Biden's Israel policy and the complications Trump created for it

H-Diplo has a helpful new essay on the current status of US relations with Israel and their significance in other areas of US diplomacy: The Trump Presidency, the Question of Palestine, and Biden’s Business as Usual 05/27/2021, by Dirk Moses, editor of the scholarly Journal of Genocide Research, and Victor Kattan, editor of the book Violent Radical Movements in the Arab World (2019). (PDF here.)

Moses and Kattan stress:

... the necessity of recognizing how the conflict between Israel and Palestine has not commanded bipartisan consensus in Washington since the time of the Obama presidency. Nor has the US’s Iran policy, with which it intersects. Concerned about Obama’s Middle East initiatives, Republican politicians and Israel advocacy groups colluded with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resist Obama’s policies on Iran and Israeli settlements. Thus politicized, different parts of the U.S. political class, with aligned domestic constituencies, identify with different factions of the Israeli political class: for instance, Democrats support centrist anti-Netanyahu forces, while all sides try to co-opt a secular, technocratic Palestinian leadership in Ramallah into their respective visions. [my emphasis]

One of the more disturbing of many disturbing moments in the intransigent Republican opposition to the Obama-Biden Administration was when the Republican majority in Congress invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress without an invitation from President Obama in order to lobby the US Congress against the US President's policy of the moment, particularly the Iranian nuclear arms control agreement. (Krishnadev Calamur, In Speech To Congress, Netanyahu Blasts 'A Very Bad Deal' With Iran NPR 03/03/2015; Chris McGreal, How Netanyahu's speech to Congress has jeopardised US-Israel relations Guardian 02/24/2015)

The Democrats are still enormously weighted down by its bipartisanship obsession, so this didn't produce the kind of sharp criticism of Israel and his Prime Minister from Democrats that one might have expected. But that moment did illustrate a significant turning point in the two parties' respective position on Israel. That mainly means that the Democrats stuck with their distinctly deferential position toward even very dubious actions by Israeli governments while the Republicans became even more receptive to the positions of Netanyahu and other far-right Israeli politicians.

But the Biden-Harris Administration's position on the recent Israeli-Palestinian clashes was part of the bipartisan continuity in US policy:

... the asymmetric exchange of missiles between Hamas in Gaza and Israel in May 2021 has its roots in expansionist Israeli policies in Jerusalem and the West Bank that had been greenlighted by the Trump administration, and which the Biden administration has not rolled back. In not doing so, it is adhering to long-set patterns of US foreign policy.

One of the key policies that was an actual achievement of the Trump-Pence Administration - an extremely problematic one, but an achievement - was the Abraham Accords, the agreement that normalized Israel's relations with the Muslim countries of Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). (Sean Mathews, Despite Gaza bloodshed, few see Abraham Accords derailing Aljazeera 05/21/2021).

Moses and Kattan how the blundering, blinkered Trump-Pence foreign policy created at least one serious complication a considerable distance from Israel:

Regarding Morocco’s recognition of Israel, this came in exchange for the Trump administration’s recognition of Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara. This was another attempt to legitimise an illegal act in international law, and again, it remains unclear whether the Biden administration will reverse this decision. Given that the recognition of Western Sahara was tied to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Morocco and Israel, the administration may be less sanguine about reversing it. But the erosion of core rules of international law, such as the non-recognition of territory acquired through the use of force, could embolden other revisionist powers to press their own territorial claims for seizing or retaining control over other “disputed” territories, which may not necessarily serve U.S. interests – for example in Taiwan, the South China Sea, or Ukraine. [my emphasis]

In one sense, of course, international diplomacy runs on hypocrisy. But international law matters, and the US position on one such issue of illegal annexation can affect the positions other nations are willing to take when the US invokes international law in other situations.

They also cite other recognitions of annexations to which the Trump-Pence Administration agreed:

This strategic continuity in the Trump Presidency’s Palestine and Israel policy must be weighed against evidence of discontinuity in key domains. Whether in style (the bullying of Palestinians by closing the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s [PLO] diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C., and cutting funding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNWRA]), or in substance (consenting to the annexation of the Golan, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and the greenlighting of Israeli settlements, ‘gifts’ given to the Netanyahu government seemingly without any concessions in return), the diplomatic novelty is impossible to ignore. [my emphasis]

Diplomacy often moves slowly. Obviously! But it's hard to see how the long-sought two-state solution can come into being now.

If the two-state solution remains the preferred solution for the “international community,” then the Biden administration’s refusal to rein in Israeli expansionism will surely signal its official demise. ...

Doing nothing is a choice, then, one with increasing domestic and diplomatic costs, but so far the signs are that the administration believes they are lower than expending capital on reigning in Israeli expansionism. Biden must recall the hornets’ nest of opposition that Obama stirred when he pushed for a settlement freeze. ...

Instead, observers who are awake to this reality are imagining a future in which all people who live in Israeli-controlled territory between the Jordan and Mediterranean enjoy equal rights. The question is whether such a vision can be attained in one state with a Palestinian majority that would defeat the very purpose of the Zionist project. Or whether a confederation, or a two-state plan similar to that enshrined in General Assembly 181 (II) of 29 November 1947 that provided for the establishment of two states could be reimagined as the basis for new conversations between Israelis and Palestinians today: an economic union with open borders, minority safeguards, and the protection of private property without discrimination. [my emphasis]

If a durable peace between Israel and the Palestinians were ever seriously the goal of US policy - and at least for some people, it was - it has failed. Not suddenly with the latest spate of violence, but slowly, over decades. The US needs to start make much more practical calculations about its real interests in supporting the plans of Netanyahu's government in the short run.

The US gives large amounts of aid to Israel in various ways. That gives the US a lot of leverage. Repeatedly and continually reassuring Israel's governments that nothing they do will affect the amount of support the US provides will be seen by Israeli governments and by the rest of the world as unqualified support for Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.