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abraham accords
Israel Becomes First Nation to Recognize Somaliland—But Still Rejects Palestine
One foreign policy analyst said that Israel views Somaliland as a "strategic location as a launch pad for strikes on Yemen and potentially a place to forcibly 'relocate' Palestinians to."
Dec 26, 2025
Israel became the first nation to recognize Somaliland as a sovereign state on Friday, a move that was met with criticism from international observers who questioned its continued unwillingness to recognize a Palestinian state.
Somaliland, a breakaway region in the north of Somalia that is home to more than 6 million people, declared independence in 1991, but until now, no United Nations member states have recognized its claim.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described his government's recognition of the territory as being “in the spirit of the Abraham Accords,” a deal brokered by US President Donald Trump for Israel to normalize relations with some of its Arab neighbors, which has itself been accused of disregarding the issue of Palestinian sovereignty.
Speaking over a video call with Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, the president of Somaliland, Netanyahu said he was signing "Israel's official recognition of Somaliland and its right of self-determination," calling the friendship between the two nations "seminal and historic."
In a statement, Abdullahi said Israel's recognition "represents a milestone in Somaliland's long-standing pursuit of international legitimacy, reaffirming its historical, legal, and moral entitlement to statehood."
However, a report from the Guardian suggested that Israel's recognition of Somaliland has less to do with the self-determination of its people than with Israel's military interests. It cited a November report from a prominent Israeli think tank, which argued that Somaliland could be used as a base of military operations against Yemen's Houthis.
Somaliland, located in the horn of Africa just south of the Arabian Peninsula, already hosts an air base that the United Arab Emirates has used to conduct operations against the Yemeni militant group, which—until a "ceasefire" agreement was reached in October—launched regular attacks on Israel and its vessels in the Red Sea in what it said was an effort to pressure it to stop its genocidal military campaign in Gaza.
Egypt and Turkey condemned Israel's agreement with Somaliland, saying, "This initiative by Israel, which aligns with its expansionist policy and its efforts to do everything to prevent the recognition of a Palestinian state, constitutes overt interference in Somalia’s domestic affairs.”
Foreign ministers for the two nations joined those of Somalia and neighboring Djibouti on a call following the development, where they called for the continued unity of Somalia as an institution and condemned Israel's efforts "to displace the Palestinian people from their land."
Adil Haque, a professor at Rutgers Law School, pointed out on social media that, in August, Netanyahu met with Somaliland's leadership "offering recognition in exchange for helping Israel to illegally deport Palestinians from Gaza."
Somaliland was one of many nations reportedly approached by Israel to warehouse Palestinians exiled from the strip permanently—others included Indonesia, Uganda, South Sudan, and Libya.
Following reports at the time that Somalia was also in consideration, its president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, responded that "the idea of removing Palestine from their own land and putting them into another, other people’s land—I don’t see that that’s a solution at all."
A senior Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity with Israel's Channel 12 reportedly agreed that Netanyahu's recognition of Somaliland undermines his repeated assertions that there will never be a Palestinian state. As the Times of Israel summarized: "The official... points out that while Israel is the first country to grant recognition to Somaliland, the rest of the world considers the breakaway region an integral part of Somalia."
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a fellow at the Palestinian Policy Network and a producer at AJ+, said: "To state the obvious, Israel wouldn’t recognize anyone unless there was something in it for them. Israel doesn’t give a shit about Somaliland apart from its strategic location as a launch pad for strikes on Yemen and potentially a place to forcibly 'relocate' Palestinians to."
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In the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the US Has Not Been a Force for Peace
The polar opposite of the needed diplomatic effort is what has been the dominant strategy of Israel and to a large degree also of the United States: the application of ever more military force.
Dec 12, 2024
The retiring United Nations envoy for the Middle East peace process has insightfully identified a major reason the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues to boil and to entail widespread death and destruction.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Norwegian diplomat Tor Wennesland criticized the international community for relying on short-term fixes such as improving quality of life in occupied territory or diversions such as seeking peace deals between Israel and other Arab states. The crescendo of bloodshed during the past year underscores the ineffectiveness of such approaches.
Needed but not employed was a concerted and sustained diplomatic effort to end the occupation and create a Palestinian state. “What we have seen,” said Wennesland, “is the failure of dealing with the real conflict, the failure of politics and diplomacy.”
It is important to understand what diplomacy in this context does and does not mean. It does not mean routinely giving lip service to a “two-state solution” while doing little or nothing to bring about such a solution.
Much of Wennesland’s criticism was directed at the international community as a whole, but his points would apply especially to the United States, the patron of the party to the conflict that controls the land in question and resists Palestinian sovereignty.
The polar opposite of the needed diplomatic effort is what has been the dominant strategy of Israel and to a large degree also of the United States: the application of ever more military force. This was true with the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel, the first full-scale Arab-Israeli war after Israel conquered in 1967 what is now the occupied territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights.
The central feature of former U.S. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s policy was a huge airlift of military supplies to Israel. Nixon and Kissinger, viewing the conflict in Cold War terms, considered their policy a success by enabling Israel to turn the tide of battle while shutting the Soviet Union out of a meaningful regional role.
Fast forward to today, and the emphasis is still on military escalation. Israel, in its vain effort to “destroy Hamas” and strike down adversaries on its northern border, is more committed than ever to increasing death and destruction as its default approach toward any security problem. The United States has abetted this approach by gifting $18 billion in munitions to Israel since October 2023.
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria does nothing to discourage these tendencies and may instead encourage them. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the events in Syria with celebration and self-congratulations, claiming that Assad’s fall was due to earlier Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah and Iran. The change of regime was an occasion for Israel increasing rather than decreasing its offensive military activity in Syria, including seizure of a previously demilitarized buffer zone along the Golan frontier and airstrikes in and around Damascus on the very weekend that rebels were entering the capital.
During the intervening years since the 1973 war, a couple of U.S. presidents did make genuine efforts to advance an Israeli-Palestinian peace. But the necessary follow-up—largely the responsibility of subsequent administrations—did not occur.
