Neglecting the Israel-Palestine peace process for years turned out to be a disaster for the US, Israel, and the people of Gaza

Also: Making US policy based on Christian Zionist fantasies is a really bad idea

Richard Schneider has a good summary of Bibi Netanyahu’s strategy of malign neglect with regard to the peace process in his years in power in Israel.

Because Netanyahu was always clear that neither the US nor most other countries would accept an official annexation of the West Bank, he let up happen unofficially. The settlers received money and built more and more, while nothing about the juridical status of the West Bank was officially changed. The demands of the Palestinians did not interest him. Occasional eruptions in the West Bank, every few years small wars with Gaza would happen – Netanyahu viewed all that something with which he could live. He was convinced that Israel could get along with that kind of “management” of the situation.

A peace agreement in any case is not possible if there is no partner for peace, at least no politician who can speak for the entire Palestinian people – and he was not wrong about that. At the same time, however, he pursued a policy of "divide et impera", divide and conquer. He welcomed the division of the Palestinians into two camps: with Palestinian President Abbas in the West Bank, on the one hand, and the radical Islamic Hamas in Gaza, on the other. This led to a complete standstill in the peace process, which was probably just what Netanyahu wanted. He saw no alternative, or more precisely, he didn’t want to see any alternative. That a nation of almost six million people [Palestine] cannot be kept under occupation in the long term was ignored.¹ [my emphasis]

Schneider also describes how Netanyahu planned to further isolate the Palestinians by reaching agreements with other Arab states. The Abraham Accords approved by Trump when he was President led to a negotiating process which the Biden Administration continued and which was close to concluding an major agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. That would have seriously disadvantaged Iran and the Palestinians.

Schneider explains:

Presumably, this was another reason for Hamas to speak out "vociferously" [i.e., with the October 7 attack]. One thing is certain: due to the invasion by Hamas and the declaration of war by Israel, this peace agreement has now been pushed into the distant future. At the same time, it has been shown that Netanyahu's policy of pure crisis management has not worked. Suddenly, the Palestinians are once again at the center of the action – obviously. [my emphasis]

Trump and his corrupt clown-show Presidency did nothing to pursue a meaningful Israel-Palestine peace agreement. Branko Marcetic points out that the Department of Homeland Security had warned Trump that the Abraham Accords could set the stage for a new intensive round of conflict in Israel-Palestine:

It’s easy to forget now, but the shocking and horrific violence that set off the current hostilities in the Middle East, where Hamas militants slaughtered and kidnapped innocent Israeli civilians, was predicted. Specifically, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump warned in October 2020 that terrorist violence was set to be imminently inflamed.

Trump's DHS didn’t claim it was because, in President Joe Biden words, of “sheer evil” from those who exist only “to kill Jews.” Rather, it pointed to the Abraham Accords: the U.S.-led effort to normalize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which Trump claimed would shift the course of Middle Eastern history from “decades of division and conflict” and which the Biden administration claimed would make the region “safer and more prosperous.”² [my emphasis]

For the prospects of a real resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Trump’s exit from the nuclear agreement (JCPOA) with Iran³ was a foolish one. It was taken even though it would benefit the security interests of nuclear-armed Israel to have an effective nonproliferation agreement with Iran. Iran wanted the deal and had agreed to it. Biden didn’t rejoin it immediately after assuming the Presidency but has been negotiating with Iran over returning to it. Staying in the agreement was also an important restraint on Iran, who wanted the deal and would be reluctant to endanger it with reckless actions.

In addition, it allowed Iran “this vacuum left by Saudi support for the deals, sharply criticizing the normalization effort as a ‘betrayal of Palestinian aspirations for freedom’.”

