A reset is urgently necessary. The Trump administration’s visible bias in favor of the Israeli right destroyed any credibility the U.S. had with the Palestinians, and the memo provides a refreshing return to a vision that seeks “to advance freedom, security, and prosperity for both Israelis and Palestinians in the immediate term,” emphasis mine.
The word “prosperity” was a recurring buzzword in the lead up to and throughout the Trump administration’s Deal of the Century, which in effect asked Palestinians to give up our rights for some ill-defined promise of economic growth. The Biden administration’s acknowledgement of the basic humanity of both sides, and the rights that humanity entails, is a crucial first step.
And unlike Trump’s Deal of the Century, this memo was drafted by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hady Amr, a pragmatist with a thorough understanding not only of Israel’s security concerns but also of Palestinian suffering, whether in relation to the occupation or to internal Palestinian divisions (the memo mentions that “the Palestinian body politic is at an inflection”).
The memorandum proposes immediate relief measures, such as $15 million in COVID-19 assistance to the Palestinians by the end of March, as well as imminently resuming funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which provides educational, health and food services to the most vulnerable Palestinians.
The memo also shows a genuine effort to accommodate the concerns of both Palestinians and Israelis. For instance, it calls for a tougher stance on Israeli settlement activities, including revoking Trump’s decision to allow products made in the settlements to be labelled “made in Israel.” At the same time, it proposes to reduce incitement to violence by the Palestinians and “to obtain a Palestinian commitment to end payments to individuals imprisoned for acts of terrorism.” It also recommits the U.S. to the two-state solution.
The document was reported to be an early draft subject to revisions and interagency deliberations, and it remains unclear whether the Biden administration will turn parts or all of it into actual policy; the administration has made clear that the Israeli-Palestinian topic is not a priority, meaning we can presume this memo to be the ceiling rather than the floor of the administration’s proposals on the conflict, at least for the foreseeable future.
But if fully enacted, these ideas would represent a commendable first step towards restoring Palestinian faith in the U.S. and telegraphing to Palestinians that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the right-wing pro-settler bloc are not invincible, and their concerted assault on the two-state solution won’t forever be unconstrained. Still, there are three main problems with the memo in its effort to restore the pre-Trump status quo.
First, Biden cannot simply rewind the clock to a pre-Trump era. Much damage was done to the peace process under Trump, allowing skepticism about the two-state solution to spread even among its proponents. Additionally, the path to restoring pre-Trump U.S.-Palestinian relations is not a clear, linear one. For example, the Taylor Force Act, signed into law by President Trump in 2018 to halt economic aid to the Palestinian Authority to penalize its Martyr Fund, blocks the path to resuming funding to the PA. Moreover, reopening the U.S. Consulate in East Jerusalem requires the approval of both the Israeli government and U.S. Congress, a tough if not insurmountable hurdle.
Second, the status quo that prevailed even before Trump’s disastrous presidency was deeply unsustainable, even dangerous. Since 2008, there have been three catastrophic wars in Gaza—Operations Cast Led, Pillars of Defense and Protective Edge. Thousands of civilians were killed and injured. And rocket attacks from Gaza have understandably increased skepticism about peace on the Israeli side. Then there were the violent lone wolf attacks, many of them carried out by hopeless youths, in 2015 and 2016 which resulted in many senseless deaths and tragedy.
Going back to the status quo means resuming a devastating reality for civilians on both sides of the conflict.
As important is the fact that to merely suffice with maintaining the pre-Trump status quo gives no guarantee that a future U.S. president won’t simply rewind the clock back to Trump’s policies, or even enshrine a worse reality. For the greatest credibility that the U.S. has lost during the Trump era is in the ability of allies to trust in the continuity of its agenda.
The heart of the Biden team is in the right place. But we need a new logic to prevail when it comes to the conflict.
The Trump team’s agenda was to pacify and contain, rather than stabilize and solve. It’s time for a real vision to prevail. And while this may not be a top priority, there are small, concrete steps they could take in this direction.
Biden could push Israel to renegotiate the 1995 Paris Protocol on Economic Relations with the PA to allow the latter greater economic autonomy and independence. This would help grow the Palestinian economy and develop sustainably, creating jobs for hundreds of thousands of high educated yet futureless Palestinian youths and giving them something worth living for. Biden could also fund and facilitate job-creating industrial zones in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, perhaps bringing Israeli and Palestinian workers together.
Biden could—and should—push for reducing the suffocating restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in, out and between the occupied territories, including allowing more Gazans to work in Israel. They should similarly push for greater economic integration between Gaza, the West Bank and the outside world, for example, allowing and subsidizing Gazan agricultural exports to Israel, the Arab World and Europe. This would de-escalate tensions and address the current radicalizing environment of poverty and despair.
Biden’s team should also work to address Gaza’s electricity crisis, to end a reality where hospitals, schools and industries operate with only eight hours of electricity per day, a brief which has already seen recent meaningful progress in talks between Qatar and Israel.
Perhaps most crucially, the Biden administration should work to allow more Palestinians and Israelis to meet one another, so that neither remains a faceless, unseen and dehumanized enemy. They could do this by creating scholarships for Palestinians to study in Israeli universities, and the other way around.
Such small, noncontroversial yet substantial measures would boost mutual trust-building. They would challenge a vicious cycle of despair, apathy and hate, and hopefully pave the way towards resuming dialogue and negotiations to end the conflict.
Muhammad Shehada is a writer and civil society activist from the Gaza Strip and a student of development studies at Lund University, Sweden. He was the PR officer for the Gaza office of the Euro-Med Monitor for Human Rights.
The views in this article are the writer’s own.