After former President Jimmy Carter brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin pocketed the resulting peace treaty with Egypt while ignoring the part of the accords dealing with the Palestinians. After former President Bill Clinton in 2000 laid on the table his "parameters" for a deal, the two sides came closer than ever to a peace agreement, but an Israeli election ended the negotiations and the new Israeli government did not return to the table.
The current impending change in U.S. administrations offers little or no hope for positive change on this subject. After social media posts by President-elect Donald Trump that said nothing about diplomacy and instead talked about “all hell to pay” if Israeli hostages were not released by his inauguration on January 20, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for his “strong statement.”
Ignoring that Israel has both the power and the land and is inflicting many times more suffering on innocent civilians than anything Hamas has done, Netanyahu said that Trump’s statement “clarifies that there is one party responsible for this situation and that is Hamas.”
Echoes of a 1973-style Cold War mentality can be heard today in much discussion of U.S. policy toward the Middle East and overwhelmingly in Israeli rhetoric. The main bête noire this time is Iran, reducing the influence of which is a constantly invoked rationale for hawkish and military-heavy policies.
The Middle East is not the only region that has demonstrated the fallacy of the notion of deescalating a conflict through military escalation. As Wennesland puts it, “Politics is what ends war, and diplomacy is what ends war.”
It is important to understand what diplomacy in this context does and does not mean. It does not mean routinely giving lip service to a “two-state solution” while doing little or nothing to bring about such a solution.
Nor does it mean seeking agreements for the sake of agreements, motivated in large part by a desire to wave supposed accomplishments before a domestic constituency. This was true of the so-called "Abraham Accords," which were not peace agreements at all but instead were largely about Israel not having to make peace to enjoy formal relations with other regional states, with which Israel was not at war anyway.
It was true as well of the enormous priority that the Biden administration put on seeking a similar agreement with Saudi Arabia, which, even if it had materialized in the form the administration envisioned, would not have served either U.S. interests or the cause of Middle East peace. The administration’s effort along this line was counterproductive not only in further reducing any Israeli incentive to make peace with the Palestinians but also, as President Joe Biden himself admitted, in probably being an additional motivation for Hamas to attack Israel last October.
As for what diplomacy does mean, it includes the concerted and sustained use of diplomatic energy, policymaking bandwidth, and political capital to address directly the core issues underlying a conflict and bring about a result that makes a difference. In the Middle East context, that result needs to include Palestinian self-determination and an end to occupation.
Correct understanding of diplomacy also speaks to what a foreign policy of restraint means. It does not mean isolationism. In areas such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can mean an increase in diplomatic involvement and in the priority that policymakers give to the goal being sought. As the restraint-minded Quincy Institute puts it in its statement of principles, the United States “should engage with the world” and pursue peace “through the vigorous practice of diplomacy.”
Much damage from the policies that Wennesland laments has been done and cannot easily be reversed. The Israeli settlement enterprise in the occupied territories, which tsk-tsks from the United States have done nothing to stop, have led many observers—though not Wennesland—to believe that a two-state solution is no longer possible.
But even if the requirement of Palestinian self-determination could be achieved only through a one-state solution that provides equal rights for all, the same principle—that peace can be achieved only through vigorous diplomacy and not military escalation—applies.
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Biden’s Apocalyptic Middle East Failure: an Autopsy
By his insistence on impunity for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has left the Middle East in flames and the U.S. and the world distinctly in peril.
Nov 11, 2024
U.S. President Joe Biden has now joined the ranks of Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush as a president whose Middle East policy crashed and burned spectacularly. Unlike Carter, who was stymied by the Iranian hostage crisis, or Bush, who faced a popular Iraqi resistance movement, Biden’s woes weren’t inflicted by an enemy. Quite the opposite, it was this country’s putative partner, the Israeli government, that implicated the president in its still ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as its disproportionate attacks on Lebanon and Iran, for which Biden steadfastly declined to impose the slightest penalties. Instead, he’s continued to arm the Israelis to the teeth.
Israel’s total war on Palestinian civilians, in turn, significantly reduced enthusiasm for Biden among youth and minorities at home, helping usher him out of office. It also created electoral obstacles for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. By his insistence on impunity for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has left the Middle East in flames and the U.S. and the world distinctly in peril.
During his first three years in office, his administration wielded the tools of diplomacy in the Middle East. Donald Trump’s sanctions against the Houthis in Yemen had imperiled the civilian population there by denying them humanitarian aid and gasoline to drive to the market for food. Biden lifted those sanctions and sponsored continued negotiations between those in power in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa and in the neighboring Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh. Only relatively small contingents of American troops remained in Syria and Iraq to help with the mopping-up operations against the so-called Islamic State terrorist organization.
Pushing Iran Into the Arms of China and Russia
Danger signals nonetheless soon began flashing bright red among friend and foe alike in the region, as Biden’s team quickly squandered an opportunity to restore the 2015 “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” or JCPOA, between the United Nations Security Council and the Iranian regime in Tehran, which Trump had so tellingly trashed. Between 2015 and 2019, that deal had successfully kept Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program purely civilian, closing off the four most plausible pathways to a nuclear weapon.
In those years, the Iranians had, in fact, mothballed 80% of their nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. While the U.N. Security Council lifted economic sanctions on that country, Republicans in Congress refused to halt unilateral American sanctions, which applied to third parties as well. European investors had to jump through hoops to invest in Iran while avoiding Treasury Department fines. As a result, a disappointed Iranian leadership went unrewarded for its careful compliance with the JCPOA.
Then, in May 2018, Trump stabbed the Iranians in the back, withdrawing the U.S. from the JCPOA and slapping the most severe economic sanctions ever applied by one country to another in peacetime on Iran. It essentially added up to an invisible blockade of the Iranian economy, even interfering with ordinary commerce like that country’s oil sales. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted of having convinced the gullible Trump to take such a step, which led Iran’s petroleum exports to plummet over the next three years. Trump even designated the Iranian National Bank a terrorist organization, again with potentially crippling consequences for the entire economy.
Biden’s hardline policy toward Tehran ultimately harmed his major foreign policy initiative, of defeating Moscow.
In revenge, Iran went back to enriching uranium to high levels and building more centrifuges, though without actually producing weapons-grade material. To this day, its civilian nuclear program remains a form of “the Japan option,” an attempt at deterrence by making it clear that it does not want a bomb but that, if it feels sufficiently threatened, it can build a nuclear weapon relatively quickly.
As soon as Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020, the centrist Iranian President Hassan Rouhani declared that the JCPOA could be restored by the two leaders virtually by fiat. And Biden’s foreign policy team initially appeared to consider negotiations to reinstate the treaty, only to ultimately retain Trump’s outrageous sanctions as “leverage,” demanding that Iran return to compliance with the JCPOA before the two sides could talk.
Perhaps the Iranian public got the message that Biden was determined to be as hostile as Trump. Certainly, in the next round of voting in the summer of 2021, they swung behind hardliner Ebrahim Raisi. And despite occasional modest diplomatic forays since then, relations have been in a dumpster for the remainder of Biden’s term, with most of Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions still in place. And once again, as in the Trump years, the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has lobbied Biden hard to cease all negotiations with Tehran.
Iran, which might have been drawn into the Western camp, has instead become a hostage to Beijing. Starting in 2019, China accepted smuggled Iranian petroleum at a substantial price discount. Then, when the Ukraine War broke out and Biden imposed maximum sanctions on the Russian Federation, Moscow and Tehran found themselves pushed ever closer.
Now, the two countries plan to sign a “strategic partnership agreement,” while, in July 2023, Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, cementing the alliances with both China and Russia into which it had been so vigorously pushed by Washington. Iran also became a definite asset for Russia in its Ukraine War, providing Russian President Vladimir Putin with crucial weaponry. In short, Biden’s hardline policy toward Tehran ultimately harmed his major foreign policy initiative, of defeating Moscow.
Passionate Intensity
Biden’s team also pursued the strategy worked out by Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner of trying to wheedle or strong-arm Arab states into making a separate peace with Israel, while throwing the stateless Palestinians under the bus. They managed to defame the Bible by naming their agreements—initially among Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Israel—the “Abraham Accords,” though they were actually thinly veiled arms deals. Underlying such a strategy lurked the possibility of creating a military bloc, involving Israel and significant parts of the Arab world, to isolate and ultimately overthrow the government of Iran. The Arab signatories all sought the economic benefits of trade and investment with Israel as well as U.S. security promises, benefiting American arms manufacturers with their orders. Had Biden instead made a full-court press for Palestinian rights, he might have created optimism rather than despair.
Sudan was also soon blackmailed into joining the accords. A popular revolution there overthrew the decades-long dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir on April 11, 2019. Its civilian and military wings then entered into a tenuous cohabitation, with the civilians pressing the generals to return to their barracks. Civilian Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and the chairman of the Transitional Military Council, General Abdel Fattah Burhan, signed onto the Abraham Accords in January 2021 both to get Sudan removed from the U.S. list of terrorist nations and to begin repairing its economy.
The Israeli and U.S. response to the gruesome Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, can fairly be said to have entirely undone all of Biden’s diplomatic work in the region.
In the end, that represented pure economic blackmail, a policy continued by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. A 2022 poll showed that more than 74% of Sudanese rejected any normalization with Israel. Instead of attempting to bolster budding Sudanese democracy, the Biden administration continued to resort to backdoor deals with that junta in the interests of America’s main geopolitical client in the Middle East (while Sudan itself fell into a catastrophic civil war).
Blinken also made it a personal mission to rope Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords. Unlike the two other Gulf states committed to the treaty, however, Saudi Arabia has a largely pro-Palestinian Muslim population in the millions and a peace treaty with Israel might have fomented unrest among them. While Mohammed Bin Salman, the fickle crown prince who ran much of the show in that country, continued to vacillate on the issue, his father, King Salman, repeatedly made it clear that “Palestine is our number one issue,” and that there will be no recognition of Israel without an ironclad path to a Palestinian state (a longstanding Saudi position).
Nonetheless, the Biden foreign policy team continued pressuring Riyadh to normalize relations with Israel, even as the Gaza War grew ever more devastating and the Saudi public daily saw images of women and children being shredded by American-supplied bombs and drones. In an opinion poll released last January, 78% of Saudis said that they felt psychologically stressed by the Gaza War, while nearly every one of them lambasted the U.S. response as “bad” or “very bad,” and 57% believed there was now no possibility of making peace with Israel.
Things Fall Apart, the Center Cannot Hold
The security guarantees the U.S. gave the United Arab Emirates under the Abraham Accords emboldened its leader, Mohamed Bin Zayed (MBZ), in his quest to create an informal empire stretching from Yemen to Sudan and even all the way to Libya. In April 2023, however, Sudan’s conventional army and the country’s special operations Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fell to fighting one another, as the generals that led them competed for power. The country then devolved into a horror show of a civil war, with half of its 50 million people now facing starvation and at least 62,000 already slaughtered. The brutal RSF fighters are nonetheless backed by the Emirates (lovingly dubbed “little Sparta” by the Pentagon). And in these years, President Biden has proven impotent when it came to reining in America’s “Abraham Accords” darling. In fact, he only recently hosted MBZ at the White House and a Rose Garden that’s seen more genocidaires than most administrations.
The Israeli and U.S. response to the gruesome Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, can fairly be said to have entirely undone all of Biden’s diplomatic work in the region. While the United States and some other Western governments viewed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s never-ending devastation of Gaza and his country’s deployment of American 2,000-pound bombs against residential complexes as forced on him by Hamas’ alleged tactic of using civilians as “human shields,” virtually no one in the Global South agreed. Even some European Union states and Israeli journalists dissented.
President Biden could undoubtedly have halted Netanyahu’s total war on Palestinian civilians at any point in 2024, given Israel’s dependence on U.S. ammunition and arms.