Markus Bickel observes, “In the moment, torpedoing Saudi Arabia's rapprochement with Israel appears to Iran to be more important than possibly playing a more constructive role in the region in cooperation with Riyadh [Saudi Arabia].”⁴

And now, here we are in 2023 with a real possibility of the US going to war with Iran. And he explains how that was consistent with Netanyahu’s approach to the Palestinian issue that Schneider described in the quotes above. Marcetic:

This shift dovetailed with the Trump administration’s ultra-Israel-friendly stance and its own goal of further isolating Iran in the region. The resulting Abraham Accords were, at least in the neoconservative world, considered a stroke of “genius.” Rather than finding a solution to the seemingly intractable question of Palestinian statehood, it simply sidelined it.

The signers dropped this long-standing precondition as they re-established diplomatic relations and deepened security and economic cooperation with Israel, while Trump lavished them with rewards, like an arms deal for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and U.S. recognition of the annexation of West Sahara for Morocco. It effectively supplanted the Saudi government’s Arab Peace Initiative, which since its 2002 introduction had been the foundation of the Arab world’s program for resolving the conflict, placing the Palestinians front and center.

The new normalization agreements’ foundational and cynical assumption was that the plight of the Palestinians could and would be safely ignored and forgotten about by both the region’s governments and the broader international community. [my emphasis]

Natanyahu has been a disaster for Israel. Trump was a disaster for America and for Israel and for others, as well.

Biden’s decision to continue the Trump approach set by the Abraham Accords now clearly looks like a serious mistake. Because, as Marcetic says, “almost every assumption that undergirded the Abraham Accords was disastrously wrong, not least the idea that dismissing the Palestinians would make for a more peaceful Middle East.”

Not to contribute to New Cold War hype, but Bückel also notes that China has been playing an important diplomatic role in trying to move Saudi Arabia and Iran to more cooperative relations:

China's relations with both Riyadh and Tehran are good. Even if US President Joe Biden leaves no doubt about military support for Israel, the new Gaza war could be the last in which Washington is the main foreign power. The Chinese-brokered link between Tehran and Riyadh is likely to rewrite the rules of the game in the heartland of the old Middle East conflict between Israel, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories.⁵ [my emphasis]

Trump also damaged the peace process by simply giving away an important diplomatic bargaining chip, US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. (Biden could also have reversed that decision on his own when he took office.) And Trump bragged during his 2020 campaign that he did that to please his religious-fundamentalist, Christian Zionist base voters.

“And we moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. That’s for the evangelicals,” Mr Trump told supporters at Wittman Regional Airport on Monday, as Democrats prepared for the first night of the party’s virtual convention.

“You know it’s amazing ... the evangelicals are more excited about that than Jewish people. That’s really right, it’s incredible,” the president added, to raucous applause from the crowd.⁶

One of the most prominent Christian Zionist figures, John Hagee, the chair of the large Christians United for Israel (CUFI) group, is out there talking smack about Iran. And giving a sample of what the basis is for “evangelicals”⁷ that Trump bragged about pleasing:

“The fact is there is a God and that God is a Creator,” Hagee added. “That God in Genesis … created the Heavens and the Earth. Since He creeded [sic] the Heavens and the Earth, He is the owner, and as owner, He has rights. And He, as owner, has given to the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, their covenant with them that they should own this land forever.”

Explaining that the “covenant is recorded in the Bible more than 20 times,” Hagee stressed that “it remains their property to this day.” He added, “That covenant with God has never been broken and it still stands.”

“The people who are saying the land does not belong to Israel do not believe in the God of Heaven and they do not believe the Bible has the Word of God,” Hagee concluded. Hagee also warned that the historic sites in Israel that date back to the time of Jesus Christ and even earlier would “disappear” if the state of Israel did not exist.⁸ [my emphasis]

Running US foreign policy based on crackpot, rightwing fundamentalist readings of the Christian Bible is a really, really bad idea!

I saw a comment from someone the other day saying that taking such a view of Hagee’s means we’re supposed to accept that in 2023 because according to a religious text God gave it to the Jewish people so long ago that God Himself probably doesn’t remember why he did it.

Thomas Lecaque recently wrote of the events of October 7 and since:

All of this—real lives taken, real worlds shattered, real threats of ongoing mass murder and death—is part of an incredibly complex geopolitical reality; of settler colonialism, land occupation, political pressures, and a long history of violence.

