So, having grown up in the Bay Area, I fondly
remember those Jewish National Fund boxes that
we would use to collect donations to plant trees
for Israel. Years later, when I visited Israel for the
first time, I saw the fruits of that effort, and the
Israeli ingenuity that has truly made
a desert bloom.
Girl Scout Cookies are so passé.
It's been almost 100 days since Joe Biden and
Kamala Harris took office, and we said goodbye
to Donald Trump ... for now.
And while there's still a little time before we can judge with some finality the Biden administration's
first 100 days, I gotta say, it's great that instead of getting a $15 minimum wage and $2000 COVID
relief checks we got ... bombing the Iranians in Syria.
While the administration is still young, we can
already see which directions certain policies are
going, like foreign policy, especially with regards
to occupied Palestine and Israel.
Hey guys, I'm Sana. I am not looking forward to a Republican president in 2024, and in this episode
we're going to talk about how and why President Joe Biden and his administration might be worse
for occupied Palestine than the Trump administration.
♪♪
There is no doubt that the Trump administration
was absolutely abysmal for Palestinians.
Not that American policy for the Palestinians has
ever been anything short of abysmal. It's always
relied on, as Professor Noura Erakat put it in a
recent op-ed, the same bottom line:
the foreclosure of meaningful Palestinian futures.
The same long-standing bottom line that also makes clear that the American position on Israel
is nonnegotiable, rendering Palestinian and Israeli life and aspirations unequal.
But there is something to be said about the Trump
administration's audacity and pacing, and it was
devastating for Palestinians.
The administration gave Israel strategic, economic
and diplomatic gains without any asks in return,
without any concessions.
Mr. President, your deal of the century is the
opportunity of the century, and, rest assured,
Israel will not miss this opportunity.
So that included making moves like the
Abraham Accords, led by Victorian doll-child
Jared Kushner, which normalized relations
between Israel and several Arab-majority
countries, supporting the annexation of the
Syrian territory of the Golan Heights, moving the
American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
It included former Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo saying in late 2020 that the
State Department would implement a plan and
process to declare NGOs like
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch
anti-Semitic.
Yeah, and they almost got away with it too.
The Trump administration's heightened assault on Palestinians also included eliminating aid to
UNWRA, a UN organization dedicated to relief and aid for Palestinian refugees.
And of course we can't forget the continued and further blessing of
settlement expansion and increased home
demolitions in the West Bank.
The Trump administration is reversing the
Obama administration's approach towards Israeli
settlements. The establishment of Israeli
civilian settlements in the West Bank is not, per se,
inconsistent with international law.
Trump was good for Israel — 63% of Israelis
certainly thought so.
While many commentators and political analysts
have characterized the Trump administration's
record on occupied Palestine and Israel as
a departure from the Obama administration,
especially on the question of settlements and
engagement with Benjamin Netanyahu, it actually
was also a continuation of the Clinton administration's
approach.
And by that, I simply mean again giving Israel all the gains at the expense of the Palestinians and
not getting any concessions in return, much like we saw in the Oslo Accords.
"But Sana, Biden's back baby! He's gonna bring us back to the path of Obama!"
First of all, not tempting. Secondly, not tempting at all.
There's often an overstatement about how "good"
President Obama and his administration,
which of course included Joe Biden,
actually were on Palestine.
It was, after all, on that administration's watch that
we saw one of the bloodiest assaults on Gaza:
Operation Protective Edge, which claimed
over 2,000 Palestinian lives and
was defended by the Obama administration
under the guise of Israel's right to defend itself.
And it was the same administration that signed an
agreement in 2016 giving Israel $38 billion in aid
over the following decade: the biggest
military aid package in U.S. history.
And those settlements that Obama thought didn't exactly, "advance the cause of peace?"
They expanded significantly during his tenure.
So the Obama administration wasn't bad for Israel. It was actually pretty great for it.
And you don't have to take my word for it.
Listen to what then-Deputy Secretary of State
Antony Blinken had to say about Obama's record
on Israel at the American Jewish Congress in 2015:
No administration and no president has done as
much for Israel's security as President Obama.
Don't just take my word for it. Listen to another
voice, who called this administration's support for
Israel's security, and I quote, "unprecedented."
And that is the voice of Israel's prime minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu.
Blinken is now Biden's Secretary of State.
In the less that 100 days that the Biden
administration has been in power, it has shown
little interest in moving the needle in any other
direction than the one set by its predecessor.
In fact, it's shown every indication, so far, that it
will uphold Trump's actions.
