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February 4th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
On Tuesday, January 26, 2021, the Biden Administration put forth its first detailed comments on its Israeli-Palestinian policy in a speech to the United Nations Security Council by Acting U.S Envoy Richard Mills. The content of the remarks was not surprising to anyone who followed President Biden’s positions during the campaign or watched Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s confirmation hearing.
Biden’s campaign made it clear last summer that, if elected, his administration would keep its embassy in Jerusalem, but would likely reopen the East Jerusalem Consulate that for decades before its closure by the Trump Administration in 2018 was effectively an American diplomatic mission to the Palestinians. The campaign also signaled the likely reopening of the Palestinian Mission in Washington if congressional restrictions are overcome.
Most noteworthy in Mills’ speech was the indication that the United States will resume financial aid to The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which was eliminated by former President Trump in 2018 as part of his undertaking to liquidate the Palestinian issue. The resumption of U.S. funding—the largest of any single contributor—will surely be a welcome step to the cash-strapped and encumbered agency.
While Mills did not suggest a U.S sponsored resumption of negotiations between the two sides, nor did he call on Palestinians and Israelis to return to the negotiating table, he emphasized trying to shape a better situation “for both sides” with an end goal of preserving the possibility of a two-state outcome—a goal that was always illusive, but now seems impossible.
Not lost on anyone is the fact that Mills’ statement occurred on the first anniversary of the reveal of Trump’s infamous “Deal of the Century,” when in the words of the great late Robert Fisk, “[t]he two old political fraudsters (Trump and Netanyahu) emerged at the White House with the most deranged, farcical tragi-comedy in history, it was difficult to know whether to laugh or cry.”
The 80-page “peace plan” document unleashed by Trump is of course aimed at liquidating the Palestinian issue. To be sure, Trump is racist, and one must not forget that in one of his first acts as President, he issued a travel ban on Muslims entering the country. Arguably the worst expression of Trump’s racism is his messianic enthusiasm to eliminate the rights of the Palestinian people, legitimize Israel’s occupation and the settlements, nix the old city of Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and green-light Israel’s annexation of 30% percent of the West Bank in contravention of international law. It nullifies any remaining prospect—however feeble—for the much talked about Two-State Solution.
Gideon Levy, a columnist with the Israeli daily Haaretz, was even more indignant than Fisk in describing Trump’s plan. It was “the final nail in the coffin of that walking corpse known as the two-state solution,” he wrote, and created a reality “in which international law, the resolutions of the international community and especially international institutions are meaningless.”
Trump’s scheme would have eliminated Palestinian refugees’ right of return, leaving millions of stateless refugees languishing in camps and throughout the Middle East. Trump’s plan bought into the fraudulent claim—promoted by the likes of Daniel Pipes and the inaptly named Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz—that Palestinian refugees number no more than about 50,000. That falsehood was shamelessly repeated by former U.S Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, only a week before he left office. This was unsurprising, considering that Secretary Pompeo had less than two months earlier broken all standards of diplomatic decency and officially visited the illegal colony of Psagot to toast its illegitimacy with wine named after him.
In short, the “Deal of the Century” wasn’t just a gift to Israel of monumental proportions. It embodied every Israeli demand ever made to Washington, or even imagined by Washington, and effectively destroyed every effort made by the United Nations Security Council; every UN resolution on Israeli withdrawal; every effort by the EU and the Quartet on the Middle East to produce a just and fair resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
It would not stop there. Trump, Jared Kushner, and Pompeo would bribe and blackmail Arab countries into normalizing relations with Israel. The UAE and Bahrain normalized relations in exchange for weapons; Sudan did in exchange for getting an aid agreement for $1 billion in annual World Bank financing and being removed from the U.S.’s “state sponsors of terror” list; and Morocco did in exchange for U.S recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed territory Western Sahara, a step opposed by a majority of legislators in the U.S. Congress. Even Indonesia, the largest Muslim country on earth, Pompeo claimed, was on the verge of recognizing Israel for a handful of dollars.
For sure, Palestinians have their share of internal chaos and corruption and political dysfunction. Among so many other things, they need to put their house in order and restore cohesion to their cause. But they need not rush to bestow gratefulness on the Biden Administration or genuflect before it for merely returning to a weak approximation of the status quo ante—complete with a recognition by the Biden administration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Rather, America needs to show goodwill towards the Palestinians to gain their trust. For starters, the Biden Administration should disavow the “Deal of the Century” and declare it, and all that which resulted from it, as null and void.
The views in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center.
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