Realism and pragmatism needed on Israel-Palestine, but American policymakers find those very difficult

The current outbreak of violence in Israel-Palestine, clearly initiated by Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government, currently facing the dilemma of being unable to form a new government after elections, is obviously developing quickly at the moment. The Israeli attack on worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque was a very dramatic, highly symbolic act of violence and contempt for not only Palestinians but Muslims generally. (Oliver Holmes and Peter Beaumont, Oliver Holmes in Jerusalem and Peter Beaumont Guardian 05/10/2021; Frank Andrews, Al-Aqsa under attack: How Israel turned holy site into a battleground Middle East Eye 05/12/2021)

Juan Cole has a suggestion for how we should describe it at this point: "a performance of Israeli dominance and Palestinian defiance." (Gaza and Israel’s Kidnapper’s Dilemma: Keeping a Million Children Brutalized in its dark Basement Informed Comment 05/15/2021)

He calls attention to the dramatic disparity of power between the two sides:

Israel’s staccato bombardment campaigns against Gaza (2008-9, 2014, 2021) are not a war. Israel has an army, Gaza does not. Israel has a sophisticated Air Force with 581 aircraft, including fighter jets and helicopter gunships. The Palestinians in Gaza don’t have a conventional army or navy or air force, don’t have tanks or aircraft or artillery. Most of their rockets are high school science experiments (they have a handful of longer range rockets). The Izzuddin Qassam Brigades have a few tens of thousands of poorly armed and trained volunteer militiamen. If they tried to mount a conventional assault on Israel they would all be killed in an afternoon. The Asian Spa killer in Atlanta killed more people than Hamas has since the beginning of the current hostilities.

Pragmatic realism on the Israel-Palestine conflict has been desperately hard to find in American politics. It's not that no one has been trying. Two books that appeared during the Cheney-Bush Administration, when conflict with Muslim countries and groups took center stage in American politics represent two significant exceptions. One was The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007) by the über-Realist scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. This combined a realist analysis of general US policy toward Israel with a fact-based discussion of groups lobbying for US support for Israeli policies, a subject that has been used in dishonest ways by anti-Semitic propagandists. Having two of the most important American foreign policy intellectuals lay out this analysis was an important step in demystifying the whole topic.

Jimmy Carter's 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is the other. The idea that Israel was in real danger of making a two-state solution a practical impossibility, and that they would be left with an apartheid state, with a Jewish majority and a Palestinian minority deprived of equal civil rights and many denied basic human rights, forcibly held in desperate conditions.

American policy didn't change for the better. Cheney and Bush saw Israel's rightwing governments as allies in the War on Terror against Muslims, and made no serious attempt to forward the Israel-Palestine peace process. The Obama Administration was so stridently anti-Muslim. But the Obama-Biden Administration was generally willing to give Netanyahu's government free rein, as well, and also did little to advance the peace process. And the Trump-Pence Administration was completely deferential, even recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a major issue in an attempt to end the Israeli occupation in a way that would bring actual peace.

There's certainly no guarantee that the Biden-Harris Administration will do better, though the public should demand they do. But there are signs that there might be important shifts in American understandings of the conflict. The two-state solution seems less feasible than ever. And it's at least no longer as shocking as it was in 2006 to talk matter-of-factly about the possibility and reality of "apartheid" in Israel. And there's at least some hope that a more realistic discussions among politicians and at least some of the establishment press about American pragmatic foreign policy interests, human rights, and international law in regard to Israel than we've had for a long time.

But it's not as though there isn't plenty of solid information and analysis on the subject available for those who are motivated to look.

Zaha Hassan and Daniel Levy provide a good example with Biden's Old Playbook Won't End Israeli-Palestinian Violence Foreign Policy 05/13/2021:

They also have a good analysis of why the latest developments in Israel-Palestine is a problem for the foreign-policy branding that the Biden-Harris Administration is attempting. As they note, "the United States is indisputably the most consequential external actor in this arena." And however cynically pragmatic professed US concerns about human rights problems in other countries so often are, the "soft power" of the US in matters of democratic governance and human rights really is A Thing. And the (so far thankfully tentative) new-cold-war posture toward China has relevant implications on Mideast issues: "The 'America is back' message has been all about a law-abiding, norm-promoting, rights-respecting nation leading a resurgence of democracies. ... It's not hard to imagine the refrain in Beijing: 'You say Uyghurs, we say Palestinians.'"

Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer write about the current situation in Battle between Israel and Hamas is an unwelcome surprise for Biden CNN 05/12/2021: "It is doubtful whether the current crisis in Jerusalem -- which has now grown into a larger battle between Israel and Hamas -- will impel the Biden administration to launch a full-throated effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, at a minimum, it should compel the administration to do everything it can to defuse this dimension of the crisis."