In doing so, the Biden administration will possibly be worse for Palestinians and for the solidarity
movement in the United States because it will bring right-wing, anti-Palestinian, anti-free-speech
rhetoric, policies and practices under a liberal veneer.
What was perceived as radical under Trump will be normalized under the Biden administration,
worsening the prospect for Palestinian liberation and protection of life.
I believe that when any organization delegitimizes
Israel, we must stand up and speak out for Israel
to be treated equally.
And that is why the first resolution I co-sponsored
as United States senator was to combat anti-Israel
bias at the United Nations and reaffirm that the
United States seeks a just, secure and sustainable
two-state solution.
In 2017, then a new senator, Vice President
Kamala Harris uttered these words to a room of
policymakers at the AIPAC conference.
Yeah, the very right-wing, Zionist AIPAC.
Her first act as senator from the state of
California was to co-sponsor a resolution
condemning the Obama administration's
abstention from a UN vote denouncing Israel's
settlement expansion in the West Bank.
To date, Harris has spoken three times at AIPAC and has not received endorsements from
the liberal, Zionist organization J Street with which many Democrats find themselves aligned.
Given the central and bigger role she's believed
to take on in the White House, especially in the
runup to the 2024 election, there are critics and
supporters who believe that Harris will push
Biden's foreign policy, on occupied Palestine in
particular, to the right.
Why? Because despite Biden's own history, via the
Obama administration, he's not considered an
ideologue on Israel in the way that Harris has
shown herself to be.
And while Biden recently reinstated aid to
Palestinians and recommitted to the two-state
solution, a long dead and buried prospect, those
actions are simply a return to the status quo, and
there is much to suggest that the administration
will move to the right, certainly compared to its
Democratic predecessors.
Biden hasn't shown any interest or commitment to moving the embassy from Jerusalem or
withdrawing recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, two Trump moves that broke with
decades of bipartisan U.S. policy and with overwhelming international consensus.
He's shown no interest in placing real, substantive pressure on Israel.
In her confirmation hearing, U.S. Ambassador to
the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield
reiterated her support not just for Israel, but also
against UN resolutions that hold
Israel accountable.
I look forward to standing with Israel, standing
against the unfair targeting of Israel, the
relentless resolutions that are proposed
against Israel unfairly.
Israel has no closer friend than the United States.
She also called BDS a movement that quote,
"verges on anti-Semitic" and said she would
encourage other countries to follow suit of the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with
Israel. These are all moves which hurt Palestinians and uphold the foreign policy successes of the
Trump administration.
And while the Biden campaign made it clear in its
platform for Arab Americans that it would defend
the constitutional right to free speech, it also
reiterated in the same breath that Biden condemns
the BDS movement.
The same BDS movement that has long been under attack by state and federal lawmakers
who've attempted to criminalize it. But Biden's position on protecting the right to support BDS
is also undercut by his upholding of another major move by the Trump administration:
adopting the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance's definition of
anti-Semitism, a definition which conflates
criticizing the state of Israel with anti-Semitism.
Even the guy, Kenneth Stern, who drafted that
working definition said that it was being
weaponized to suppress free speech. He pointed to
the disparity in adopting that definition of
anti-Semitism and how we don't even have a legal
definition for anti-Black racism
in the United States. Nope.
And the Biden administration, through the State
Department, has also expressed concerns about
the International Criminal Court's recent decision
to probe into alleged war crimes committed by
Israel against Palestinians.
The State Departments actually said, in a
statement, that because occupied Palestine isn't a
sovereign state, it can't be party to any ICC
investigation.
Everyone knows that war crimes can only be committed against real states, not an entire
population that is occupied, ethnically cleansed, kept in an open-air prison and subjected to a
system of apartheid in an attempt to deny them any semblance of sovereignty. Of course not.
Also worth noting that the Biden administration has not yet withdrawn sanctions against ICC
officials that had been imposed by the Trump administration for investigating alleged American
war crimes in Afghanistan.
Biden isn't a departure from long-standing
American policy on occupied Palestine and
Israel, he is a continuation of it. And while
Trump was as Trump as he was, especially on
occupied Palestine, on Israel, he too wasn't a
departure - just a quickened, brasher version of it.
He said the quiet part out loud.
What's at stake now, as it's always been, is the liberation and future of Palestinians, a liberation
and future tied inextricably to us, through our tax dollars, our elected officials, our foreign policy.
And Biden, like his predecessors, is showing us already how little care there is for
the protection of Palestinian life in this country.
Hey guys, thanks so much for watching.
So, I'm going to be taking a couple of months to
work on something new for AJ+, which means
you need to hit that subscribe button and
the notification bell so that you remember to
come back when I come back.
We'll see you soon.