South Africa brought a case against Israel at the International Criminal Court charging it with genocide, which the Court said was "plausibly brought" in January, issuing the equivalent of a preliminary injunction against the Netanyahu government. Israel, of course, ignored it and has simply continued the devastation there (and now in Lebanon as well). Somehow, Biden seemed unaware that the government of extremists formed by Netanyahu in late 2022 was anything but the Israel of the 1960 film Exodus, with a blue-eyed Paul Newman as the protagonist. It was instead a witch’s brew of virulent ethnonationalism and religious apocalypticism.
Worse yet, Netanyahu used the cover of his Gaza atrocities to expand the war further. He deliberately bombed an Iranian diplomatic facility (considered Iranian soil under international law) in the Syrian capital of Damascus last spring. Iran later responded with a rocket barrage. Netanyahu went on attempting to get Tehran’s goat, aware that if he could turn his conflict into an actual war with Iran, American jingoists would give him even more knee-jerk support.
In the process, he had Ismail Haniyeh, his chief, if indirect, civilian Hamas negotiating partner, assassinated in Iran’s capital of Tehran on the occasion of the inauguration of a new president there. He then launched a terrorist onslaught of booby-trapped pager bombs against an Iran-allied group, Hezbollah, in Lebanon before invading that country and subjecting significant parts of it to a Gaza-style bombardment, as a response to Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel in support of Gaza. Such provocations led to yet another Iranian missile barrage against Israel on October 1 to which Israel replied with attacks on Iranian military facilities. Biden was reduced to pleading with Iran to be reasonable in response, while declining to demand any similar restraint from Israel.
The Blood-Dimmed Tide
And here’s the truth of the matter: President Biden could undoubtedly have halted Netanyahu’s total war on Palestinian civilians at any point in 2024, given Israel’s dependence on U.S. ammunition and arms. Instead, his gung-ho support of the insupportable in Gaza has helped turn the Middle East into a genuine powder keg, which he is bequeathing to his successor. Crucial Red Sea and Suez Canal maritime trade has already been partially paralyzed, thanks to rocket attacks launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels in support of the people of Gaza, adding inflation and supply-chain difficulties to the global economy.
Biden then restored sanctions on the Houthis, harming Yemeni civilians, while allowing Netanyahu to go on butchering Gazan civilians. Lebanon, already a basket case, with a ruined port, a bankrupt national bank, no president, and a third of its population below the poverty line, now faces a wholesale reduction to fourth-world misery. More than a million Lebanese have had to flee their homes in that small country, and the conflict will undoubtedly contribute to Europe’s immigration crisis.
Consider it a distinct irony, then, that, rather than allying with Israel against Iran, most Arab publics have significantly raised their estimation of Tehran. Even long-time American ally Turkey and U.S. partner Egypt have felt threatened by the extremist Netanyahu government and its Napoleonic ambitions, and have begun warming to one another and exploring better relations with Tehran.
Nativist Shiite militias in Iraq rained down rockets on bases in that country hosting U.S. troops, but ranged even further afield, targeting American soldiers in Jordan and killing Israeli troops in Israel itself. They pledged to come to the aid of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The Iraqi parliament recognized such militias in 2016 as the equivalent of a national guard. Iraq’s outraged Shiites even finally convinced Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani to kick the last U.S. troops out of that country by 2026.
In the end, Biden’s unfaltering bear hug of Benjamin Netanyahu ensured that even the last vestiges of the George W. Bush administration’s neoconservative project of reshaping the Middle East to America’s and Israel’s advantage have now gone down the drain. Washington continues to send ever more bombs and sophisticated weaponry to a Middle East in flames and, with Donald Trump set to take office in January, such dangerous arms deals will likely only multiply.
Consider it a genuine first-class nightmare.
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What Will a Second Trump Term Really Mean for Palestine?
Trump has two clear paths when he assumes power next January: continue to allow the U.S. to be led by the nose by the Christian evangelical right or stop Netanyahu’s war.
Nov 09, 2024
Conventional wisdom has it that Trump 2.0 will be a disaster for Palestinians, because Trump 1.0 all but buried the Palestinian national cause.
And it is indeed true that under Donald Trump’s first term as president, the U.S.. was wholly guided by the Zionist religious right - the real voice in his ear, either as donors or policymakers.
Under Trump and his son-in-law adviser, Jared Kushner, Washington became a policy playground for the settler movement, with which the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, was unashamedly aligned.
Whatever Trump does, the scale of Palestinian resistance during this war has demonstrated that the agency in the conflict does not lie with extremist leaders in Israel or Washington.
Consequently, in his first term, Trump upended decades of policy by recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the U.S. embassy there; he disenfranchised the Palestinian Authority by closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington; he allowed Israel to annex the Golan Heights; he pulled out of the nuclear accords with Iran; and he assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the most powerful Iranian general and diplomat in the region.
Even more damaging for the Palestinian struggle for freedom was Trump’s sponsorship of the Abraham Accords.
This was—and still is—a serious attempt to pour concrete over the grave of the Palestinian cause, constructing in its place a superhighway of trade and contracts from the Gulf that would make Israel not just a regional superpower, but a vital portal to the wealth of the Gulf.
On October 6, 2023, the day before the Hamas attack, the Palestinian cause was all but dead. The Palestinian struggle for self-determination felt like the baggage of an older generation of Arab leaders, which was being unceremoniously dumped by the new generation.
All the diplomatic talk was of Saudi Arabia’s impending decision to normalise relations with Israel, with the picture of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shaking hands in public with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dangling as the prize lying just behind the next corner. One more push, and it would be in the bag.
If that charge sheet is not long enough, it could easily be argued that Trump’s second term will be even worse for Palestinians than his first was.
Wildest Impulses
This time around, and with the Republican partyprojected to have control over both houses of Congress, there will be no adults in the room to correct the president’s wildest impulses.
