Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken after a joint statement and meeting at the prime minister’s office, May 25, 2021, in Jerusalem, Israel.
Through the course of three Israeli-Hamas wars in Gaza between 2009 and 2014, Washington officials developed a detailed diplomatic playbook for managing the crises.
Violence erupts between Hamas and Israel. Washington publicly embraces Israel but works behind the scenes with Egyptian and Qatari interlocutors, among others, toward a diplomatic solution. As Palestinian civilian casualties mount, U.S. officials convey impatience to Jerusalem, privately, then publicly. If the Israeli ground invasion, which both sides hope to avoid, is forestalled, cease-fire contours take shape. Jerusalem asks Washington for more time, citing strategic successes in eliminating terrorist capacities. Hamas and Israel calibrate their strikes to signal de-escalation. Washington informs Jerusalem that time’s up. The cease-fire is declared.
Then the playbook’s more ambitious second phase begins. American officials are deployed to Jerusalem, Ramallah, and other Arab capitals. European, Arab, and U.N. diplomats declare the status quo untenable and vow the reconstruction of Gaza. Eventually, an international conference is organized. Proximity talks aimed at launching a new round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations begin. Interminable wrangling follows.
But soon enough, the acts of goodwill and diplomacy are overshadowed by intransigence. New Israeli settlement construction is announced, the military occupation of the West Bank continues, and the blockade of Gaza remains.
The Gaza playbook’s appeal is manifest. It allows Washington to claim credit for defusing the latest violence. It channels international horror toward immediate humanitarian relief in Gaza. It re-establishes Washington as the ultimate broker.
But the playbook is just a piece of the broader policy framework that has guided successive administrations for three decades. This framework—known among experts and journalists as the Middle East Peace Process—holds out the promise, however remote, of a two-state solution. The core idea is that Israel’s settlement enterprise can be solved through increasingly convoluted “territorial swaps” that prioritize Palestinian accommodations to the expanding realities of “facts on the ground.” It has allowed the United States to nudge Israel toward successive negotiations with a Palestinian political entity whose modest authorities were designed to facilitate such negotiations on terms considered palatable to the occupier. By anchoring those negotiations to Israel’s pre-1967 borders, it has allowed the United States to sidestep the inconvenient truth of the permanent displacement of roughly 85 percent of the Palestinian population from Israel in 1948.
In the 1990s, the peace process was useful to American, Israeli, and even Palestinian officials in preserving the fiction that the occupation—then a mere quarter-century old—was a temporary phenomenon. But over the subsequent decades, peace-processing gradually became an end in itself. Israeli-Palestinian negotiations became a form of performance art, whose main objective was to cast blame on the other side when the negotiations inevitably fell apart.
The Gaza playbook’s appeal is manifest. It allows Washington to claim credit for defusing the latest violence.
All that was left to do was to remove the fig leaf. And so that is what President Trump did.
He approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the only way he knew: threaten the Palestinians into submission before making them an offer they could not refuse. International conflict resolution is not Manhattan real estate, and the Deal of the Century was an abject failure. But its failure showed the peace process in a new light. The Trump administration’s rhetoric, tone, and temperament—its embrace of annexationist maximalism—were something entirely new. But the outcomes? New Israeli settlement construction was announced, the military occupation of the West Bank continued, and the blockade of Gaza remained, much the same under the Trump administration as under its predecessors.
Looking at the wreckage of three decades of American mediation, another of the playbook’s appeals is apparent. It allowed successive American administrations to wash their hands of their own responsibilities in sustaining the systemic Israeli repression of Palestinians.
Of acquiescing in a 14-year blockade of Gaza that has rendered most of its two million inhabitants prisoners in open air. Of abiding in the expansion of the Israeli settlement population from under 300,000 at the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 to more than 700,000 today. Of lamenting and occasionally condemning the demolitions or dispossessions of Palestinian homes, while refraining from measures that might deter such activity. Of the continuous provision of nearly $4 billion in annual military assistance with no strings attached.
WHEN THE FOURTH Hamas-Israeli war began on May 6, the Biden administration followed the first phase of the Gaza playbook to a tee. Last Friday, after two weeks of fighting, a cease-fire was announced. Whereas the 2008 and 2014 iterations culminated in weeks-long Israeli ground invasions that left thousands of Palestinians dead, this time a land war was averted. As awful as the violence was, the alternative would have been worse.
