Ronen Zvulun/Pool Photo via AP
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly Cabinet meeting at the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, December 10, 2023.
For more than 30 years, the official policy of the American government (with some deviation during the Trump presidency) has been to support and promote a two-state solution to the problem of Israel-Palestine. The Oslo Accords, which established a process by which a viable and independent Palestinian state could be established alongside Israel, was one of the genuine achievements of Bill Clinton’s presidency. But for a right-wing Israeli’s assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who championed the accords, they might have led to something like a durable peace or at least a modus vivendi in that vexed land.
Neither the Israeli far right nor the Palestinian extremists ever accepted Oslo; each favors a religiously homogenous regime that runs from the river to the sea. The Israeli far right now dominates Israel’s government, and that government’s leader, Bibi Netanyahu, is now more explicit than he’s ever been that no Palestinian state will ever be established. Down in the polls—very down in the polls—after having Hamas’s October 7 murder raid occur on his watch and after refusing to accept any responsibility for having had that happen, Bibi plainly hopes his extreme anti-Palestinian posture will at least win him back the support of the Israeli right. As Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea noted in the centrist newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, “He failed as Mr. Security and he failed as Mr. America. Maybe he’ll succeed as Mr. Never Palestine.”
Which raises a question for the Biden administration and the United States more generally: Why should we support Israel so long as its policy is fundamentally at odds with ours, and with our general support for legitimate national aspirations? Why should we continue to give it aid? Why should we continue to veto United Nations resolutions premised on promoting two-state solutions?
I don’t regard such a shift in policy as anti-Israel; I regard it as a necessary form of tough love. Plainly, Israel’s policy of opposing a Palestinian state has not worked, as numerous acts of terrorism, two intifadas, and the October 7 raid have made all too bloodily clear. There’s no reason whatever to believe that it will work going forward. To the contrary, were Israel to accept a viable Palestine on the West Bank, it’s clear that its leading Arab neighbors, most particularly Saudi Arabia, would normalize relations with it, and the global “Kick Me” sign that Israel has affixed to its butt could be removed. (Some kicks would surely continue, due partly to the endurance of antisemitism, but they’d be fewer in number.) Such an accord would require Israel to relinquish a number of its West Bank settlements, but the majority of Israelis (those who live within the nation’s Green Line accepted borders), having experienced the rule of the settler and ultra-Orthodox extremists in Bibi’s Cabinet, don’t appear all that keen on forfeiting their lives and livelihoods to the demands of those zealots.
Despite Biden’s continued (though, one hopes, for not much longer) support for Israel’s war in and on Gaza, a rapidly expanding rift has emerged between the two nations on the postwar status of Palestinians. The U.S. has called for extending the authority of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza; Bibi’s government flatly opposes any form of Palestinian control there. Biden now vociferously supports efforts to revive and actualize the two-state solution; Bibi vociferously opposes it. Biden can very plausibly argue that his suggested course is the only course that will guarantee a measure of Israeli security; all polling suggests that a majority of American Jews would agree with him.
So why continue to support a nation that refuses to save itself? Conditioning U.S. aid on Israel having the good sense to understand that its own viability is linked to the viability of its neighbors would be tough love at its finest.