After all, did Friedman not just publish a book entitled One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, in which he argues that the U.S. has a biblical duty to support Israel’s annexation of the West Bank?
“Palestinians, like Puerto Ricans, will not vote in national elections… Palestinians will be free to enact their own governing documents as long as they are not inconsistent with those of Israel,” Friedman writes.
In allowing Netanyahu to claim total victory, the U.S. administration under a first Trump presidency buried not just the prospect of a two-state solution, but along with it, the Zionist dream of a liberal, secular, democratic Jewish state.
So will Trump 2.0 not simply presage yet more territorial changes, such as the annexation of Area C of the occupied West Bank, the permanent division of Gaza, the return of Israeli settlements to northern Gaza, and the clearing of the border area in southern Lebanon?
All of this could, and no doubt will, come to pass under a second Trump term, with no brakes.
I do not for one second underplay or underestimate the sacrifice in blood that Palestinians have paid so far—the death toll in Gaza could easily be three times higher than the current official figure—or could yet pay for all that is about to come.
But in this column, I will argue that the settler movement, backed by a second Trump term, is in the process of burying any chance that Israel will prevail as an apartheid Jewish minority state in control of all the land from the river to the sea.
Irreversible Consequences
Let me make two points about the situation that existed on October 6, before I go on to deal with the irreversible consequences of everything that has happened since. And make no mistake—they are irreversible.
The first is that in allowing Netanyahu to claim total victory, the U.S. administration under a first Trump presidency buried not just the prospect of a two-state solution, but along with it, the Zionist dream of a liberal, secular, democratic Jewish state.
The liberal version of this state had been the main vehicle of Israeli expansion, with its salami slices making ever-deeper inroads into historic Palestine. By killing it, the liberal fig leaf dropped from the Zionist project, and the religious Zionist forces who were once regarded as fringe and even as terrorists, such as far-right politician Itamar Ben Gvir and the Kahanists, became mainstream.
This fundamentally altered the whole project to establish Israel as the dominant state between the river and sea. It suddenly became the only state, and one that was governed by religious fanatics; by people wishing to level the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
It became a state governed by the religious dogmas of Jerusalem not by the European Ashkenazi internet geeks and sophisticates of Tel Aviv. Under the first Trump presidency, the rift between these two camps became irreconcilable and fundamentally destabilising.
The second change that the first Trump presidency brought about, or rather completed, took place in Palestinian minds.
A whole generation of Palestinians born after the Oslo Accords came to the conclusion that all political and nonviolent ways of seeking an end to the occupation were blocked; that there was no longer any meaning in recognising Israel, let alone trying to find anyone in it to talk with.
Talking to Israel became a meaningless exercise. The political route was blocked not only inside Palestine, but outside it.
To their eternal shame and discredit, U.S. President Joe Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, kept all the “achievements” of the first Trump presidency in place—first and foremost the Abraham Accords.
Biden's Humiliation
Trump’s big boast during his first term of office was that he made all these changes to the status quo of the Palestinian conflict, and the sky did not fall in.
But the sky did fall in on October 7, and everything that Trump and Biden had done before that contributed to the Hamas attack, which provided the same shock to Israel that 9/11 provided to the US.
After the Hamas attack, it was impossible to ignore the Palestinian cause. It moved from the periphery of global human rights causes to the very center.
It’s not a scorecard of total humiliation for Biden, but when the history of this period is written, Biden will emerge as a weak leader.
But Biden didn’t get it. An instinctive Zionist, he allowed Netanyahu to humiliate him. His first reaction to the Hamas attack was to give Israel everything it wanted, thwarting all international moves at the United Nations for a cease-fire. His second reaction was to draw red lines, which Netanyahu proceeded to ignore.
Biden told Netanyahu not to reoccupy Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor. Netanyahu did it anyway. Biden told Netanyahu to allow aid trucks into Gaza, and Netanyahu mostly ignored him. Biden told Netanyahu not to invade Lebanon; Netanyahu did it. Biden told Netanyahu not to attack Iranian nuclear and oil facilities, and Netanyahu listened to him—for now at least.
It’s not a scorecard of total humiliation for Biden, but when the history of this period is written, Biden will emerge as a weak leader.
He also emerges as a leader who facilitated genocide. The amount of heavy bombs that the U.S. supplied, and that Israel used against overwhelmingly civilian targets in Gaza and Lebanon, over the past year far outweighs the U.S.’ own use of such bombs during the entire Iraq war.
If the Israeli state has fundamentally changed after October 7, so too has the Palestinian mindset.
The scale of the killing—the official Palestinian death toll from the war has exceeded 43,000, and the real count could be several times higher, with the degree of destruction rendering most of the Gaza Strip uninhabitable—has crossed all red lines for Palestinians, wherever they live.
No Room for Negotiations
From now on, there is no talking or negotiating with a state that does this to your people. The only two votes in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that secured unanimity among Jewish Israeli MKs included legislation to veto a Palestinian state, and a law banning UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.
These two votes alone told Palestinians that they would be deluded to think that a post-Netanyahu government would bring any relief from occupation. In a deeply divided Israel, the only thing that all Jews could agree on were two measures that fundamentally made life impossible for Palestinians, the majority of the population.
In such extreme conditions, there are only two alternatives: to do nothing and die, or to resist and die. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, believe in the latter.
Palestinians are not raising the white flag. They are staying, and fighting, and dying where they live.
Consequently, Hamas is at the height of its popularity in areas where the Muslim Brotherhood was on October 6 at its weakest: in the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt.
Walk around Nablus’s old city and ask people who they support. The answer will not be the defunct Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. By a substantial margin, it will be Hamas, a group that is proscribed in the U.K. and other countries as a terrorist organization.
In Jordan, Hamas is praised by the whole population, East Bankers and Palestinians alike, because Israel’s assault on the occupied West Bank is seen as an existential threat to the kingdom.
Walk into a Palestinian home for dinner on Friday, and everyone will tell you that this death toll, and the deaths under a second Trump term, are the price to be paid for liberation from occupation.
