How the Abraham Accords Can Help Provide Coronavirus Vaccines for Palestinians

Despite the loud complaints from the usual circles, the Oslo treaty makes clear that the Palestinian Authority (PA), not Israel, is responsible for overseeing the provision of healthcare in the areas under its control. The PA, for its part, confirmed this by rejecting an Israeli offer to provide it with the coronavirus vaccine. Yet it is in Israel’s interest to see that the pandemic comes to an end in the West Bank and Gaza. Michael Koplow argues that its recent peace agreements with Arab nations provide an ideal pathway for doing so:

The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco are in a perfect situation to help the Palestinians, demonstrate that normalizing relations with Israel is not only about their own narrow interests, and help Israel with its own reputational issues, all while overcoming the primary constraints on the Israeli and Palestinian sides to resolving the vaccination situation on their own. If states that have diplomatic relations with Israel agree to serve as middlemen, Israel can use them as a passthrough to provide vaccines that will go to Palestinians, and Palestinians can accept them directly from non-Israeli actors.

Israel [would thus] not have to concede any absolute legal obligation to provide healthcare in the West Bank, while the Palestinians can maintain the legal fiction that they are not bending to Israel when it comes to vaccines. [Such a plan helps to solve] the actual problem of how to vaccinate Palestinians, removes the harsh spotlight on Israel with regard to the vaccine issue, and allows normalizing Arab states to take credit for breaking the logjam while demonstrating how their relationships with Israel can in fact benefit the Palestinians in real ways.

The U.S. should also be involved in kickstarting this process. The Abraham Accords were delivered with heavy American involvement, and were sealed on the back of American commitments. The Biden administration has spoken of its support for the normalization agreements and its desire to strengthen and expand them, and this would be a great way to start.

Read more at Israel Policy Forum

More about: Abraham Accords, Coronavirus, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Oslo Accords

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF