The Biden Administration Shouldn’t Try to Solve the Israel-Palestinian Conflict—because It Can’t Be Solved https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2020/11/the-biden-administration-shouldnt-try-to-solve-the-israel-palestinian-conflict-because-it-cant-be-solved/

November 24, 2020 | Michael Mandelbaum
About the author: Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., and the author, most recently, of Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford).

President Trump, and the four presidents who came before him, all tried their hands at bringing peace between Israel and the Palestinians, each attempting to learn from his predecessor. All failed. If the next president truly wishes to learn from prior mistakes, he ought not try in the first place, writes Michael Mandelbaum:

Then-Vice-President Biden assisted President Obama in attempting to bring about a settlement of the now century-long conflict through the establishment of a Palestinian state that would exist peacefully next to Israel. The effort failed in the past and is doomed to fail in the future as well, for a central but little-recognized reason: the Palestinians do not want such a state. Their overriding goal is the destruction of Israel and they will enter into no arrangements that require their acceptance of a Jewish state in the Middle East as permanent and legitimate.

Over the years the Palestinians and their representatives have provided massive and incontrovertible evidence that this is in fact their position. They have refused several generous Israeli offers of statehood and have offered no proposals of their own in return. They have taken no serious, concrete steps to prepare for statehood, and in their public statements and the curricula of their schools they have relentlessly anathematized the idea as well as the fact of Jewish sovereignty.

How, then, should the Biden administration approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict beginning in 2021? First, it should follow the lead of the Trump administration, which declined to continue to fund UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), [the purpose of which is to keep Palestinian refugees and their descendants from integrating into the countries where they live], and seek to abolish that agency.

Second, the new administration should make clear to the Palestinian authorities that the necessary condition for the continuation of an American-sponsored peace process is a clear, unambiguous, publicly and repeatedly stated renunciation of the “right of return” [of descendants of refugees from the 1948 war not to a Palestinian state but to the Jewish one]. By retaining their claim to this right, the Palestinians signal that they continue to pursue the destruction of Israel, in which case no settlement is possible.

Read more on American Purpose: https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/the-peace-illusion/