This generation of Palestinians has shown a degree of fortitude that no previous generation showed. They are not cutting and running, like former President Yasser Arafat’s PLO did when surrounded by Israeli forces in Beirut in 1982.
No one in Gaza is fleeing to Tunisia, and few to Egypt, which is just across the border—and far fewer than Netanyahu intended. Palestinians are not raising the white flag. They are staying, and fighting, and dying where they live.
'Time for Complete Victory'
This is the answer to those who argue that looking at the long term is all very well, when the short-term duty is simply to survive. There is no short term for Palestinians any more. It’s over. There is nothing left.
The short term means returning to your tent. It means going back to your home in the occupied West Bank, knowing that tomorrow you could be burned out by settlers armed by Ben Gvir. There is no going back. Palestinians have all lost too many family members for surrender to be considered an option.
Viewed from the perspective of a Palestinian farmer clinging to his stony ground in the face of repeated settler attacks in the hills of South Hebron, it’s a toss-up as to whether Kamala Harris as U.S. president would have made any difference. If anything, she could well have been an even weaker influence on Netanyahu than Biden was.
Letting Netanyahu think he can achieve “total victory” only means feeding the forest fires of a regional war.
So we have ended up with Trump once again.
The settler right are popping bottles of champagne in celebration. Speaking in the Knesset, Ben Gvir welcomed Trump’s election victory, saying that “this is the time for sovereignty, this is the time for complete victory”.
Netanyahu is also using this period to clear out the stables in his government by sacking his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
Trump thus has two clear paths when he assumes power next January, assuming that Biden continues to fail to secure a cease-fire in Gaza. He can either carry on where he left off, and continue to allow the U.S. to be led by the nose by the Christian evangelical right, or he can do what he strongly hinted he would do to the Muslim leaders he met in Michigan—which is to stop Netanyahu’s war.
Either path is littered with elephant traps.
Fires of Regional War
Letting Netanyahu and his alliance with Ben Gvir achieve “total victory” would mean, in reality, the ethnic cleansing of two-thirds of the occupied West Bank, with a huge refugee influx ending up in Jordan—an act that would be seen in Jordan as a cause for war.
It would mean the expulsion of Palestinians from northern Gaza and the permanent destruction of southern Lebanon, with the assumed right of Israel to continue bombing Lebanon and Syria.
Each of these actions would lead to more war, which Trump has pledged to stop. Remember that one of the last things Gallant said before he was sacked was that a war in Syria to cut Iran’s supply lines was inevitable.
Stopping the war would present Netanyahu with his biggest political peril, as doing so before a return of the hostages would be tantamount to a Hamas and Hezbollah victory.
Letting Netanyahu think he can achieve “total victory” only means feeding the forest fires of a regional war.
Nor would getting Saudi Arabia to recognise Israel, putting the cherry on top of the cake of the Abraham Accords, make any difference—although I strongly doubt whether Mohammed bin Salman would be stupid enough to do this anymore.
The reality is that such deals have no meaning while Palestine does not have its own state, and while each Arab leader feels the anger of their own population on Palestine.
But forcing Netanyahu to stop the war, in the way a strong Republican president like Ronald Reaganforced Israel stop the bombing of Beirut four decades ago, would also have seismic consequences.
It would stop the religious Zionist project in its tracks. It would feed the growing dissatisfaction within the Israeli army’s high command, who have already signalled they have achieved all they can in Gaza and Lebanon, and are suffering from war fatigue.
Stopping the war would present Netanyahu with his biggest political peril, as doing so before a return of the hostages would be tantamount to a Hamas and Hezbollah victory.
Hope for the future
One year on, there is still no credible project to install a government in Gaza that would allow the withdrawal of Israeli troops. The moment they do, Hamas reemerges. The only government of post-war Gaza that could succeed would be a technocratic government that is agreed with Hamas—and that in itself would represent a huge humiliation for Netanyahu and the army’s vow to crush the resistance movement.
Whatever Trump does, the scale of Palestinian resistance during this war has demonstrated that the agency in the conflict does not lie with extremist leaders in Israel or Washington. It lies with the peoples of Palestine and across the Middle East.
And that is the biggest hope for the future. Never before in U.S. electoral history has Palestine been a factor in turning the youth vote away from the Democratic Party. Henceforth, no Democratic leader wishing to rebuild their coalition can ignore the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim vote.
It may be that as Biden departs, we have seen the party’s last Zionist leader. That in itself is of immense significance for Israel.
The irrational, quixotic, transactional occupant of the White House—the president who insists that his advisers reduce all their analysis to one sheet of A4, which they are lucky he actually reads—will only accelerate the destruction of the status quo in the Middle East that he started in his first term.
With much help from Netanyahu, Trump has already killed the dream of Zionist liberal democracy that lasted for 76 years.
This is some achievement in itself. In a second term, he will only hasten the day the occupation ends.
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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, told Bloomberg. "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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What Israel Should Learn From the Failed US Response to 9/11
The costs related to the misguided War on Terror approach—in shattered lives, in outlays for the military campaigns—continue to negatively affect the United States. And those costs are dwarfed by the impacts on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. There's a better way to respond to a terror attack.
Oct 20, 2023
The Palestinian people have never really figured prominently in the calculations of U.S. administrations. The Middle East is a locus of power politics, and Palestinians have very little power. Tragically, Arab states have all too often treated Palestinians like pawns as well. In Israel, as second-class citizens and residents of occupied territory, Palestinians hardly merit a place on the chessboard.
Sure, the Palestinians have international law, the United Nations, and a large swath of public opinion on their side. That and $3 will get you a latte.
The latest outbreak of horrendous violence—the slaughter of Israeli citizens by Hamas, the slaughter of Palestinian citizens by Israeli forces—has frequently been linked to the specific suffering in the Gaza strip. Nominally governed by the militants of Hamas, Gaza has been rightly compared to an open-air prison where Israel subjects the residents to all the indignities of the incarcerated. The environment is tightly controlled. There is terrible overcrowding. Only a designated number of Palestinians are allowed out on work release. These intolerable conditions have nurtured dreams of resistance: the more intolerable the conditions, the more violent the resistance.
