of contradictions that fueled the tensions that erupted October 7.
Oct 22, 2023
It’s easy to forget now, but the shocking and horrific violence that set off the current hostilities in the Middle East, where Hamas militants slaughtered and kidnapped innocent Israeli civilians, was predicted. Specifically, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump warned in October 2020 that terrorist violence was set to be imminently inflamed.
Trump’s DHS didn’t claim it was because, in President Joe Biden words, of “sheer evil” from those who exist only “to kill Jews.” Rather, it pointed to the Abraham Accords: the U.S.-led effort to normalize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which Trump claimed would shift the course of Middle Eastern history from “decades of division and conflict” and which the Biden administration claimed would make the region “safer and more prosperous.”
So how did we end up with the exact opposite?
Hamas’attack also can’t be understood without the bipartisan push for Israeli-Arab normalization at the Palestinians’ expense, and the outrage, anger, and despair it has inspired.
For decades, the peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meaning the provision of an independent state for the Palestinian people and the end of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, was central to the task of engineering peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. This was a problem, since between successive Israeli governments steadily chipping away at the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict and dwindling U.S. interest in pressuring the Israeli state to follow through on the commitment, that resolution started to look increasingly impossible.
But over time, the priorities of the Arab states shifted away from the Palestinians, too. Their largely authoritarian leadership became more preoccupied with matters like maintaining political control in the wake of the Arab Spring protests—for which support from an advanced military power like Israel might prove useful—and an increasingly assertive Iran, which then-newly appointed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman called a “much more urgent and more important” issue.
This shift dovetailed with the Trump administration’s ultra-Israel-friendly stance and its own goal of further isolating Iran in the region. The resulting Abraham Accords were, at least in the neoconservative world, considered a stroke of “genius.” Rather than finding a solution to the seemingly intractable question of Palestinian statehood, it simply sidelined it.
The signers dropped this long-standing precondition as they re-established diplomatic relations and deepened security and economic cooperation with Israel, while Trump lavished them with rewards, like an arms deal for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and U.S. recognition of the annexation of West Sahara for Morocco. It effectively supplanted the Saudi government’s Arab Peace Initiative, which since its 2002 introduction had been the foundation of the Arab world’s program for resolving the conflict, placing the Palestinians front and center.
The new normalization agreements’ foundational and cynical assumption was that the plight of the Palestinians could and would be safely ignored and forgotten about by both the region’s governments and the broader international community. Both the Trump administration and, reportedly, bin Salman, pressured Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to assent, while the states that signed continued paying lip service to the Palestinian cause, claiming this normalization push would halt Israel’s annexation plans for its illegal West Bank settlements.
In reality, the text of the agreements barely mentioned Palestinians, outside of a few vague assurances to keep working toward a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that Morocco maintained a “coherent, constant, and unchanged position” on the matter. This was, to put it mildly, far short of what both Palestinians and their supporters in the U.S. Congress demanded.
As Arab states began gradually deepening ties with Israel, they increasingly backed away from their historic positions. Bin Salman declared (and subsequently walked back) that Israelis “have the right to have their own land,” effectively sanctioning the loss of what the Muslim world viewed as Palestinians’ historic land.
When violence broke out in April 2021 at the Al-Aqsa mosque, with Israeli forces raiding one of Islam’s holiest sites, the UAE response was notably muted. That the normalization process continued despite what would earlier have been viewed as an unacceptable provocation against both Palestinians and Islam itself was celebrated by the accords’ supporters, as proof that ongoing repression of Palestinians could indeed be safely ignored.
But the Palestinian issue could not simply be wished away, and the signing of the pacts created a set of contradictions that fueled the tensions that erupted October 7. The vast majority of the populations of Israel’s Arab neighbors opposed the accords, as did some leaders, like Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who charged that the signers had “lost their moral compass,” and Jordan’s King Abdullah, who declared that “no architecture for regional security and development can stand over the burning ashes of this conflict.”
So did Palestinians themselves, across opinion surveys, with both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas calling it a “betrayal,” a “treacherous stab,” and “grave harm.” Hamas also called for “an integrated plan to bring down normalization.” Protests against the accords erupted in Morocco, one of the signers.
The signing of the accords was particularly fraught in Saudi Arabia. The country’s powerful clerics continued to oppose Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. But beyond that, the Saudi leadership’s internal legitimacy and its standing as the region’s leader of the Islamic continued to rest in part on its commitment to the Palestinians. Regional rival Iran quickly stepped in to fill this vacuum left by Saudi support for the deals, sharply criticizing the normalization effort as a “betrayal of Palestinian aspirations for freedom.”
Meanwhile, Israeli policy didn’t change as promised, and in fact, only hardened. Since 2020, when the accords were signed, illegal settlements have expanded and even ramped up alongside settler violence. The Netanyahu government has now advanced a record number of settler housing units, and transferred administration of the occupied territories from military to civilian hands, widely interpreted as signaling plans for annexation, even as figures like former Abbas adviser Ghaith al-Omari claimed the accords had “already delivered to the Palestinians” by stopping this policy.
This past September, the UAE’s ambassador to the United States admitted annexation hadn’t actually stopped.
The Biden administration could have reversed Trump’s efforts, and placed pressure on Israel to halt these plans, as well as end its settlement expansion while making good on its promises and obligations under the peace process. Instead, the president continued Trump’s normalization efforts while breaking from presidential precedent and not even attempting to advance the peace process, all while issuing little to no criticism of the Israeli government’s violations.
He has in fact escalated the issue, pushing for an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement, with the only concession to Palestinians the mere preservation of the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian peace—an agreement that would also entail further nuclear proliferation in the region and giving Saudi Arabia security assurances. Even so, Biden’s secretary of state continues to claim that this could “be used to advance” such a peace.
So while Hamas had reportedly planned this operation for two years, and claimed it was motivated by years of violence at Al-Aqsa, its attack also can’t be understood without the bipartisan push for Israeli-Arab normalization at the Palestinians’ expense, and the outrage, anger, and despair it has inspired.
What is clear—from Hamas’s extraordinary violence, the wider regional war it threatens to spark, as well as the major pro-Palestinian protests across Arab countries in response to Israel’s bombing campaign—is that almost every assumption that undergirded the Abraham Accords was disastrously wrong, not least the idea that dismissing the Palestinians would make for a more peaceful Middle East.
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