It is not easy of course, but US President Joe Biden should have done more to try and resolve one of the most intractable and divisive conflicts in the world, when he visited both Israel and Palestine last week. It is especially difficult, given these turbulent times, created by Russia’s devastating invasion of Ukraine and the global energy and food crisis that disaster has generated.

 Nevertheless Biden could have tried harder. It was his first trip to the Middle East since beginning his term but he has had many over decades and great deal of experience on that challenging front. The Democrat in the Oval Office has met every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir back in the 1970s, but she is the one he mentions most often. His many speeches about Israel often describe his first visit as a 30-year-old senator. There are slight changes depending on the venue and the audience, but the story always ends with Meir brandishing a map of the region Then he would quote Meir as telling him Israelis have a “secret weapon” – the fact that “we have no place else to go.”

 That complexity was apparent from the moment Air Force One landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport last Wednesday: one of the many politicians waiting there to greet him was Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud, who received a rare and warm handshake from Biden. But that did not save the US President from a blast of criticism from other right-wing politicians, pundits and activists, some of them with ties to Bibi, over his plan to visit the Augusta Victoria hospital in East Jerusalem on Friday without any Israeli officials alongside him.

 The US does not recognize Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem back in 1980, but Donald Trump, Biden’s Republican predecessor, moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem in 2018, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the creation of the Jewish state in 1948. But he damaged America’s commitment to a just solution for the Palestinians. Washington also recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

 Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan briefed correspondents before his arrival that the president will not launch any new initiatives aimed at restarting a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, but he confirmed that Biden would be meeting the Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. However they each issued separate statements when they met.

  In Ramallah Palestinian officials closely monitored Biden’s speech upon landing, in which he briefly mentioned the two-state solution, describing it as “the best way to ensure the future of equal measure of freedom, prosperity, democracy for Israelis and Palestinians alike” adding parenthetically these nine words: “even though I know it’s not in the near-term.” Palestinian minister and member of the PLO Executive Committee, Ahmad Majdalani, responded that Biden’s words are meaningless as long as there are no practical steps to implement the two-state solution on the ground. 

 That reaction is entirely understandable: apart from a contribution of $100m to six hospitals in East Jerusalem, and additional aid to UNRWA, there was nothing peace-worthy at all. Biden also declared that Palestinians and Israelis “deserve equal measures of freedom, security, prosperity and dignity, and access to health care when you need it, is essential to living a life of dignity for all of us.” His visit to Augusta Victoria was the first by a sitting US president to anywhere in East Jerusalem that is not the Old City and was seen by American officials as likely to please Palestinians. Trump had previously cut $25m from hospital aid after the Palestinian Authority severed ties with his administration over his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

 Palestinians of course, want more than financially symbolic gestures. The Saudis clearly understand that position. When Biden flew on Friday directly from Ben-Gurion to Jeddah (the first US president to do so), to meet King Salman and the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, their foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, explained that the kingdom would not join the Trump-mediated Abraham Accords of 2019, normalising relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. Instead it would insist on the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

 Of course Israel and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have converging geopolitical and strategic interests, including confronting Iran in the light of the looming failure of the Vienna nuclear negotiations, and Tehran’s support for Hizbullah and Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen. In addition American mediation helped secure agreement on the removal of US-led peacekeeping forces from the Red Sea Saudi (but formerly Egyptian) islands of Tiran and Sanafir; and Riyadh’s acceptance of direct Israeli flights from Asia using Saudi airspace - incremental steps but not enough to constitute formal normalization.

 No-one can simply ignore the Palestinians as they are not going to disappear. “But the Palestinians are being pushed to the back of the queue,” as the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz editorialised on Friday, explaining America’s Middle East policy. “The tab for this sorry error will be picked up by both Palestinians and Israel.”
 

BY: IAN BLACK