The Washington Post Today's WorldView by Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall - April 30, 2024 : The delusions behind Biden's plan for Middle East peace

 

READ ONLINE | SIGN UP Today's WorldView   By Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall Email The delusions behind Biden’s plan for Middle East peace In this image released by the Saudi Royal Palace, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman greets President Biden at the royal palace in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in July 2022. (Bandar Aljaloud/Saudi Royal Palace/AP) On the face of it, President Biden’s grand vision for the Middle East makes plenty of sense. Israel, an American ally and beneficiary of many billions of dollars in U.S. military aid, would see its regional security fears quelled through an overt set of alliances with some of its Arab neighbors. Those Arab states, mostly ruled by Sunni monarchs, would reap the dividends of a closer relationship with a country known for its high-tech sector and cutting-edge defense industries. Iran, an antagonist for all these parties, would find its reach and ambitions checked by an interwoven thicket of foes. This vision is more or less the same concept that motivated former president Donald Trump when he ushered in the Abraham Accords — normalization agreements between Israel and two Arab monarchies (the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain) that were grandiosely cast as breakthroughs for regional peace. And the problem bedeviling Biden’s hopes for the Middle East remains the same one that Trump failed to address: The relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. Trump and his allies tried to sweep the Palestinians — and their lack of a viable state and absence of the same rights as millions of Israelis in their midst — under the rug. The monarchs of the Gulf, jaded by years of a failed peace process and more animated by the threat of Iran, largely obliged. Biden came to office and opted to walk in Trump’s footsteps, making a few symbolic concessions to the Palestinians after Trump had doled out political gift after gift to the Israeli right. By summer 2023, talk of Saudi-Israeli normalization was all the buzz in the Middle East. Then came Oct. 7, when militant group Hamas struck southern Israel with an unprecedented, deadly rampage, triggering the hideous war that has ravaged Gaza and seen more than 34,000 Palestinians — many of them women and children — killed by Israeli forces. The conflict has smashed the uneasy status quo that existed in the region. The United States, along with its European and Arab partners all recognize that the moribund process to achieve a Palestinian state needs to be revived, even as they push for a more immediate cessation of hostilities and the release of the remaining hostages in Hamas captivity. But there is a yawning gap between Biden’s hopes and the realities on the ground. The United States still sees an Israeli-Saudi deal as the linchpin of a broader political agreement that would pave the way for Gaza’s reconstruction as well as the emergence of a Palestinian state. The shocking toll in Gaza has made it a nonstarter for Arab governments to engage the Israelis without prioritizing Palestinian concerns. And nobody of any consequence in Israeli politics — from the far-right allies of right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his chief rivals in the more moderate opposition — seems willing to consider the question of Palestinian self-determination or rights. “Israel is not paying attention … nor is it willing or politically equipped to make strategic decisions,” noted Haaretz columnist Alon Pinkas. “It’s all tactical. Israel is consumed by justifiable rage, frustration and an impasse on three fronts: in Gaza against Hamas; in Lebanon versus Hezbollah; and, in the outer circle, against Iran.” There’s justifiable anger on the part of Israel’s would-be Arab partners, too. “The challenge that we have is that we don’t have a partner in Israel now,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman al-Safadi told a special meeting of the World Economic Forum in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Sunday, gesturing to the continued Israeli rejection of any talk of Palestinian statehood. ADVERTISEMENT   Safadi also indicated that the absence of a meaningful political solution would make it harder for Arab governments to participate in peacekeeping and reconstruction efforts in Gaza. “Whoever goes there, if they are seen or perceived to be there to consolidate the misery that this war has created, then they will be seen as the enemy,” he said. “I think nobody would want to be part of that configuration.” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud echoed these concerns, suggesting that an Israeli commitment to a two-state solution would make any future peacekeeping mission in Gaza more “credible.” “If we all agree that the Palestinian state — giving the Palestinians their rights — is the solution that gives everybody what they need … then we should all decide whether to invest all our resources into making that happen,” he said. The trouble is that the Israelis do not agree. On his seventh trip to the region since the outbreak of the war, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will go to Israel and once more confront a defiant Netanyahu. In Riyadh, Blinken acknowledged the crux of the problem: “I think it’s clear that in the absence of a real political horizon for Palestinians, it’s going to be much harder, if not impossible, to really have a coherent plan for Gaza itself.” ADVERTISEMENT   Netanyahu’s plan for Gaza involves more war. On Tuesday, he shrugged off mounting domestic and international pressure against Israel’s looming full-scale attack on Rafah, the southern Gazan city that’s home to more than a million displaced Palestinians. “We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate the Hamas battalions there — with or without a deal, in order to achieve the total victory,” Netanyahu said during a meeting in Jerusalem with representatives of hostages’ and victims’ families. In Riyadh, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, which is headquartered in the West Bank, said if Netanyahu gets his way, the “biggest catastrophe in the Palestinian people’s history would then happen.” He said the United States was “the only country able to prevent Israel from committing this crime.” Even in the event of an attack on Rafah, it’s unclear that Netanyahu would achieve his stated strategic goals. Experts believe that Hamas’s military capacities have been degraded, but hardly eliminated. Meanwhile, Gaza has been pulverized. “Instead of liquidating Hamas, the Israeli campaign has destroyed the Gaza Strip as a living space, in every sense. … This field of ruins, on which hatred can only prosper, will be fertile ground for a resurgence of armed Islamism,” wrote Jean-Pierre Filiu, a historian at Sciences Po Paris, pointing furthermore to the complicity of Gaza’s neighbors. “All the more so since Hamas will denounce Arab and international passivity to better exonerate itself from its direct responsibility in such a disaster.” 