![]() ![]() ![]() But because the US has long designated Hamas, the Palestinian militant political group with an Islamist worldview, as a terrorist organization, US officials can’t contact them and must work through third countries. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which Hamas administers some level of control over, remains as acute as ever. But now it’s clear that he and others treated Gaza peacemaking as a sideshow. It’s not even the first time that someone like Sullivan, who also served as a senior official in the Obama administration, has worked with his Egyptian counterparts to negotiate an Israel-Hamas ceasefire, as he is likely doing now. “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said only last week. But as far as I can tell, there has been no policy reckoning in Washington about that war. It’s all the more surprising because the two-week war between Israel and Hamas in May 2021 should have been an indication of Palestine’s enduring centrality to Middle East affairs. With Biden’s Middle East team prioritizing a long-shot deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Biden’s inner circle has avoided talking about Gaza entirely. But the autocratic Arab leaders who made “peace” with Israel never represented their own citizens. Trump exacerbated the hopelessness for Palestinian political rights by cutting the Palestinians entirely out of the process, and instead helped seal normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. Gaza does not come up anymore.īut it remains central to how Palestinians and Arabs see Israel-Palestine and the Middle East - and how many Arabs perceive the US role in the world. The Biden administration’s key players bring up Palestine as a secondary issue. Palestinians are hardly represented in panels and keynotes. I’ve been to several Mideast policy conferences this month and spend probably too much of my time interviewing Washington experts and attending lectures on Middle East history. The terrible bloodshed of today’s attacks underscores the cost of doing so. Israel and the United States have wished away Palestinians. “No Arab army has entered the territory of Israel since the 1948 war,” the preeminent Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University told me. Even in decades of large-scale Arab-Israeli wars, the battles were fought outside. Israel’s conflicts with Hamas, along with the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel conflict, have largely been rocket and artillery exchanges. Biden said recently, as many of his surrogates often do, that the US remains intent on “preserving the path to a negotiated two-state solution.”īut negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization have been frozen since 2014 under President Barack Obama, and most Palestinian analysts at this point acknowledge that US administrations since President Bill Clinton have engaged in a failed, asymmetrical process that never would have allowed for the conditions of an independent, sovereign state of Palestine.Īnd so the symbolism of Hamas breaking through Israeli security barriers and wreaking havoc on Israel - including the kidnapping of at least one Israeli soldier as well as civilians - will resonate across Palestine, the Arab world, and beyond. In the current US-led diplomatic equation, there is no space for Palestinians, except for talk of minor concessions to ease daily humiliations. President Joe Biden has not reversed his predecessor Donald Trump’s policy of putting aside the question of Palestine and instead has exerted immense capital on the normalization of Israel’s relations with Arab states, no matter how extreme the policies of the Israeli government. A Hamas commander cited many of these factors in his statement. The now-regular presence of Israeli Jews praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites, have further pressurized the situation. Israeli government ministers have been pursuing annexationist policies and sharing raging rhetoric both incite further violent response from Palestinians and appear at a time when new militant groups have emerged that claim the mantle of the Palestinian cause. Instances of Israeli security forces and Israeli settlers antagonizing Palestinians through violence are on the rise, from the pogrom on the city of Huwara to a new tempo of lethal raids on Jenin. The attack comes amid an ongoing failure to grapple with the dangerous situation for Palestinians in the West Bank where Israel’s extreme-right government over the past year has escalated the already brutal daily pain of occupation. It comes after nearly two decades of the US and world leaders overlooking the more than 2 million people living in Gaza who endure a humanitarian nightmare, with its airspace and borders and sea under Israeli control. Hamas has launched an unprecedented strike on Israel. ![]()
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