What is the Biden administration's true goal for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

US PRESIDENT Joe Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, in 2022: Biden and his senior staff are motivated by a vision of a two-state solution combined with a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal that puts them in history books forever, the writer argues.

As a young 22-year-old, John F. Kennedy visited Palestine. At the end of his visit, he relayed his observations of his time in Palestine to his father, Joseph Kennedy, then the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Kennedy outlined the Jewish-Arab-British conflict and then offered his suggestion for a solution. “Theoretically the British plan sounds just and fair, but the important thing and the necessary thing is not a solution just and fair but a solution that will work... it seems to me that the only thing to do will be to break the country up into two autonomous districts giving them both self-government to the extent that they do not interfere with each other, and that British interest is safeguarded. Jerusalem, having the background that it has, should be an independent unit. Though this is a difficult solution yet, it is the only one that I think can work.”

Kennedy wasn’t the first to suggest splitting the land of Israel as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ultimately, the United Nations suggested a partition plan that the Arabs – later to identify as Palestinians – rejected.

Searching for a solution

After numerous wars that attempted to annihilate the Jewish people living in Israel and end the Jewish state in its infancy, the Arabs finally realized that violence wasn’t going to end the Jewish state. Yasser Arafat duped the world into thinking he and the Palestinian people had dropped terrorism and were looking for a peaceful solution to share the land with the Israelis. Although George W. Bush considered Arafat an evil man, he was the first to offer American support for a Palestinian state and resuscitated the long dead two-state solution.

Republicans have long abandoned supporting the two-state solution as the only pathway to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although he too offered a two-state solution to the conflict, Donald Trump declared, “I am looking at two-state and one-state [solutions], and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two. But honestly, if Bibi, and if the Palestinians, if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.”

US PRESIDENT Joe Biden delivers an outline for a ceasefire in the Gaza war at the White House, in May. (credit: EVELYN HOCKSTEIN/REUTERS)

US PRESIDENT Joe Biden delivers an outline for a ceasefire in the Gaza war at the White House, in May. (credit: EVELYN HOCKSTEIN/REUTERS)

Democrats still maintain the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the two-state solution. Although President Joe Biden hasn’t authored his own peace proposal, he tweeted, “A two-state solution is the only way to guarantee the long-term security of both the Israeli and the Palestinian people. To make sure Israelis and Palestinians alike can live in equal measures of freedom and dignity. We will not give up on working toward this goal.”

New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin described Biden’s support of Israel during the war as two-faced.

“During most of the six months of Israel’s war with Hamas, President Biden has given support to our ally with one hand and undercut it with the other. The approach features both Biden’s quiet supply of munitions to Israel and a near-daily dose of harsh public criticism of its military conduct.”

Arab and Muslim Americans not won over by president

Goodwin, along with many others, suggests Biden’s two-faced approach is motivated by politics. He wrote, “It’s all part of a convoluted plan to formally back the beleaguered Jewish state while also appeasing angry members of the Democrats’ far-left wing, many of whom are antisemites who believe Israel has no right to exist. The plan is so obviously a political calculation that a popular joke holds that Biden’s talk of a two-state solution isn’t really about Israel and a Palestinian state – it’s about appealing to Muslim-American voters in Michigan and Minnesota!”

The problem with this theory is that it doesn’t align with the sentiments of the Arab-American community. Arab-American voters have made it clear they can never be won over to the Biden camp. Arab-Americans have refused to meet with Biden or his representatives.

Michigan Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said, “President Biden, not all of America is with you on this one and you need to wake up and understand that. We will remember this.”

Michigan State Rep. Alabas Farhat declared that “Joe Biden has single-handedly alienated almost every Arab-American and Muslim-American voter in Michigan.”

Osama Siblani, the publisher of The Arab American News, said, “I will never vote Biden again, if he stands on his head. We will not meet with anyone who represents the Biden or Kamala Harris campaign because they lied to us.”

Biden’s contradictory approach to Israel, supplying it with weapons while criticizing it and holding it back from the steps it needs to take to defeat Hamas, can’t be attributed to winning over Arab-American votes because they refuse to listen to him and will never vote for him. If Biden’s policy on Israel and Gaza isn’t motivated by electoral politics, what is driving his policies?

Biden and most of his senior staff of establishment Democrats are dyed-in-the-wool loyalists to the two-state solution. Many began their political careers as junior or mid-level staff in the Clinton administration and the Oslo plans, and then rose to senior staff and cabinet members in the Obama administration, and now serve as senior advisers to Biden, the most senior of them all.

Consider Ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration, chief of staff and Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, and now ambassador in the Biden administration. He recently said, “The United States has long believed that two states is the correct resolution to the conflict. This is the third administration I’ve served that’s believed that. So it’s not a new idea.”

Biden and his senior staff know this is their third and last chance at the evasive conclusion to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they’ve been chasing for over 30 years. They are motivated by a grandiose vision of a two-state solution combined with a Saudi Arabia-Israeli normalization deal that headlines them in history books forever. This vision is the driving force behind a confusing Biden foreign policy that supports Israel in some ways and undermines it in others.

The Biden administration’s policy on Israel isn’t being driven by electoral politics to win Arab-American votes, it’s driven by the improbable peace deal that ends the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The realization of the Biden vision isn’t impossible, but it’s as close to impossible as an administration vision can get. One hundred years of Palestinian terrorism, 76 years of Palestinian intransigence, the Palestinian Authority corruption, along with its tactic support of Hamas’s October 7 attacks, makes them wholly unqualified to govern, let alone forgo its desire for a state to replace the Jewish state of Israel.

The writer is a certified interfaith hospice chaplain in Jerusalem and the mayor of Mitzpe Yeriho, Israel. She lives with her husband and six children.