Biden’s Democracy Agenda Faces First Big Test in Gaza

“We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict,” wrote former U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner two months ago in the Wall Street Journal. Kushner said the Abraham Accords, a series of peace agreements he helped negotiate between Israel and several Arab states, “exposed the conflict as nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”

His victory lap might have been a tad premature. Since May 10, more than 200 people have been killed in the latest conflict between Israel and Palestine, which has seen Hamas fire a blizzard of rockets at Israel and Israel level much of the Gaza Strip. The two sides might reach a cease-fire as early as Thursday—after Israel has degraded Hamas’s arsenal and inflicted all the damage it wants—but that won’t make much of a difference to the underlying problems defining this Groundhog Day scenario.

Saying the Biden administration’s Middle East policy has been less clueless than what came before is clearing a low bar. But diplomats in the region view the United States’ diplomacy during the latest conflict in Gaza as feckless, saying the administration’s role—while “supportive”—has been “minimal.” U.S. President Joe Biden’s declaration earlier this week that he “supports a cease-fire” without explicitly calling for one—let alone spearheading a diplomatic campaign to get one—was viewed by Israel as nothing more than a green light to finish the job as quickly as possible. Even Biden’s admonition to Israeli leaders on Wednesday only urged de-escalation as a “path” to a cease-fire.

Meanwhile, Hady Amir, the U.S. envoy dispatched to the region, is a capable, well-meaning diplomat with a deep knowledge of the conflict, but he has been given little authority and has the impossible task of representing a government that has no serious policy vision for the problem at hand.