1,000 WORDS (Ghazal Fatollahi for The Washington Post) The children of the Gaza Strip have many questions their parents cannot answer. When will the fighting stop? How many more nights will they sleep on the floor? When can they go back to school? Some still ask after classmates who have been killed. To report on the heavy toll for parents right now in Gaza, Washington Post journalists spoke with 21 parents and children from 15 families in Gaza.  Muhammad al-Nabahin, a father of four, and other parents said they were painfully aware that their efforts to protect their families could be futile — that forgoing their own meals would not protect their children from hunger, that following evacuation orders would not guarantee their safety. Nabahin said his family barely survived a strike near their house in the Bureij camp. But as they moved from place to place, what his four children kept asking about were the toys they had left behind. During a pause in fighting, Nabahin brought his children home to recover whatever they could. But everything was “destroyed,” he said. “They started crying.” Ahmed, his 13-year-old son, told The Post: “I cannot believe that I am not dead yet.” (Ghazal Fatollahi for The Washington Post) The Post couldn’t show photographs of the families because they didn’t bring any when they moved to seek safety, or internet connectivity isn’t reliable enough to take and send photos from their locations. Instead, The Post asked children’s book illustrator Ghazal Fatollahi to depict the stories we heard in a style that represents the children’s age and vulnerability. TALKING POINTS • Illegal crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border are down more than 40 percent since December and have remained relatively stable through the first four months of 2024, bringing a modest reprieve for President Biden on an issue regarded as a liability to his reelection campaign. • Students across the Middle East and globally are holding pro-Palestinian protests in solidarity with the recent wave of U.S. campus protests. From Kuwait to Lebanon, in Egypt and Ramallah, students across the have occupied central locations on campuses and waved placards calling for an end to the war in Gaza and divestment by their universities from companies that do business with Israel. Meanwhile, dozens of New York police officers in riot gear entered Columbia’s campus Tuesday night after issuing a dispersal order to protesters gathered outside one of the university’s entrances. Officers headed toward encampments, breached a building occupied by protesters and removed students from the campus with their hands zip-tied behind their backs.  • Hala Rharrit, a veteran U.S. diplomat, explains to The Post why she resigned last week from her 18-year career at the State Department. She said she felt the continued flow of U.S. arms to Israel was enabling the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and inflaming anger toward Washington in the Arab world. Inside the State Department, she said, diplomats are afraid to express viewpoints contrary to official policy, unlike most other issues during her career, where robust discussion was the norm. “I will not be the reason why someone hates America more," she said.  TOP OF THE POST Trump held in contempt after violating gag order in hush money trial By Devlin Barrett, Shayna Jacobs, Perry Stein and Isaac Arnsdorf   Attorney general moves to reclassify marijuana as lower-risk drug, officials say By David Ovalle, Michael Scherer, Tyler Pager, Dan Diamond and Fenit Nirappil   LIVE UPDATES Police breach occupied building at Columbia, remove students from campus By Niha Masih and Victoria Bisset   VIEWPOINTS A murder plot that cannot be ignored: India must come clean at last By The Washington Post Editorial Board   Egypt is obliged to let Gaza refugees in By Alice Jill Edwards | Foreign Policy   Student protest is an essential part of education By Serge Schmemann | The New York Times   EXHAUSTED PARTY The Houses of Parliament in London. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP) LONDON — Five years ago, Britain’s Conservative Party scored a landslide victory in a general election that contained outlines of a realignment in that nation’s politics. Today, those same Conservatives appear headed for one of their worst defeats in a generation, an unraveling of a once-proud party that has come with astonishing swiftness. Based on current polls, the general election that will be held in the coming months — the date has not yet been set — looks likely to restore a reinvigorated Labour Party to power after 14 years in the minority. Those same polls suggest that Labour could emerge with a majority in the House of Commons that rivals or eclipses its strength after the 1997 election that brought former prime minister Tony Blair to power. The decline and fall of the Conservatives is the story of a political party that has become exhausted and inward-looking after more than a decade in power. Not unlike the Republican Party in the United States, it is riven by factionalism, stained by scandal and judged by many voters as incapable of dealing with the country’s problems — all amplified by a whipsawing series of leadership changes. Since 2010, Britain has had five Conservative prime ministers, including three in 2022 alone. One of them, Liz Truss, lasted just seven weeks. That record tops by one the number of U.S. House speakers Republicans have run through in the same period. That both the British Conservative Party and the U.S. Republican Party are experiencing division and infighting suggests some parallelism between the two parties. What they share is that both are engaged in debates about the future of conservatism. But there are limits to the similarities. Though both are in turmoil, the two parties are not exactly alike. The Republican Party has congealed around former president Donald Trump. The Conservatives, also known as the Tories, have more or less come apart. As one former British government official put it, the Republican Party has become a Trumpian cult while the Tories still operate under more “small d” democratic principles — at least for now. That, however, does not mitigate the trouble the Tories are in. The question that will come to the fore if the Conservatives lose as badly as some polls predict is whether they will be captured by fringe elements, who some analysts fear would make the party far more right-wing and hard-line on issues such as immigration, and ever more anti-Europe; potentially, more Trumpian. There are almost certain to be forces of resistance to such moves, with party members and others calling for a rejection of the extremes and pushing to move the Tories back to something closer to traditional conservatism. Right now, the only consensus is that a bracing internal war for the party’s future is looming. – Dan Balz Read more: Britain’s Conservative Party, like the U.S. Republican Party, is in turmoil AFTERWORD Americans are sleeping more than ever. See how you compare. By Caitlin Gilbert and Luis Melgar Read more