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Biden muddles along with Israel as West Bank violence spirals
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| A Palestinian woman sits in front of a damaged building after the Israeli army's withdrawal from the Jenin camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Wednesday. (Mohamad Torokman/Reuters) |
Israel “mowed the grass” again this week — the grim euphemism often deployed for its periodic violent campaigns against militants in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. The intensive two-day Israeli incursion into Jenin refugee camp saw hundreds of troops sweep into the crammed, densely populated area with support from armed drones and bulldozers. Twelve Palestinians were killed and more than 100 were injured, while the operation caused widespread damage to civilian homes and infrastructure. Thousands of residents were forced to flee to safety elsewhere. One Israeli soldier was killed in clashes with Palestinian militants.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his government would not let Jenin, a West Bank city long in the crosshairs of Israel’s security apparatus, become a “refuge for terrorism.” In the aftermath of the operation, Israeli officials said they had unearthed militant arms caches, hideouts and secret tunnels, and confiscated significant quantities for weapons and materiel for ordinances. The raid was the latest episode in a year that is already on pace to be one of the deadliest for Palestinians, with more than 150 fatalities. Twenty-nine Israelis have been killed in the same span of time.
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As is the case when one mows the grass, the lawn tends to grow back. In the aftermath of the Jenin raid, the dreaded cycle of violence rolled on, with reports of scattered Palestinian reprisals. It all comes in a context shaped by the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, as well as an increasingly feeble Palestinian Authority, which is both unable to rein in Palestinian militancy and increasingly unpopular among the Palestinian public living under decades of Israeli military occupation.
Israeli officials insist they carried out the raids and targeted operations against Palestinian militant cells with “pinpoint” precision to avoid civilian casualties. But their activities play out over a more troubled, wider canvas. The past year has seen a surge in attacks carried out by Jewish settlers in the West Bank on Palestinian villages and property. In some instances, their rampages appear to have been tolerated by Israeli security forces operating in proximity. All the while, Netanyahu’s government is accelerating plans for the de facto annexation of much of the West Bank with the further expansion of Israeli settlements in lands once intended to comprise an independent Palestinian state.
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In the face of all this, the Biden administration is muddling along and doing little to change a dangerous status quo. In a curt statement this week, the White House said it supported “Israel’s security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups.” Palestinian officials and analysts see the U.S. response as yet another indication of Washington’s complicity in the abuses of a military occupation and settlement project deemed illegal by a U.N. commission last year.
There’s little love lost between President Biden and Netanyahu, who has spent years yoking himself to the agenda of the Republican Party in Washington and who brought extremist, far-right factions into the Israeli mainstream to maintain power. But the current administration has shown little appetite to arrest the current course of events in the West Bank, where many fear the likelihood of an explosion of violence similar to the second intifada two decades ago.
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U.S. officials may warn their Israeli counterparts about their concerns over settlement expansion and other maneuvers by the Netanyahu government, including its plans to overhaul Israel’s judiciary. But there is little sign that the Biden administration is willing to marshal a tougher position on Israeli actions in the West Bank — certainly not a stance that would confront the actual status quo in Israel which has led prominent human rights organizations to warn of “apartheid” in the Holy Land.
Under Biden, the United States has rolled back few of the major concessions doled out by former president Donald Trump to Israel’s right-wing government. That includes the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (a determination that was supposed to coincide with the establishment of a separate Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital) as well as recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights. Though it pays lip service to achieving “a negotiated two-state solution” for Israelis and Palestinians to live side-by-side, successive U.S. administrations, including that of Biden, have effectively shielded Israel from facing any political or legal repercussions for its settlement activity in the West Bank.
U.S. supporters of a two-state solution and Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation consider this approach untenable. On settlements, Biden officials “have continued the tradition of strong condemnation but with no actual consequences,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal-leaning, pro-Israel advocacy group, told me.
Part of the dilemma for the Biden administration is a lack of political space at home to change course. The current crop of Republicans are far removed from the days of former secretary of state James Baker III, who in 1989 urged Israel to “forswear annexation, stop settlement activities” and recognize Palestinians as people “who deserve political rights.”
A generation later, Trump takes his cues from messianic U.S. evangelicals and the far right of the American Jewish political spectrum, boosting the interests of pro-settler groups. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another Republican presidential hopeful, seemed to not even recognize the existence of the Palestinian people in a speech delivered in Jerusalem earlier this year.
While there’s growing support for Palestinian rights among U.S. Democrats, Ben-Ami said that the political shift in Washington isn’t matching the scale of the looming “one-state” reality in Israel. Just this week, Netanyahu reportedly admitted during a meeting at the Israeli Knesset that Palestinian hopes for statehood and sovereignty “must be eliminated.”
Biden’s approach “is a policy that is not connected to the reality of what [Netanyahu’s] government is all about and what is happening on the ground,” Ben-Ami said, adding that the Biden administration needs to both “make there be some consequences” for Israel and also muster “a vision for an alternate, better future” for Israelis and Palestinians. Neither effort seems to be anywhere in the cards.
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In the absence of any action, analysts see only a worrying deterioration. “Conventional wisdom in Washington has long revolved around satisfying Israel’s needs and desires to encourage it to moderate its positions on peace with the Palestinians and make the necessary ‘compromises,’ even ‘sacrifices,’ for peace,” wrote Palestinian political commentator Marwan Bishara. “But in reality, unconditional U.S. support has thus far hardened Israel’s stance, radicalized its society and driven its polity towards fascism.”
Earlier this year, Matt Duss and Zaha Hassan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace decried the “carrot-heavy approach” adopted by the United States over multiple decades of Israeli settlement expansion. They instead called for the moderate use of sticks, including ceasing to offer “blanket political cover” for Israeli policies at the United Nations and the application of existing U.S. domestic law to condition how Israeli security forces use U.S. military aid in the occupied territories.
Duss, a former adviser to left-leaning Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), believes the Biden administration would “find a lot more support than they may expect” for such steps focused on upholding international law and defending human rights. But amid a thicket of other geopolitical concerns, Biden is unlikely to expend much political capital on this front.
“This administration is so heavily focused on great power competition that they have completely deprioritized the focus on human rights,” Duss told me. “Their main goal [vis-à-vis the Israelis and the Palestinians] is that they don’t want to be bothered.”
But, Duss added, “this conflict has a way of reasserting itself on the agenda.”