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JERUSALEM: Joe Biden’s victory in the US elections marks a setback for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, but could spur a renewed engagement between Washington and the Palestinians, experts said.
Netanyahu called Trump Israel’s strongest ally in the White House, and advanced Republican policies that delighted the Israeli prime minister’s right-wing base.
Trump unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, an accord between Tehran and world powers detested by Netanyahu, and recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s “undivided” capital.
He also backed Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which were taken from Syria, and avoided criticizing Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
According to a poll before the US elections by the think tank of the Israel Institute of Democracy, 63 percent of Israelis wanted Trump to win a second term.
Biden is expected to reverse much of Trump’s record.
READ: Israelis protesting against Netanyahu welcome US election results
The president-elect has said he opposes the construction of settlements in the West Bank, in line with the international consensus that Jewish communities in the occupied Palestinian territory violate international law.
But Biden’s ties to Israel run deep and, in keeping with decades of American politics, he has been a staunch supporter of the Jewish state.
He visited Israel in 1973, just months after being elected to the United States Senate.
In a 2015 speech while serving as Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden said that the United States was married to a “sacred promise to protect the homeland of the Jewish people.”
During the 2012 vice-presidential debate, when Biden faced criticism for the Obama administration’s treatment of Israel by Republican Paul Ryan, Biden claimed that he and Netanyahu “had been friends for 39 years.”
Former Israel envoy to Washington, Michael Oren, notes that Biden does have a “genuine friendship” with Netanyahu.
IRAN, STANDARDIZATION OFFERS
However, Oren believes that friction between Biden and Israel will increase if the new administration seeks to revive Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, a prospect he said had a “very high” probability.
“Netanyahu will be perceived as the person who failed to stop the deal with Iran, in 2015 and in 2021,” he told AFP in an interview on Thursday, referring to the internal perceptions of the Israeli prime minister.
Netanyahu, and much of Israel’s security establishment, criticized the Iran deal, claiming it offered an archenemy huge financial benefits without removing the threat of a nuclear-armed Islamic republic.
Iran insists its nuclear program is strictly for civilian purposes.
An effort by Biden to revive the pact with Iran could also affect the normalization agreements negotiated by Trump with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, said Eytan Gilboa, professor of political science at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.
The Jewish state signed normalization agreements with these two Gulf states in September, on the White House lawn, spurring a series of more detailed agreements.
The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and especially Saudi Arabia, states led by Sunni Muslims, are staunch rivals to Iran’s Shiite majority.
Experts have said that the normalization agreements, as well as the warm ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia under Trump, were fueled in part by the desire to forge a united front against Iran.
“The Iranians are going to say that you can’t have both: you can’t negotiate with us and, at the same time, help expand the coalition that is basically against us,” Gilboa said.
Bds
Israeli officials are also concerned that the growing number of critics of Israel in the Democratic Party has influence over the Biden administration, Gilboa said.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who was proposed for a possible cabinet position, has called Netanyahu a “reactionary racist.”
Meanwhile, Israel has accused two Democratic congressmen, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, of supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel for its treatment of Palestinians.
According to Gilboa, “the progressive and radical branch of the Democratic Party” is “anti-Israel” and is gaining traction.
“We still don’t know how much influence they will have on policymaking,” he said.
INITIAL REACTIONS OF PALESTINE
Under Trump, relations between Washington and the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority collapsed.
Trump cut funding to the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and rejected the notion that Israel-annexed East Jerusalem should serve as the capital of a future Palestinian state, among other dramatic policy changes.
Ismail Haniya, head of Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, asked Biden on Saturday night to “correct” Trump’s “unjust policies”.
Meanwhile, Nabil Shaath, an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, called the end of Trump’s presidency “a victory.”
Trump’s controversial Middle East peace plan was unveiled in January without the involvement of the Palestinians, who rejected it outright.
Experts agree that while a renewed push for peace in the Middle East is unlikely to top Biden’s immediate agenda, his administration will seek to restore the traditional role of the United States as an intermediary in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“They are likely to seek a much greater engagement” with the Palestinians, said Sarah Feuer of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