Forget about an independent state, which had long been the Saudi demand. This time around, Riyadh would settle for some unspecified version of prison reform.
But there is another desperation at work here, fueled by a fury at being sidelined by geopolitics. Even as they lose more and more land to Israeli settlers, Palestinians have had to listen to promises that this agreement or this pact or this set of negotiations will accord them something approximating a state or a secure homeland or some measure of dignity. And it just hasn’t happened.
The most recent deal, which would result in Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic recognition of Israel, has also included some sops thrown at the Palestinians. According to murderous Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman, the deal would “reach a place that will ease the life of the Palestinians.”
Say what?!
Forget about an independent state, which had long been the Saudi demand. This time around, Riyadh would settle for some unspecified version of prison reform: better meals, more exercise in the yard outside, perhaps conjugal visits. As if Palestinians don’t merit even an asterisk in the agreement, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu refused to enumerate even these minor concessions.
Disrupting this imminent deal seems to have been at least one motivation for the attacks launched last week. But if it’s true that Hamas had been planning this assault for one or even two years, then it’s necessary to look at the other geopolitical conditions that have pushed Palestinian militants to act and the Israeli government, equally militant under Netanyahu’s extremist reign, to wage war in return.
Arab-Israeli Conflict
As befits a country obsessed with power politics, American presidents have long been focused on the very sources of power in the Middle East—namely, fossil fuels. Oil undergirded the longstanding U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia, a regressive, authoritarian state that has nevertheless thumbed its nose at the United States by funding anti-Western extremism throughout the world. Securing access to oil was one reason the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and unseated Saddam Hussein. If the Middle East consisted of nothing but sand and date palms, the United States would have expended as much geopolitical capital there as it has in Patagonia and Mauritania.
The other locus of U.S. interest in the region has been Israel. Over the years, Israel has been the top recipient of U.S. military assistance. In 2021, for instance, it received $3.3 billion, 11% of the entire U.S. foreign assistance budget. To make this alliance more secure, successive U.S. administrations have dreamed of ending the nearly 80-year-long conflict between Arab countries and the Zionist state. Beginning in the 1990s, the road to that rapprochement ran through the Occupied Territories. If the United States could push the Israelis and Palestinians toward a two-state solution, so the thinking went, Arab-Israeli peace would follow.
Beginning with the Trump administration, however, the United States reversed the equation, focusing more on negotiating agreements between Israel and the Arab states that secondarily dealt with Palestinians. Through the Abraham Accords, the brainchild of Trump’s son-in-law and foreign policy neophyte Jared Kushner, the United States brokered a deal between Israel and both the UAE and Bahrain. Then came normalization between Morocco and Israel, at the expense of U.S. recognition of Moroccan claims to Western Sahara. In one of its last acts, the Trump administration presided over an agreement between Sudan and Israel, which has so far stopped short of full normalization.
“Slowly but surely, the rights of the Palestinian people dropped down the priority list of Arab governments which saw the U.S. as the main guarantor of their political survival and narrow economic interests.”
Not only has the Biden administration adopted the Abraham Accords as part of its own foreign policy in the Middle East, it has attempted to build on them by pushing the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. If it can make the bed for these strange bedfellows, the United States can accomplish a task started during the Obama administration: refocusing U.S. attention away from the Middle East and toward Asia in particular. Because of its need for heavy crude, the United States still imports some oil from the Persian Gulf—12% of total imports in 2022. But beginning in 2019, America began to produce more energy than it consumes. No longer dependent on Middle Eastern oil and having brought Israel in from the cold, the United States is poised to downgrade the Middle East in geopolitical importance.
Israel and oil are not the only pull factors for the United States in the Middle East. Since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, the United States has also sought to contain Iran and its partners, including Hezbollah and Hamas. The progress made during the Obama administration to secure a nuclear agreement with Tehran was unraveled by Trump, which also led to the discrediting of the political pragmatists in Iran and their loss in the 2021 elections. A sign of the erosion of U.S. influence in the region could be measured recently when China negotiated a détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Less animosity between the leading Shia (Iran) and Sunni (Saudi Arabia) countries in the region should be good news for Palestinians. Despite much rhetorical support, however, the major states in the Middle East have largely failed to stand up for the Palestinian cause, beginning with Egypt’s involvement in the Camp David Accords in 1979. “Seeking to maintain good relations with the superpower, Arab regimes allowed Washington—Israel’s main supplier of weapons and military support—to take control of peace efforts in the region,” writes Imad Harb of the Arab Center Washington D.C. “This left no space for Arab leaders to positively impact decision-making regarding the Palestinians. Slowly but surely, the rights of the Palestinian people dropped down the priority list of Arab governments which saw the U.S. as the main guarantor of their political survival and narrow economic interests.”
This high-level abandonment of the Palestinians has proven unpopular with folks on the street in the Middle East, who have taken a very dim view of the Abraham Accords and their successors. Demonstrations in support of Palestinians have spread rapidly throughout the region in the wake of Israel’s blockade of Gaza and preparations for a ground invasion. But if the United States is unable to influence Israeli policy—and several administrations indeed attempted to push back on Israeli occupation policy and its treatment of Gaza—then these public protests won’t have much impact either.
The Russia Factor
Hamas has counted on both Iranian and Russian support over the years. Iran has provided military support and, through Hezbollah, training as well. Despite much work by intelligence agencies, however, no Iranian fingerprints have been found on the latest attack by Hamas.
Russia, meanwhile, adopted the Soviet foreign policy of supporting the Palestinian cause. Although some Russian weapons have ended up in the hands of Hamas, it’s not likely that there has been a direct military relationship. Indeed, Russia has tried hard to maintain good relations with Israel, and it thinks of itself as a potential arbiter of conflict in the region.
