A Middle East Security Pact Won’t Free Palestine

Senior members of the U.S. government are back to talking up a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During his State of the Union address in March, President Joe Biden asserted that “the only real solution is a two-state solution,” reinforcing what has long been the nominal position of the United States as it pertains to the conflict.

A little over a month later, however, the United States stood as the only country to vote against, and therefore veto, a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have paved the way for Palestine to become a full member of the U.N. The Biden administration attempts to square this seemingly contradictory circle by claiming that the United States does not oppose Palestinian statehood out of hand but rather that it believes the establishment of such a state can only come about via bilateral negotiations with Israel.

But how those bilateral negotiations are supposed to begin in the first place, when Israel’s leaders and a large part of its public are opposed to the very idea of Palestinian statehood, remains woefully unclear.

The fate of the administration’s own gambit for Palestinian statehood rests on a renewed diplomatic blitz to establish normalized relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, a process initially put on pause by Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and the subsequent war. In exchange for normalization, the Israelis would have to agree in principle to “getting out of Gaza and committing to work toward Palestinian statehood,” as veteran Middle East correspondent—and Biden’s favorite pundit—Thomas Friedman said in a recent column for the New York Times. To tie up the entire package, the United States would also commit to a strengthened security alliance with the Saudis to both counter growing Chinese influence in the Middle East and deter Iran’s regional ambitions.

This matches the logic of the previous administration’s Abraham Accords, which saw Israel establish diplomatic relations with four Arab states for the first time since 1994. Both initiatives flow from the same assumption that Israel will be more likely to concede ground on the Palestinian issue once it has peaceful relations with everyone else. This idea has already failed. Israel’s annexationist program has only accelerated after nominally committing to not annexing the West Bank in exchange for relations with the United Arab Emirates, yet the Biden administration is determined to expand on former President Donald Trump’s agenda to see Israel integrated into the Middle East without a definitive resolution for Palestinians. This would be a grave mistake.

As Matthew Duss of the Center for International Policy has written, one of the key premises of the Abraham Accords was that Palestinians could simply be managed indefinitely and that Israel continuing to deprive them of their fundamental rights would not necessarily lead to conflagration. Cracks in this premise already existed prior to Oct. 7, with a growing pro-Palestinian bloc in the U.S. Congress flexing its rhetorical and political muscles for the first time, but the developments since the war started have definitively proved this premise to be false. It is no longer possible for a Democratic president to unconditionally support Israel, no matter its behavior or posture toward Palestinians, without receiving significant backlash within the party.

The legal and political consolidation of a one-state reality is likely to only accelerate the shifts in perspective from U.S. leaders and officials. This reality is not new: Israeli military occupation of the 1967 territories has existed now for more than half a century. All of the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is under effective Israeli control, while Palestinians are divided by geographic and legal statuses.

The settlement enterprise has only gained influence as time has gone on. One in every 10 Israeli Jews live in settlements within the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and settlers serve in not only the Knesset but the cabinet of the government as well as on the Supreme Court. It is no longer tenable for the United States to pretend that the settler enterprise is anything but a state enterprise, so a policy suite toward the occupation and settlements must adjust accordingly.

A U.S. policy suite centered on human rights and international law, rather than theoretical geopolitics, would look dramatically different. The Biden administration has upheld the Trump administration’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and that the settlements are not in violation of international law. It was only this February and March that the administration reverted back to the pre-Trump position that Israeli settlements were illegal.

Positive developments such as the creation and expansion of an unprecedented sanctions regime on Israeli settler violence have been unfortunately overshadowed by bombshell reports concerning the reticence of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the president to impose Leahy Law restrictions on Israeli military units found to have committed grave human rights violations, such as the killing of Omar Assad, a U.S. citizen. Analysts such as Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned over the administration’s policy toward Israel, claim that there exists a de facto exemption of Israel from U.S. laws concerning arms transfers.

If the United States were serious about wanting to restore its credibility in an effort to mediate a political solution, it would need to start enforcing U.S. laws such as the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits military assistance to states that impede the delivery of humanitarian aid. Arms transfers must therefore be suspended. There are reports that ammunition shipments are being put on hold, though it is unclear if this is related to enforcement of the Foreign Assistance Act.

Pressure on Israel will be a key part of any solution. There will be no reason for Israel to compromise or for Palestinians to trust Washington if the United States remains Israel’s lawyer at every diplomatic forum. The Arab world has offered to normalize relations with Israel on the creation of a Palestinian state for well over two decades now. Israeli intransigence on the issue of Palestine is, and will continue to be, one of the defining roadblocks to peace in the region. Once the United States accepts that the occupation is the problem, and that peace isn’t possible without Palestinian self-determination or the realization of freedom for Palestinians, a whole new and more productive approach is able to be taken. That is why the Biden administration should take the following steps to fundamentally alter the geopolitical calculus.

First, the United States should immediately, and without condition, recognize Palestine as a state and its sovereignty over the occupied territories pertaining to the pre-June 1967 borders, as virtually the rest of the world does. If the United States is serious about two states for two peoples, it should decouple the U.S. components on Palestinian statehood from the security pact it is pursuing and fulfill its obligations to the Palestinian people.

Concurrent to recognition, the United States should reopen the consulate general in East Jerusalem to serve as its embassy to Palestine while also reopening the PLO’s office in Washington to serve as Palestine’s embassy to the United States.

Unilateral recognition would not impede future bilateral negotiations or even have a definitive impact on how Israelis and Palestinians decide to live with one another in the end, but it would mean that Israel could no longer sideline the issue of Palestinian self-determination with virtual impunity. The president would not need permission from Congress or Israel, despite the fact that Israeli troops remain in control of most Palestinian territory.

In tandem with such recognition, the United States should reverse its position toward the ongoing deliberations at both the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) concerning Palestine. As of right now, the United States is opposed to the very notion of ICC jurisdiction over Palestinian territory and has argued in front of the ICJ that it should not declare the Israeli occupation to be illegal. These are not positions in line with international law or consensus, and the Biden administration has no room to talk about a rules-based international order when it argues that Israel should be axiomatically exempt from these rules.

By supporting Palestine’s right to pursue legal accountability for Israel’s actions, the United States would bring itself into line with the rest of the international community, and it would collapse Israel’s assumption that it can act as it pleases without consequences. This is especially important in light of possible ICC indictments being issued against senior Israeli leaders over their use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.

This would only be the beginning. There are other actions the Biden administration could take, such as endorsing a binding U.N. resolution that would replace Resolution 242, adopted in the aftermath of 1967, as the foundation for the peace process and raise Palestine to full membership at the United Nations, as well as imposing import duties or wholesale embargoes on settler goods in the occupied West Bank.

But for peace to be given a chance of seriously succeeding, whether through two states or one, the United States has to begin charting a new course that truly emphasizes the right of Palestinians to dignity, security, and freedom.