What it is not is a holy war, a crusade, or a Christian eschatological event. And yet a good portion of the Christian Right in the U.S. cannot help but make the murder of Israelis and Palestinians—including children—about them and their religious ideas.

Some of it is minor, but nonetheless revealing. Following the October 7 attack former Republican Ohio State Representative Candice Keller spent days posting about the Rapture on her Facebook page, championing the violence in Israel because of what she thinks it represents for her ideas of the apocalypse.⁹ [my emphasis in bold]

Here is a 10-minute video of the former Trump Administration, David Friedman, addressing a meeting sponsored by the far-right fundamentalist group Family Research Council¹⁰, headed by Tony Perkins, which is an SPLC Designated Hate Group.¹¹ I present it here not for anything of substantive quality in what he says, but as a very current example of Christian Zionist advocacy for uncritical support of the most brutal and aggressive anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic policies Netanyahu’s government may take.

The politics practiced by Christian Zionists and by the Trump Administration contributes to the continuation of the kind of abuses which Amnesty International (AI) has been documenting in the current situation.¹² To my surprise, the Democracy Now! video I embedded just below on AI’s findings won’t play here on Substack, apparently due to a YouTube decision that it should be “age-restricted.” But it is available at the link on the blacked-out video embed and in the footnotes as of this writing. (The video from the FRC hate group above dated 10/23/2023 at this writing is available for unrestricted embedding.)

1. Schneider, Richard C. (2023): Israels 9/11.Der Terror der Hamas und das israelische Dilemma. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 11/2023, 43-52. My translation from German. Paragraph break added.

2. Marcetic, Branko (2023): Forget 'peace,' did Abraham Accords set stage for Israel-Gaza conflict? Responsible Statecraft 10/20/2023. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/abraham-accords-peace-middle-east/> (Accessed: 2023-25-10).

3. The Historic Deal that Will Prevent Iran from Acquireing a Nuclear Weapon. White House/National Archives, n/d. <https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/issues/foreign-policy/iran-deal> (Accessed: 2023-25-10).

4. Bückel, Markus (2023): Der Angriff der Hamas und die Machtverschiebung in Nahost. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 11/2023, 5-8. My translation from German.

5. Ibid.

6. Mathers, Matt (2023): Trump admits moving US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was ‘for the evangelicals’, The Independent (UK) 08/18/2020. <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/trump-us-embassay-evangelicals-wisconsin-rally-a9675466.html> (Accessed: 2023-25-10).

7. Not all Protestant American Christians who identify as evangelicals are Christian Zionists. And not all of them accept the cynically politicized reading that extremists like John Hagee and Tony Perkins make.

8. Foley, Ryan (2023): John Hagee warns the US is 'wide open' for terror attack from Iran. Christian Post 10/25/2023. <https://www.christianpost.com/news/john-hagee-warns-us-is-wide-open-for-terror-attack-from-iran.html> (Accessed: 2023-25-10).

9. Lecaque, Thomas (2023): Israel-Hamas Is Not A Religious War and This Is Not Your Rapture. Religion Dispatches 10/18/2023. <https://religiondispatches.org/israel-hamas-is-not-a-religious-war-and-this-is-not-your-rapture/> (Accessed: 2023-25-10).

10. Ambassador David Friedman-Stand with and Pray for Israel. Family Research Council YouTube video 10/23/2023. (Accessed: 2023-23-10). As noted above, the Family Research Council is an SPLC Designated Hate Group.

11. Family Research Council. SPLC website, n/d. <https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/family-research-council> (Accessed: 2023-23-10).

12. Amnesty International Finds "Damning Evidence of War Crimes" by Israel as Gaza Death Toll Tops 6,500. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 10/25/2023. (Accessed: 2023-25-10).

Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza. Amnesty International 10/20/2023. <https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/damning-evidence-of-war-crimes-as-israeli-attacks-wipe-out-entire-families-in-gaza/> (Accessed: 2023-25-10).