On Monday, Secretary of State Tony Blinken embarked on a four-day trip to the region. This would seem to commence the Gaza playbook’s post-conflict phase. The cease-fire had not yet been announced before the calls began for the Biden administration to restart “final status” negotiations.
The American instinct to respond to each Gaza crisis with an ambitious new multilateral initiative runs deep. There are, of course, important diplomatic steps to be taken. The nomination of a U.S. ambassador to Israel is overdue. Relations with Palestine need to be rebuilt from scratch after the Trump administration shut them down. The fragile cease-fire needs to be stabilized.
The American instinct to respond to each Gaza crisis with an ambitious new multilateral initiative runs deep.
The Biden administration seems to understand that a more ambitious attempt to restart two-state negotiations will fail. But a narrow focus on improving lives in Gaza while ignoring the root causes of their misery will only reinforce the symbiosis between Hamas and successive right-wing Israeli governments. A fifth Gaza war would only be a matter of time.
Breaking the cycle of violence in Gaza requires a dramatically different approach.
In announcing the latest cease-fire on Friday, President Joe Biden said something which has the potential to do just that. “I believe,” the president said, “the Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live safely and securely and to enjoy equal measures of freedom, prosperity, and democracy.” Secretary Blinken repeated the sentiment in his weekend media appearances. It also echoes language in the Biden administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance: “We will defend and protect human rights and address discrimination, inequity, and marginalization in all its forms.”
It is too soon to know how the Biden administration would adopt such an approach toward Israel-Palestine. Presumably, the administration does not yet fully know itself. But the president’s unusual capacity for empathy opens possibilities for a new course in U.S. foreign policy, based on a repudiation of not just Trumpism but also pre-Trump militarism. If President Biden is willing to act on the conviction that Israelis and Palestinians are equally deserving of respect, human rights, and human dignity, a more productive U.S. approach to Israel-Palestine is within reach.
First, the United States should insist that the siege of Gaza end. The missile and rocket exchanges have stopped, but the ongoing structural violence against the people of Gaza continues. Palestinians in Gaza have been collectively impoverished to an extent most Americans would struggle to comprehend. What to do about Hamas’s rockets is a vexing policy dilemma. There are no simple answers, but there are mechanisms available to open Gaza, while mitigating the risks.
Indeed, the 14-year blockade has neither prevented Hamas from replenishing rocket supplies nor diminished its grip on power. The organization’s indiscriminate targeting of Israeli population centers is reprehensible, including because it knows that the Israeli response will lead to many more dead Palestinians than Israelis. Israel has the right to defend itself. But who can argue that no such right extends to Palestinians? The time has come to use Washington’s considerable influence with Israel—as well as with Egypt—to push for an end to the blockade once and for all.
The gradual, then sudden nature of narrative change should be a wake-up call to Israeli officials that their efforts to further entrench the occupation will no longer go unanswered.
Second, the United States should support full human rights for Palestinians, just as it does for Israelis. A recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the U.S./Middle East Project proposes a rights-based approach. Such an approach would reaffirm Israeli rights to security and peace, while giving equal support to Palestinian rights, including freedoms of movement and from violence, dispossession, discrimination, and occupation. Both Palestinian and Israeli civil society, in which lies the region’s best hope for genuine peace, have come under significant pressure from Israel, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, and Hamas alike. It is important to continue to listen to and speak out on behalf of those who use nonviolent means to speak truth to power.
Third, the United States should signal in word and deed that Israel is not above accountability. Successive administrations have methodically blocked U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at upholding international law. This practice of the United States vetoing its own policies needs to end.
In recent days, House and Senate bills have been introduced to constrain U.S. military assistance to Israel. It seems unlikely that the Biden administration will endorse these measures, though American diplomats should use to full effect the leverage these proposals create. The gradual, then sudden nature of narrative change should be a wake-up call to Israeli officials that their efforts to further entrench the occupation will no longer go unanswered.
Recalibrating U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine would put authoritarian leaders in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates on notice that gross human rights violations have consequences. It would improve the standing of the United States to engage on Chinese, Russian, and Iranian human rights violations. It would better align U.S. policies with the country’s values. Most importantly, it could lay a more stable foundation from which the United States might someday return to an active mediation role with some prospect of success for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund or its trustees.