At the same time, the Hamas attacks fit comfortably into the Kremlin narrative that the tide is turning against Ukraine because now the West’s attention is divided. As far as Russian President Vladimir Putin is concerned, U.S. and European governments are experiencing donor fatigue, which is accentuated by the new demands for assistance from Israel.
In such an environment—Russia down, United States on the way out—Israel acts without meaningful constraints.
But the Biden administration is likely to use the Hamas attacks to bundle assistance to Ukraine with support for Israel, making it that much more difficult for Republican lawmakers, who are currently hamstrung by their inability to choose a House speaker, to vote down the package.
Putin, meanwhile, has placed calls to various leaders in the region. The Kremlin has its own version of the Abraham Accords: the Authoritarian Accords. The Russian leader has good relations with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s Ebrahim Raisi, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, not to mention Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. If he weren’t saddled with the conflict in Ukraine, Putin might actually be able to bring everyone to the table. But a leader’s convening power is undercut when he has broken international law by invading a neighboring country and helped to drive up the global prices of food and energy. In such an environment—Russia down, United States on the way out—Israel acts without meaningful constraints.
What’s Next
The situation in the region is indeed bleak. An Israeli ground assault on Gaza will have horrendous consequences—for Palestinians, probably for Israel, and for the prospects of regional peace. Israel will try to eliminate Hamas, an entity it once helped to create in order to undercut the authority of the more secular PLO. But Israel has never been able to eradicate any of its adversaries in the past. So, should it proceed with an invasion, Israeli will face an occupation of Gaza as difficult to maintain as Russia’s seizure of a part of Ukraine.
It might seem that any kind of rapprochement between Israel and Palestine is off the table for another generation. But some analysts harbor hopes, however slender. According to Steven Simon, a former Obama national-security adviser, “The U.S. should establish a small contact group of important players, including Saudi Arabia, to validate and sell a post-conflict plan. This would entail the handoff of Gaza to the U.N., once the guns have cooled, pending the invigoration of the Palestinian Authority and commitment to Palestinian national rights.” Perhaps, under cover of providing public solidarity with Israel, Biden quietly pursued such an option during his recent trip to the region.
The key point here, though, is “once the guns have cooled.” The sooner the guns cool, the better. That means an immediate ceasefire.
Over time, though, the two historically stateless peoples, who have both been used as pawns for centuries, can find common cause as neighboring states.
Israel should learn the lessons of the past, including the ones that the United States learned after September 11. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq might have satisfied, in whatever misguided fashion, an immediate desire for revenge. But keeping the guns hot ended up killing more than twice as many Americans as died on that day in 2001. The costs—in shattered lives, in outlays for the military campaigns—continue to negatively affect the United States. And those costs are dwarfed by the impacts on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.
What should Israel do instead? It’s certainly easy to preach restraint from a distance. But here’s the reality that Israel needs to face: Even if it somehow eliminates Hamas, it won’t eliminate the conditions that brought Hamas to power in Gaza. Israel has to grapple with the reality of Palestinians. They can’t be wished away.
The dispossession of the Palestinians has been a non-stop tragedy—for the dispossessed obviously but also for the occupiers, who have known no real security. An independent Palestinian state at first might only externalize the risks that Israelis face. Over time, though, the two historically stateless peoples, who have both been used as pawns for centuries, can find common cause as neighboring states—like Germany and France after World War II or Indonesia and East Timor today. Fratricide, as the latest events have proven once again, only benefits the one percent of extremists on both sides.
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Netanyahu Shows Map of 'New Middle East'—Without Palestine—to UN General Assembly
"Netanyahu made clear with his little map today what normalization really seeks: eliminating Palestine... from the region and legitimizing greater Israel, all with the blessing of Arab regimes," one critic said.
Sep 22, 2023
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu angered Palestinians and their defenders Friday after presenting a map of "The New Middle East" without Palestine during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Speaking to a largely empty chamber, Netanyahu—whose far-right government is widely considered the most extreme in Israeli history—showed a series of maps, including one that did not show the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Gaza. These Palestinian territories have been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, with the exception of Gaza—from which Israeli forces withdrew in 2005, while maintaining an economic stranglehold over the densely populated coastal strip.
Middle East Eye reported Netanyahu also held up a map of "Israel in 1948"—the year the modern Jewish state was established, largely through the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs—that erroneously included the Palestinian territories as part of Israel.
Palestinian Ambassador to Germany Laith Arafeh said on social media that there is "no greater insult to every foundational principle of the United Nations than seeing Netanyahu display before the UNGA a 'map of Israel' that straddles the entire land from the river to the sea, negating Palestine and its people, then attempting to spin the audience with rhetoric about 'peace' in the region, all the while entrenching the longest ongoing belligerent occupation in today's world."
As Middle East Eye noted:
The inclusion of Palestinian lands (and sometimes land belonging to Syria and Lebanon) in Israeli maps is common among believers of the concept of Eretz Yisrael—Greater Israel—a key part of ultra-nationalist Zionism that claims all of these lands belong to a Zionist state.
Earlier this year, Netanyahu's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, spoke from a podium adorned with a map that also included Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria as part of Greater Israel. In the same event, he said there was "no such thing as Palestinians."
The use of such maps by Israeli officials comes at a time when Netanyahu's ultra-nationalist government has taken steps that experts say amount to the "de jure annexation" of the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu used the maps in an attempt to illustrate the increasing number of Arab countries normalizing relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords brokered by the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump.
"There's no question the Abraham Accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace," the Israeli prime minister said. "But I believe that we are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough, an historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia will truly create a new Middle East."
Critics have countered that peace between apartheid Israel and Arab dictatorships has come at the cost of advancing Palestinian rights. In the case of Morocco, the United States recognized the North African nation's illegal annexation and brutal occupation of Western Sahara in exchange for normalization with Israel.
Netanyahu's props on Friday reminded numerous observers of the time during his 2012 General Assembly speech when he used a cartoon drawing of a bomb to illustrate Iran's progress on advancing a nuclear weapons program that both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies said did not exist.
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