Biden chose not to make Mideast talks a priority
Arab leaders say region is now paying the price
WASHINGTON – From its first months in office, the Biden administration made a distinctive decision on its Middle East policy: It would deprioritize a half-century of high-profile efforts by past U.S. presidents, particularly Democratic ones, to broker a broad and lasting peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
Since Richard Nixon, successive U.S. administrations have tried their hands at Camp David summits, shuttle diplomacy and other big-picture tries at coaxing Israeli and Palestinian leaders into talks to settle the disputes that underlie 75 years of Middle East tensions. More than other recent presidents, Joe Biden notably has not.
Instead, administration officials early on sketched out what they called Biden’s policy of quiet diplomacy. They advocated for more modest improvements in Palestinian freedoms and living conditions under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line government, which has encouraged settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and which includes coalition partners that oppose the U.S.-backed two-state solution. The less ambitious approach fit with Biden’s determination to pivot his foreign-policy focus from Middle East hot spots to China.
But the long-term risks of sidelining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exploded back into view with the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s heavy bombardment of Gaza in response. The United States’ angry Arab partners are pointing to America’s failure to actively engage as Israeli-Palestinian violence roars back to center stage.
Hamas militants’ bloody breakout from Gaza and Israel’s escalating military response have killed thousands of civilians in Israel and Gaza, prompted Biden to deploy carrier strike groups to the region, and the situation threatens to spill conflict and flows of Palestinian refugees across borders.
In Cairo this weekend, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi was one of a succession of Arab leaders to warn Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is scrambling through Middle East capitals to try to contain the conflict, that the Israel-Gaza war threatens the stability of the entire Middle East.
Biden is likely to hear the same as he meets with leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority in Jordan on Wednesday, after he travels to Israel.
Sissi, who fears the Israeli military offensive will push Gaza’s 2.3 million people across the border into Egypt, cast blame on the near-disappearance of any international pressure on Netanyahu’s government and Palestinians to return to negotiations.
Arab leaders “are very aware this is going to keep blowing up. And they might ride it out this time, they might ride it out next time, as they have in the past,” said Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Lebanon.
“But it’s not actually a comfortable position for them to be endlessly living in,” with endless cycles of Israeli and Palestinian wars that threaten the region’s peace and economies, said Sayigh, who accused the U.S. of encouraging Netanyahu to think there was no need to address Palestinian concerns.