Thanks to President Donald Trump, the Abraham Accords are slowly bringing peace to the Middle East. When Trump left office, though, Saudi Arabia had not formally normalized relations with Israel (although things have been changing, especially with flights going from Israel to Saudi Arabia). The two nations are now on the verge of official normalization, except for one thing: While neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia sees the Palestinians as part of the process (and rightly so because Palestinians have nothing to do with Saudi Arabia), the Biden administration is insisting that any agreement benefits the Palestinians.

There are a whole lot of moving parts here. I’ll start with the Times of Israel report about the Biden administration’s insistence that the Palestinians get downstream benefits from any relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia:

Any progress on normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia currently hinges on defense guarantees, which the latter is seeking from the United States, said a senior Israeli official traveling with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s delegation to Cyprus.

The senior official, deeply involved in the diplomatic process, estimated there are another “four to five” non-resolved issues upon which the negotiations turn, but they are “not as complicated.”

American and Palestinian delegations are traveling to the Gulf state this week to continue talks that would include a US-brokered normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a prospect deeply desired by Netanyahu.

The official assessed that Israeli concessions to the Palestinians were not the chief Saudi focus, with the Saudi-US defense pact the kingdom’s main concern.

While declining to elaborate on potential concessions, the senior official added that Netanyahu, who spent the past two days in Cyprus for trilateral talks with his Cypriot and Greek counterparts, felt confidant he would be able to rally his hardline coalition behind him. The coalition, including Netanyahu’s far-right partners and lawmakers in his Likud party, overwhelmingly oppose a Palestinian state and are committed to extending Jewish sovereignty over the West Bank.

In other words, Saudi Arabia doesn’t care about the Palestinians. However, the U.S. government, as a condition of the normalization talks, is trying to force Israel to get on board with a two-state solution while pulling out of Judea and Samaria.

Regarding Judea and Samaria, an archeology dig has discovered a 4,000-year-old Israelite settlement in that region. It is a reminder that, with the Canaanites and Philistines having vanished several millennia ago, Jews are the indigenous people of the Holy Land. It’s also a reminder that Judea and Samaria are the heartland of the Jews’ indigenous state.

As for the two-state solution, Israel cannot recognize on her borders a sovereign state that has as its stated goal her destruction. Nor can Jerusalem function as a divided city. The last time that Arab Muslims had control over Jerusalem, they banned Jews from accessing their Holy sites and destroyed anything they could get away with destroying.  

In other words, while Saudi Arabia and the U.S. are talking about ways to protect Saudi Arabia, the Biden administration is saying that, as a condition of entering into the agreement, Israel must destroy her national security. That hardly seems fair.

The article has a few other points about the way the Biden administration is interfering in Israel’s internal politics. It points out that, two-and-a-half years into his administration, Biden still hasn’t met with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile, though,

Netanyahu’s political rival, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, is headed to Washington this week for high-level meetings with White House and State Department officials.

The senior official “estimates that there will be a meeting with Biden,” but said it was not clear when.

In sum, the Biden White House wants to destroy Israel’s sovereignty and national security before it will put its necessary imprimatur on a peace deal with Saudi Arabia. It is also refusing to acknowledge Israel’s duly elected political leader and is playing footsie with the opposition to that political leader. And it’s doing all of this to elevate a group of people who have no long-standing historical ties to the land, who have genocidal intentions toward Israel, and who are misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Christian, and antisemitic.

Image of Biden as the joker in the deck made using public domain pictures and the Joker by David Bellot.